You know why the age of 2-3 is great?  It’s because it’s the age when kids… or toddlers, if you prefer… start to figure things out.  Cute things, like that on their birthday they get presents, or that if they move a stool to the counter they can climb up to reach the candy they saw from across the room.  It’s the age when they start to reason with you, even if the reasoning is not always clear.

Unfortunately, this is also the age when kids learn they can make up excuses that may get them out of trouble, because now they know what trouble is, and that they don’t want to be in it.

Alex and I are learning this the hard way when it comes to E.  E is quite a character at times, which I have written about before (like when he pointed out my white socks to a room full of people).  E is also no stranger to long-winded explanations for why he did something that, in retrospect, he wishes he hadn’t done (like when he destroyed our 1,500-piece puzzle because he wanted to help clean up the living room).

Lately, E has developed a habit of smacking people.  He especially likes to go for the face.  We don’t know where he learned this, and we’re trying hard to teach him that hitting is not OK.

This past weekend, we went out to lunch with my family.  My dad, grandma, brother, and sister were all there.  So was one of my sister’s friends.  E knows all these people very well, and loves them all, so he was having a great time at lunch.  He even got to have a big plate of french fries all to himself.  Lunch was going well.

And then it happened.  For no reason at all, E turned to me (I was sitting next to him) and whacked me in the face.  Hard.

Time stood still.  My grandma was horrified.  My dad was watching to see how Alex and I were going to handle it.  I think my brother and sister may have been torn between horrified and amused.  E shrank away from me and then bee-lined for under the table (his most-favorite hiding spot ever).  Alex got him out and then took him for a walk, as close to a time-out as possible at a restaurant.  When he came back, E apologized to me and gave me a hug – the little guy definitely felt bad.  That’s when Alex told us all WHY E had smacked me.

“He says he did it because you took one of his french fries.”

Now, I had been nowhere NEAR E’s french fries.  Not that this is a good reason to hit someone anyway, but it was a blatant lie!  Everyone at the table backed me up on that, because Alex actually BELIEVED E!!  So not only is he capable of thinking up plausible excuses, he’s also capable of GETTING HIS FATHER TO BELIEVE THEM!!

I’ve said it before.  We are in so much trouble.

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© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I call ‘collective blogging.’  This means that we have each written a blog post on the same topic – but we wrote our posts separately.  Her take may not be the same as mine, and that’s the fun of it!  If you’re interested in reading past collective blogs, please click here.

Today’s Topic:  A Day in the Life of a Geeky Kid (and her mom)

To read Whitney’s post about her experience as a geeky kid, please visit her blog, My New Chimerical Kit.

This won’t surprise those of you who know me personally, but for those of you who don’t, when I was a kid I was a bit of a geek.  A nerd.  A goody-two-shoes, if you will.  I NEVER did anything to make a teacher call home, or get sent to the principal’s office, or get detention.  Technically I did have a teacher tell my mom that I wasn’t prepared for class once during parent-teacher conferences, but that was my AP English class and that teacher hated me because she once asked me what I thought about the book TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES (PL 25) and I told her I didn’t care very much about the book.  That might be a separate blog post at some point, because that class was horrible and I hated it and someone could probably write a sitcom about it if they wanted to (right, Jen?!).

Anyhoo, there is only one time that I am aware of where a teacher actually sought my mom out to let her know I had done something rather… geeky.  The teacher’s name was Mrs. Gorman, and she was my preschool teacher (age 3 and 4).  Ah… preschool.  It’s such a wonderful time.  You get to play, make messes, and take naps.  There’s snack time.  Your biggest concern is whether or not you’re going to get a good seat in the “music time” circle, and the day you got to make a new letter picture (and by letter I mean A, B,C) was more exciting than anything else you’d ever known.

There was this one time when the whole preschool class was finger-painting for the afternoon.  This was, in retrospect, probably not a great call on the part of Mrs. Gorman.  Twenty-five 3-year-olds with paint on their fingers and no sense of the consequences of putting those fingers places other than the paper?  Probably not the best idea.  She must have realized this halfway through the activity, because she called out to all us little kids,

“Don’t get the paint on your clothes, your moms won’t be happy!”

I’m going to overlook the fact that she suggested only moms can do laundry.  That didn’t bother me too much at age 3.  Besides, I knew MY mom would be just fine if I got finger paint all over my cute little outfit (did I mention that I ALWAYS had to wear a cute little outfit when I was in preschool?  And that it absolutely HAD to match, or else I would pout and be upset all day over my mismatched garments?).  To little, geeky, 3-year-old me, it seemed that my mom could get dirt and paint and food out of all clothing.  So, being the darling child that I was, I stood up and told Mrs. Gorman,

“Don’t worry!  My mom will do everyone’s laundry if they get paint on it!”

I’m not sure what exactly happened after that – Mrs. Gorman may have had to leave the room so-as to not laugh in my face.  Years later I found out from my mom that when she came to pick me up from preschool that day, Mrs. Gorman had pulled her aside and told her that her daughter had volunteered her to do the entire class’s laundry for the day.  I think my mom said they had a good laugh over the whole thing.

Something tells me a child less geeky then myself would have kept the bragging about her mother’s laundry-doing abilities to herself.  Bragging about having the coolest new Barbie, yes, bragging about laundry, no.  But to me, this was information everyone needed to have – it was COOL.

And yes, to this day I am still convinced my mother has a laundry secret she has not yet shared with me.  I’m thinking perhaps she’s saving it for my wedding night.

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She doesn’t know it, but my friend Tiffany is a prophet.

Last week she told me there was no way the puzzle Alex and I are working on would survive the weekend.  Today I am here to tell you, she was 100% right.

…. Maybe I need to pause here and tell you what the heck I’m talking about.

Two weeks ago, Alex and I decided we needed something to do TOGETHER.  So we went to Toys ‘R’ Us and bought a 1500 piece puzzle that depicts a European riverside town.  We both love puzzles, so we thought this was a fantastic idea.

***I will pause here for you all to laugh at our dorkiness.***

We’d been working on the puzzle for a solid week when I realized E was going to be at our house for the Thanksgiving holiday and all that weekend.  He is here most weekends, but we had acquired said puzzle on a weekend when he happened to be with his mom.  So I mentioned to Tiffany in passing: I have no idea how we are going to protect this puzzle from a two-year-old.  Her response was: “Yeah, that puzzle is toast.”

I didn’t agree with her.  I was sure that between Alex and I, we could keep E from destroying our puzzle.  E, himself, loves puzzles, after all.  Surely we could just explain to him that this was our puzzle and he should not play with it.  Right?  RIGHT??!!??  For two days, I was right.  E would walk over to our puzzle and explain to us, “Daddy – ‘Stina’s puzzle, not E’s puzzle.”  He also felt it necessary to show us the “missing” pieces, where we had not yet put everything together.  It was downright cute.  He put his truck puzzle together right next to ours, just so he could be included in the puzzle extravaganza!

Then Friday came.  E was in a particularly… evil toddler-y mood.  I was cleaning while Alex took care of some things at work.  And that’s when it happened.  E walked over to the puzzle while I was washing the kitchen floor, looked at me, smiled angelically, then proceeded to completely destroy the puzzle Alex and I had spent the last week putting together.  Here’s the best part: he gave me a REASON why he tore the whole thing apart.  See, after he did it, he knew he was going to be in trouble.  So he hid.  After he was done hiding, he came over to me and I asked him why he broke the puzzle.  It was at that point that he told me he was trying to put it on the floor because I was cleaning – he was trying to HELP.

You can go ahead and say it.  We are totally screwed.  This kid is already thinking up excuses for why he did something bad and HE IS TWO.

E was pretty embarrassed about breaking up the puzzle.  He told Alex he was sorry, and then he got all shy when I told him to tell my father and my sister about what he did the next day.  But the fact remains: Tiffany was dead-on balls accurate.  Our puzzle was toast.  I took a few pictures of it tonight, when Alex and I began the re-construction process.  By the time I thought to get the camera, we had put some of it back together, so when you look at these pictures keep in mind: E broke apart the WHOLE THING.  All the pieces you see were at one time ASSEMBLED.  The pieces you see in the pictures were all broken apart by E.

Poor puzzle.

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© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.