The Boy: Mommy, you want to push me on the bicycle?
The Mrs: Sure. Where do you want to go?
The Boy: Arizona.
Category: daddyblog
Posts about being a dad, incorporating posts from our Fergomas blog
Might make it tough to fill out forms
The Mrs: What’s your first name?
The Boy: Conrad
The Mrs: What’s your last name?
The Boy: Thomas
The Mrs: What’s your middle name?
The Boy: Clifford the Big Red Dog
English is hard
We saw a sheriff’s deputy on the way to school this morning. I tried to explain the difference between a sheriff and a police officer to The Boy:
Law enforcement officers who work in towns and cities are called police. If they work outside of towns, in the county “even though towns are actually in the county”, they are called sheriffs, only really they are sheriff’s deputies, and sometimes they are called just deputies. So if someone “calls the sheriff,” the sheriff probably won’t show up, he or she will send a deputy.
The law enforcement agency responsible for highways and interstates is called the Highway Patrol. Their officers are called State Troopers.
Simple, really.
Mommy made me coffee!
We stopped at a coffee shop yesterday, and The Boy decided he wanted coffee, too. We got him some hot chocolate. This morning he asked for coffee at breakfast, so Jean just made some from milk and cocoa and honey and I think vanilla. She stood at the stove for a while, stirring it and tasting it to get it right.
She’s a good mommy.
The perfect wedding guest
We took The Boy to see his former “and beloved” nanny Bonnie get married yesterday. I was a bit apprehensive about his ability to sit through the ceremony, but we hit on an interesting formula. He went down for his nap much later than usual, so he had only been sleeping for about half an hour when we got him up to go. He was dazed and cranky all the way there, and just waking up as we arrived.
He sat quietly and attentively through the short ceremony, then just as it was ending and Bonnie and Steve had been presented for the first time as husband and wife, he said, just loud enough to be heard a few rows away, “All done.” He got an appreciative laugh from the crowd. Then just as they turned us loose to head to the reception, he said, “Now let’s eat cake.”
The difference between sharing and taking
We took The Boy to the park today, and when he wasn’t literally running around in circles, he was engaging in his other favorite pastime: trying to gather up everything in sight and hold it all simultaneously. He’s not happy unless he has at least one thing in each hand, which can be hard when you’re climbing on monkey bars.
There was a little girl with some sort of primary-colored wheeled conveyance, and Conrad naturally decided he should be driving it. She wasn’t playing with it at the moment, and he sprinted across the playground, climbed on top of it and started to peddle away.
Now I know he’s only two, but I want him to understand that you don’t just get to grab everything you see. And by the look on the little girl’s face, I could tell she wasn’t particularly happy that this sweaty little boy was absconding with her vehicle. So I said, “Conrad, please give that back to her.”
To which her grandmother replied, “No, he can ride it. Can’t he, honey? You need to share.”
First of all, don’t go turning my lesson about not taking other people’s stuff into your lesson about sharing. I’ve just told my son to do something. Please don’t tell him he doesn’t have to, since, you know, you’re not his parent and all.
Second, do you really want your child to grow up thinking it’s okay to just take other people’s stuff? Or that if someone wants to take your stuff you need to let them? I know the instinct is right, but maybe we need to be teaching the toddlers that you should share your stuff when the other person asks, not when the other person just grabs.