“Levi! Come get a cookie!”
“Guckie??”
“Yes, a cookie!”
“Guckie? GUCKIE?? Guckie, guckie, guckie!”
“Here you go… let me get one out of the package for you---“
“-NO!!”
“Ok! You do!”
“NO! NO!” *slaps packet of cookies out of my hand and runs to corner of room, glowering*
“Fine, you don’t get any cookies when you act like that!” *sets cookies on side table*
“Guckie?”
“Say PLEASE cookie, and I will let you have one.”
“Guckie?”
“PLEASE. Say PLEASE. PLEASE cookie?”
“GUCKIE! Guckie? Mama guckie??”
“Fine.” *I know full well how many marks that gets me on the bad parenting chart, thank you*
*After making sure I leave the cookies on the table, not attempting to help remove any AT ALL, lest my touch make the cookies undesirable, Levi spends a considerable amount of time attempting to remove a cookie from the package*
“Guckie?”
“Okay, here, let me get that for you… there you go.”
*Levi wanders over to other side of the room with his cookie. I look over after a minute and see he’s taking teeny crumbly bites, and watching large crumbs fall to the floor. Sighing, I think; “Oh well. I can vacuum.” Then I hear---and I kid you not---dark, gleeful chuckles, as my child takes care to step on every individual crumb he’s dropped and proceeds to GRIND it into the carpet, as forcefully as his little foot can manage.
What happened next, you wonder???? This.
Yep, here I am, writing this. Yes, this JUST happened, and those crumbs are still mashed into my carpet. I should go clean those up, huh? Yeah… I think I’m going to take a few more minutes for myself. At least in writing about it I can turn a potentially tragic situation (for el niño) into a witty anecdote about living with a toddler. However, I’m not sure there’s so much of a story here with an actual moral, as much as this being a way for me to tally up the reasons that I should not add a niño numbero dos, and so that later in life, when my teenager is asking WHY am I SO UNFAIR???, I can haul out my Book of Recorded Wrongs and show him how payback is TOTALLY fair.
