Today I had to give Patches an emergency bath because Gleek had peanutbuttered him. (gloppy layer, all over) Since I didn’t want to reward this behavior I refused to allow Gleek to join him in the tub. She sat on the toilet and watched. Then she very deliberately took a roll of toilet paper and threw it into the bathtub. I was livid. I came down on her like a ton of bricks, finally at the end of the tirade I wound up with the words “Why would you do a thing like that?”
Teery little eyes looked into mine and a small sad voice answered “I wanted to make it clean.”
I am reminded once again that adult motivations do not easily apply to children. She had no idea what happens when toilet paper gets wet. One of these days it’ll stick in my skull and I’ll stop scolding kids for the wrong things.
I’ve learned how to wait til they do it the second time after being told why it was a bad thing to do before scolding. It doesn’t work with Goose but seems to work for Pirate. Hopefully Wen will learn from Pirate’s example instead of Goose’s.
“I am reminded once again that adult motivations do not easily apply to children.”
My ex-wife got angry once (well, a lot, but I’m talking about this specific occurrence) when my son, despite her having specifically told him not to, took a cherry slushee into his bedroom.
He spilled it on the carpet, then covered the stain with his Jeff Gordon bedspread, staining it as well.
She can’t seem to comprehend that sometimes, children do things that make no sense, whatsoever, to an adult.
Should of brought in a local dog to lick the peanut butter off. All right, bad idea… but funny to picture.
But the real kicker, is that the behaviors make perfect sense to the child. One of the challenges of parenting is trying to twist my brain into viewing an event the way a 3 year old would.
An example: Just today Gleek told the following story- “I have a hamster in a cage and a limosine in the backyard and the hamster gets in the limosine and falls off and cuts his head and there is blood and then he is dead. He is a dead goat. And then he turns into a beautiful butterfly!”
To her that story had no gaps and came to a satisfactory ending. As an adult, I fell off my chair laughing and she had no clue why. Adults sure are weird.
Adults just don’t understand
Adults just don’t understand that “You never told me NOT to iron a marshmallow!” is a valid defense!
(I wanted to make s’mores like we’d made in Brownies, but I wasn’t allowed to use the stove because it was too high)