Our First Flesh Wound

Considering the basic self-destructive nature of Gabe's personality, it's pretty astonishing that we haven't had any semi-serious injuries yet. Certainly he is almost always covered in bruises and his head is generally misshapen with all of the bumps in their various states of recovery. And Norah is VERY accident prone. She's kind of a mess, really. Pretty much every day she bonks or smashes or scrapes something on her body. I'm hoping it's just a phase--blamed on her body and her coordination not quite meshing properly.

And, of course, there have been minor emergencies, like the time Gabe got himself trapped in the rocking chair. That is still one of my most vivid memories of him as a toddler--trapped in a place it should have been impossible for him to get into, screaming his brains out, and me taking the time to get a picture before running out to find a saw to cut him loose. Parenting at its finest.

But we haven't had any screaming-at-the-top-of-their-lungs-in-pain-for-a-good-long-while kinds of injuries yet. No major blood loss. No need to break out the gauze or medical tape. Until July 3.

Gabe and Norah were setting off some fireworks with a friend, sparklers, specifically. At some point in the last few decades while I wasn't paying attention to sparklers, it became common to make them out of wood. I guess I can understand some of the appeal. Those little metal sticks that were left-over were a bit of a piercing hazard for people walking around afterwards and they probably didn't rust away to nothing very quickly. But, still, I'm not sure I grasp the logic of putting what is, essentially, a heat source that rivals a welding kit on the end of a strip of balsa wood.

So, considering that, I'm not surprised that some of the sparkler burned free and fell on the ground. The nasty part came when Norah, not wearing shoes, stepped on that piece of molten "freedom."

Things got ugly for awhile, but she came out of it pretty well. And I'm proud of Libby for not taking her to the ER. After having ground off the top half of my right index finger down to the first knuckle when I was nine years old and never seeing a doctor about it, I have a pretty high bar for what does and doesn't warrant a trip to the ER.

Nonetheless, it was a pretty ugly burn. I'd post a picture, but that kind of grizzly detail really isn't necessary and I can't imagine anyone really wants to see it that bad.

It also put a pretty severe kink in her summer plans. Because of the bandage on her foot, she hasn't been able to get in the swimming pool or, really, do much of anything fun or messy for the past week. Moreover, without Norah, Gabe hasn't had any interest in getting in the pool either. Apparently, playing in a swimming pool is pretty boring when you're by yourself.

The good news is that it has been healing exquisitely. The kids had their yearly checkup two days after the accident and the doctor took a quick peek at the wound. He said it was healing much faster than he thought possible, and I think she'll be able to resume summer swimming activities in the next couple days.

I guess I should also do some updates on the last month of summer funness.

Gabe at his Water Colors Camp. His second of two camps this summer and the one that he preferred. The kid loves his art!

His picture is the one above him. He named both of these pictures that they hung up for display (which he thought was pretty awesome, since this camp was at a museum), but I can't remember the names of either of them.

His second picture, and a pretty typical pose for both of them at this point.

I can't remember what he was eating here--and he can't remember either. He assures me that it wasn't blood even though the picture that immediately follows this was of him losing his third tooth and him holding bloody gauze up to the empty socket. I want to say this was from a bomb pop. You can see the white color also smeared around his upper lip. I swear, this kid can't keep food in his mouth. I swear he purposely smears it all over his lips and face because he likes the feel of it.

Libby couldn't wait for Gabe's tooth to fall out anymore. She worked it with her fingers for a few minutes before deciding to go with the string-pulling method. It took a few good yanks (which, to my way of thinking, meant that it wasn't really ready to come out, but that's just me), but it eventually gave. It was the first of his top teeth, and the first one he'd lost in almost a year.

The 3rd of July. Before things got all burny in the Norah's footal region.

Champagne poppers. Nothing burns in them. GOOD fireworks for children.

4th of July. Mostly the kids got to set off smoke bombs and tanks and other relatively harmless fireworks. Gabe especially loved running through the smoke bombs and pretending that nobody could see him. They also figured out that, since the smoke bombs shoot fire out their tops, they can be strategically set up to light other fireworks. They didn't, however, figure out that you can stick them into a coffee can with an action figure and pull out a multi-colored, heat-deformed mess afterwards. It took all of my resolve to NOT share this tidbit with them. I decided it was best if I left it up to them to discover the various ways they can destruct the world around them.

Yeah, he's running around on the 4th of July wearing a long sleeved shirt. Though the week before HAD been unseasonably cool (with highs in the 80s . . . at the end of June! It was remarkable!) it had once again gotten quite hot by the 4th. Yet he chose to wear a long sleeved shirt, and he really didn't seem all that put out by it. Man it must be nice to be young.

And, finally, all the kids eating the most patriotic of frozen treats, the bomb pop. A missile of fun for your face!

 This was from Gabe's first week of camp, the Survivor Camp, where they talked about edible plants and storms and suchlike. This was the program they put on for all the parents at the end.

Norah's camp. This song was sung many times for a couple weeks after camp.

The recital for Norah's spring Dance camp also happened a few weeks back.

Baby's First Alias

 Last night, Libby bought the kids a cheapo tea party set at Toys R Us and they spent much of the evening playing "resternaut" (Gabe's mispronunciation that we have adopted as standard--just like Norah's "regliar" for "regular"--which I'm sure will cause him problems when he gets older and people start to make fun of him for saying the wrong word, even if it is a superior word to the original). While they were playing, they both adopted personas.

Gabe, in his typical fashion, didn't really have any character details to go along with the development of this new character. All he had was a name and a presumed backstory to fit that name. He chose Rex Awesome. Rex CAPTAIN Awesome, to be precise. The fact that his parents had the foresight to give him a middle name that would, someday, also reflect his rank representing a level of precognition Nostradamus would have been proud of. Still, a pretty great name, and I'll work on him over the next couple days to flesh out Rex's full backstory.

Norah, on the other hand, was more than willing to dream up some details to the life of her new persona. Her name is Sally Sikarsha.

The word "sikarsha" is one that Norah has used before. I have no idea where it came from, nor what it means. It's like Gabe's "setatur" word that he would say all the time but never had a real explanation for what it meant (and which he doesn't even remember anymore). She will say it from time to time, seemingly with no purpose to it. I think it's a form of "verbal fungus," like saying "um" or "uh." When there is a brief pause in the conversations she's having between a couple of her toys, it's not unusual for her to throw the word out.

Anyway, given Norah's age and understanding of international culture differences, I haven't asked her about Sally's ethnic background. Considering her first name and going only off the SOUND of the last name, I'd guess she's the child of an Indian immigrant, a second generation citizen of an English speaking country, but that is just me making assumptions based off my own limited cultural awareness. According to the Google search that I just did, the word "sikarsha" did not exist on the internet until this post. Which is a pretty impressive level of creation for an only-recently-turned four year old ("setatur" has a few other references online, though I honestly can't figure out what they are about despite clicking on a few sites).

It took a little while for Norah to decide what Sally does all day. I kept asking "What does she DO?" and Norah gave me many different responses about things that Sally did during the day, but was having a bit of a tough time coming up with what Sally was all about. "She wears clothes every day," Norah said, "Because people wear clothes." "She plays." "She likes to eat lunch." Finally, my follow-up questions "What does she dress up for" and "Who does she play with" and "Who does she eat lunch with" led Norah to decide that Sally is a stay at home mother. She has two daughters. One of them is named Maddy and the other is named Sally. I asked her if Sally the elder had named her daughter after herself, which Norah found to be a patently absurd notion. When I presented her the fact that Sally's daughter did, in fact, have the same name as her, and there was no way around the fact that she named her daughter after herself, Norah decided the name must be changed. But then she refused to come up with a new one.

Geez, I really ought to update this thing more than once a month. Looking at the pictures I've got all sorts of things that probably ought to be posted on. Ah well. I guess I'll just finish up with an update on their birthday party, which was last Saturday.

The theme this year was Pirates and Princesses and, as usual, Libby did a bang-up job of coming up with great things to entertain the kids.

Our zip line. Sadly, the rope that we used was nylon, and stretchy. So the kids, if someone tall pulls the thing all the way back and holds it until one of the small ones can grab it, can slide about three feet before they drag their knees on the ground. Still, a great idea.

Walking the plank. There's water in the little pools underneath, which they all "fell" into quite a bit.

The pirate ship in the backyard, which Libby built out of big logs almost two years ago, was the ship from which all of the pirates, with the foam swords they all made, were able to attack and pillage.

The princesses (and pretty much all of the pirates) had face painting done.

Here's a fun one for Norah to remember in her later years. Momma's little girl, which her wine glass full of juice. She carried it around with her for about an hour.

Norah received an Easy Bake Oven for her birthday. This was her first attempt at making something in it. She made two different cakes. The plan was to stack them on top of each other to create a multi-layer cake with frosting and everything.

Nailed it.

And, finally, here's Norah with an "eye patch" that she found on the floor in the laundry room. It is a pad from one of Libby's bras.

Newton Famous

Last week, Gabe had his Ag Fair. Based on his end-of-school-year schedule, this was his "summation" event.

Unlike some kindergartens, Gabe's school doesn't have a kindergarten graduation. I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, a graduation for kindergarten seems ridiculous. It's kindergarten. Getting through it requires little more than a willingness to not eat so much glue that you spend the majority of the school year in the hospital. There's no real accomplishment there. Add to that the graduation he had from preschool and the graduation he will have for exiting elementary school and entering middle school (then the one from middle school to high school, and then high school, and then college, and then clown college) and there are very few years left that the act of just getting through isn't worthy of some kind of end-of-year pomp and circumstance.

On the other hand, though, Gabe loves these kinds of events and they are pretty cute. And, hey, Gabe didn't eat so much paste that he ended up in the hospital (or break his leg falling off the playground equipment--though I will be seriously surprised if this doesn't happen in the next few years), so that's worth celebrating, right?

The school does have Ag Fair, though. It is a day where the school kids present all of the various agriculture related projects they've been working on for the last several months.

 Each class was broken up into several small groups of three or four kids, and these kids were tasked with standing by their projects (for as long as their attention spans could handle it, from what I gathered) and explaining to any interested parties what their project was, how they did it, and what the purpose of it was. There were wind powered generators and compost piles and loads of different plants and some animals and all sorts of stuff.

Gabe had to man the newspaper flowerpot station in his classroom. Which he did marvelously. I was quite impressed, actually. As soon as we walked into the classroom he went over to his station and informed us that he needed to stay there to explain things to people as they came over (this was news to us--he hadn't given us any sort of straight answer about what was going on at the fair). And he did. For nearly an hour. It was a display of attention span that I would have thought impossible just a few  short months ago.

That doesn't mean that he focused on his duties, exactly. For instance, it took four tries for Libby to coax his explanation of what the flowerpots were and how they made them for the sake of this video. The first three videos looked a lot like the first video here:

But he eventually cooperated, and then he stayed at his post for far longer than I imagined he'd want to (I saw many of the kids from his class wandering around, so it was apparently a pretty loose responsibility). I even asked him at one point if he wanted to go walking around and look at the other projects--he told me he wanted to stay with his, but he told me that I HAD to go see the windmills because they were awesome.

After that hour, he started to get a little punchy, so we wrapped things up for the night. But, as far as I could tell, the night was a rousing success.

And then, yesterday, as Gabe got off the school bus, he was excitedly waving a newspaper at me. "I'm famous!" was the first thing he said to me as he handed me the paper. I looked, and, sure enough, there was this picture:

The article is here, but it's pretty short.

He was pretty stoked about it for the rest of the day yesterday, and he TOTALLY let it go to his head. The whole way home from school he and Norah had an in-depth conversation about what it meant to be famous (the entire world knew who he was, now, he said, and being in a "magazine" as he called it was the only REAL way to be famous as being on TV or the radio was just not as good) and he had lots of tips for how Norah could become famous if she wanted to (do something awesome and be in a magazine--when she suggested she could be on TV, he soundly rejected that notion).

Then, when we got home, he paraded around the house like the cock of the walk, with his self-involvement culminating about an hour before dinnertime with this little exchange:

Gabe: "I want a cheesy roll up" (shredded cheese wrapped in a tortilla and microwaved not-nearly-long enough to melt the cheese--the only food that he will consistently eat right now).
Me: "No. It's almost dinner time."
Gabe: Looking a little dumbstruck, "But, I thought you HAD to do what I wanted."
Me: "Why would you ever think such a thing?"
Gabe: "Because I'm famous. I was in a magazine. Doesn't that mean that you have to do whatever I want?"
Me: Laughing wildly, "Yeah. Good luck with that. You might be famous to the rest of the world, but I'm still the one that cleans your pee off the toilet and makes your dinner, so that means you don't get to tell me what to do."
Gabe: "Ah, man!"

And with that bubble bursting, Gabe came back down to earth and we made it through the rest of our day.

Blast Ball

So, it would appear that I've gotten pretty terrible at coming up with things to post on here. I mostly blame Norah. When Gabe was at home every day, his hyperactivity tended to create many wonderful topics for posting. Norah, sadly, shares too many personality traits with me. We're both hilarious, obviously, but it's more a cerebral humor than physical, and capturing that sort of thing on video is pretty difficult. But we have had a few things going on in the past few weeks worth mentioning for friends and family who care.

This past school year, we've been trying, and mostly failing, to find extracurricular activities for the kids to participate in that they would actually enjoy. Last year, Gabe loved soccer. This year, he spent all of the time he was supposed to be playing his games standing (or sitting on the ground) next to the ref or the coach, trying to carry on a conversation during the games and wandering around doing his own thing during practices. So we gave up on that about halfway through the season. Norah has had her princess fair dance camp again all semester, but, as the semester has gone on, her interest in it has begun to wane. Fortunately, it's nearing completion as well, and there's a chance that she won't want to go back again next fall.

We could, of course, force the kids to participate if we wanted to, but, frankly, we don't think these things are important enough to warrant that kind of family tension. We really just want to find things that they are interested in doing instead of forcing them to do something they don't want to. I'm not sure which is the better life lesson, to be honest. Most of their lives they'll be forced to do things they don't want to, so teaching them early to figure out a way to get through it and have a little bit of fun, if possible, along the way would be valuable lessons to learn. On the other hand, if they can dedicate themselves to the things that the enjoy doing, then that seems like a win-win. Again, though, I get the feeling that whichever method we decided was best would end up being the worst in retrospect, so we might as well avoid the drama of trying to force them to do something they don't enjoy.

The next experiment for Norah is blast ball. It's like a dumbed down version of t-ball. Yeah. They dumbed down t-ball. It's for four year olds, mostly, and the concept is pretty basic. Each team gets a few turns in the field and at bat. They bat through the lineup once then switch teams. The team in the field scrambles around trying to get the ball after it's been hit (well, the two or three kids that are paying attention and whose parents have obviously spent time practicing catch with baseball gloves do, the other kids just whine or sit on the field or pick flowers or pester the coaches--Norah pesters the coaches, for the most part). The batter runs over to an air filled base that they get to jump on. The base squeaks when they jump on it, so they know they got there, I guess. And they do that for thirty minutes and then it's over.

We thought Norah would take to it pretty well since she likes catching and throwing balls and she's pretty good at hitting balls off the tee that we have in the yard. But her enthusiasm for the game that she has in our yard isn't really transferring well to the public setting.

This last one I added just because it was in the file there. Norah drew a picture of herself. The picture is, clearly, a little creepy in and of itself, but mostly I included it because of her evil mastermind smile and hand gestures that she was making while the picture was being taken.

She had a process this first day, where she had to draw a line next to the bag and then run through some little warmup type things before she would hit the ball. It was all very professional. 

This video doesn't have anything to do with blast ball. It's from Easter. And I'm including it to illustrate what a terrible parent I am. For some reason, Norah didn't want her picture taken, so this is what I did in response.

Spelling

A quick story that Libby just relayed to me from her car ride with Gabe to school this morning:

Gabe: What does 'd a' spell?
Libby: It doesn't really spell anything
Gabe: I thought it spelled 'day.'
Libby: No, that's 'd a y.'
Gabe: What does 'd a i' spell?
Libby: That doesn't really spell anything.
Gabe: What does 'd a d' spell?
Libby: Sound it out.
Gabe: I think it spells 'dumb.'

And Libby laughed and laughed and laughed, then she called me. I'm not sure that she corrected him either, so that might be how he spells 'dumb' from now on.

Gabe's Girlfriend

It seems impossibly soon for this kind of topic to be coming up. I mean, I remember having my first kiss in the early part of my second grade year--which isn't really very far away for Gabe, when I think about it. But still. And, no, I don't think it's gotten to a kissing stage yet. But here's what I know.

There is a girl in Gabe's class that he is . . . smitten by. Really, that's the best word I can come up with for it. It is ADORABLE. At the mention of her name (which I won't use here), he gets these big doe-y eyes and a goofy smile crosses his face. And then he says her name in a kind of whisper. He identifies her as his "girlfriend." But I'm not sure he knows what, exactly, any of that means.

Here's what I've been able to discern. Gabe considers this girl his girlfriend. But, when I asked if it was mutual, if she considered Gabe to be her boyfriend, he has never given me a straight answer. Which means either he doesn't grasp the concept of the question I'm asking or he's never even considered it an option (or that she has rebuffed him and he's a weird stalker kid, I guess). I've tried to explain the concept of a mAnd I know that for the last three school days he has tried to arrange a play date with her after school.

The first day, as we walked to the bus, he told me, "She is going to come over before dinner." "But," I point out, "she doesn't know where we live." He saw the logic in this argument and let it slide. I was glad to get off so easily.

The second day, he told me, "She is coming over before dinner. I gave her our address." And he did because he knows our address by heart. So I had to explain to him that she still wouldn't be coming over because kids don't get to make play dates. Adults make play dates for kids because kids don't know how to drive and can't get from one house to another with the help of an adult. So the adults have to be the ones to make the decisions. He refused to accept the logic of this argument and decided that she was still going to come over to our house. When dinner time came, he was visibly disappointed (for about a minute, because that's usually about as long as it takes for him to move on to the next thing in his brain) that she hadn't shown up.

On the third day (Friday), he told me, "She is coming over before dinner (he said it every time, I'm not sure why he was so concerned that it had to happen before dinner). Her mom said she needed a note inviting her over, so I wrote a note and asked her to come over." I smiled at this one. The kid is determined, I'll give him that. I explained that, more than likely, her mom wanted a note from the parent inviting her over to play, to make sure it was OK with all of the adults involved before going any further with it. Since we were still in the school parking lot at the time, and her mom had parked two cars away from us, Gabe tried to open up his door. "I'll run over and ask her and you can write a note!" "We can't tonight, bub. You're going out to Nana and Poppa's tonight, remember?" "Oh," he said as he deflated. And then, after two seconds, he immediately perked up as he remembered that he was going out to Nana and Poppa's for the weekend.

So it's been an interesting week, I guess, and we'll have to see how things develop.

"I'm the Winner!"

I've started to notice something interesting with Norah lately. It's been something that has developed so slowly in her that I almost failed to notice it happening. She is a pathological liar and cheat.

Now, when I say that I "failed to notice it happening," that isn't to say that I haven't noticed her lying. I do. All the time. SUPER all the time. But it started out as just regular Norah silliness, and now I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not starting to see the budding of a possibly nefarious personality type.

Let me explain. First, she's turned into something of a storyteller. I, obviously, take credit for this as I have encouraged both of our kids, throughout their young lives, to tell me stories. Like the story of the Buried Queen. Have I shared this already? If not, it really needs to be documented, so I better share it again. Just skip ahead if I'm repeating myself.

Over a year ago, they tore down our Dairy Queen. It was sad to see it go, but it was, honestly, a dump. The service was worse than terrible and the food had gotten pretty unreliable. Whoever owned it had obviously given up on life. It needed to be done away with. Still, there is something inherently awful about the closing of an ice cream store. One day, I pointed it out to Norah. "Look!" I said, "They tore down the Dairy Queen!"

"The Buried Queen?" Norah asked. And from then on, that is what it became, and every time we drove by it (which was often since it was on Main Street), I had her develop the story of the Buried Queen.

Here is how the story ended up after several weeks of careful plot and character development.

There once was a queen. She was very evil. She owned an ice cream store and she made her ice cream out of poop and pee and hate.

Side note: For awhile now, when asked, "What words are bad words?" Norah has responded, "Poop and pee and hate," and always with a slight southern drawl on hate, like "Hayte." Not sure where she got that list, but that is her list of bad words. When asked, "What words are good words?"  Norah always responds, "Studio." She cannot say WHY "studio" is a "good" word. But it is.

Anyway, the Queen fed people ice cream made of poop and pee and hate, and the people were not fond of this ice cream. They were so unfond of the ice cream that they buried her in the ground. But the Queen had an undetermined number of daughters. These daughters were sad that the queen was bad, but they were not bad. Apparently, they had no problem with the moral dilemma of burying their queen mother under their castle and then living in that castle, either, because that's what they did. With the help of Mr. Matt (the teacher's assistant at the preschool), the princesses decided that they were going to make their own ice cream and be good princesses and give the ice cream to preschoolers everywhere. They made this "good" ice cream out of, you guessed it, studio. Yet, despite the fact that they made building flavored ice cream, everyone loved them and they lived happily ever after.

This is the official version now, though I think some of it was embellished just now when I asked Norah to help me remember all of the details. There you have it. Ever the perfectionist, honing her story as she goes.

Over the last month or two, though, she's gotten to be more than just a storyteller. It's morphed into something kind of annoying and rather persistent.

Let's say she has two options, and both options will have a mundane outcome. Like, just a few minutes ago, she ran up to me while I was making a panini for a customer (I'm at the store, I don't have customers coming to my home asking for grilled sandwiches) and said that she needed to go to the bathroom. The toilet here is still tall enough that she can't crawl onto it without a little help, so she kind of can't go unless someone helps her up. I told her that I was busy but she should go into the bathroom and try to get on the toilet herself and I could help her when I was finished. Instead of going into the bathroom, she ran back to where Gabe was playing and went back to work jumping off the raised area in the front window, pretending to be a butterfly. Five minutes later, I finished with the customers and asked her if she still needed to go to the bathroom.

"Nope!" she said.

"But how is that possible?" I asked. "You didn't go into the bathroom. You just came over here."

"I just peed on the floor," she said.

"Um, what?" I knew this wasn't true as she wasn't covered in pee. She doesn't have the coordination to pull her pants down and not pee on herself unless it's into a toilet.

"I made a little potty here in the middle of the floor" (spooky, right? She even recognized that she couldn't just pee on the floor but would need a potty to not get it all over herself so she modified her story to match up more closely with reality--she's a bit of a natural at this) "and then when I was done I took it back to the bathroom and dumped it in the toilet and flushed it away."

A pretty serviceable lie, if not for the fact that she would have had to walk past me to dump this potty in the toilet, which she obviously didn't. I pointed that out and she smiled, knowing she was busted, but she was completely blase' (sorry, I have no idea how to make accent marks) about it. Still, she put together a basic story with all of the elements intact. If she'd thought it through to the "walking past dad to get to the bathroom" part and come up with some other way to get rid of her imaginary potty, it would have been a pretty solid lie (well, if there was a feasible way for her to create a potty out of thin air, I suppose).

See? She had nothing to gain by it, but she did it anyway. Possibly a bit worrisome. Again, as I've said before, having a well-developed ability to lie will probably only help her in her future life. But that doesn't mean that I want her doing it to me. So I'm going to have to figure out a way to nip that in the bud.

But lying isn't all of it. She's also a cheating cheater who cheats. When she first figured out that she could buckle her own seat belt, we started having a "contest" pretty much every time we got in the car. For practical reasons, mostly. Without the impetus of the contest, she tends to dawdle. There's another "tradition" we have to help speed the kids putting their belts on. It started when Gabe first started doing it on his own. For a short time before that, Norah had this thing she did to torment Gabe. She'd ask, "Would you like a wet finger?" Then she'd stick a finger in her mouth and wipe it on him. To help encourage him to get his seat belt on, we made it a rule that, if the belt hadn't clicked into place by the time we pull out of the driveway, then he would receive a wet finger. This was expanded to include Norah when she started putting her belt on, but she has about zero tolerance for receiving wet fingers (often resulting in crying fits when Gabe starts to threaten her with them), so the contest was developed as encouragement for her.

As the weeks past, she began to grow tired with occasionally losing this contest to Gabe as he was more adept at putting his belt on. So she often declares that "it's not a race!" Specifically, she declares this every time it looks like she might lose the race. And it happens with other races. Often she and I will race to the car when we're leaving the store (as she has a tendency to stop and examine pretty much anything that happens to be in the middle of the alley or parking lot and it can take ten minutes to get to the car if she's not spurred on to win a race). But, lately, she's been adamant that we're not racing, unless she has a good ten foot lead before we even start.

Today, she did exactly this as we walked up to the store. She was about ten feet in front of Gabe and I, and she shouted, "It's a race!" Neither Gabe nor I even made an attempt to catch up to her because we were carrying the many, many bags full of toys and electronics they both require to keep them entertained for the hours that we're here at the store. She made it to the door first and said, "I won!"

"But you cheated," I pointed out. "You didn't call the race until there was no chance that we could catch up to you. That's called cheating, when you rig the race so that you are the only one that wins. Nobody wants to play with a cheater."

"No I didn't," she claimed.

"Yeah. You did. That means you're a cheater."

"I'm the winner!" she countered sagely. And that's the point that worries me. Even though she's still very young, I'm pretty sure that she is already capable of weighing the moral dilemma of cheating versus the tiny thrill of winning a contest, and she has chosen to win over choosing to play fair. I know that sounds like a complicated concept for an almost four year old to grasp, but she's a shrewd one. One of nature's manipulators. And, lucky me, I get to try to figure out a way to convince her to do the right thing instead of always being the winner. A task that my particular moral flexibility might not be best suited to accomplish. Guess we'll see.