What Lies Beneath

Sydney's a good kid in general but for some reason she has an oral fixation with paper. She'll tear off a little piece of her tissue, ball it up in her hands, and place it tenderly in her mouth, savoring God knows what chemical flavoring and artificial texture before being told sternly by her parents, once more, that we only put food in our mouths, and paper is not food.

Sydney now knows emphatically that her parents think that paper is not food but she herself apparently begs to differ, and in order to indulge her secret fondness for paper she employs various strategies, with varying degrees of success. She's tried to reason with us. "Stop talking," she'll say. Or "go away." She's tried distraction. She's tried going in the bathroom and closing the door. None of these strategies have yielded the desired results, and so yesterday she tried something new.

She tried an outright lie.

The conversation started out normally enough: "Sydney, what is in your mouth?"

But rapidly went south: "Cereal," she said. And then she swallowed the evidence.

"Cereal? Where did you get it?"

"It was on the floor."

Right away she realized that was the wrong answer, because although cereal is food, she has been told that when cereal is on the floor you don't eat it. Which she is promptly told. So she changes her story.

"I got it from the box."

"What box? Is there a box of cereal on the table?"

There is not and Sydney knows this, so again she thinks quickly and comes up with: "No, I got it from the cabinet."

Since the cabinet in question is about six feet off the floor and impeded by a kitchen counter, I had serious doubts about this story.

"Really? How did you get it?"

Sydney has now realized that she can't account for this. So she is silent.

Even though I found the attempt hilariously funny, I somehow managed to keep a straight (and stern) face and reprimanded her for lying to me. Having been caught in such a bald faced lie, and being the good kid that she is, she immediately crumpled in a puddle of tears and promised not to do it again.

Which she won't. She'll definitely tell a better lie next time. Here we go.

Tongue Twist

Witnessed just now:

Dad: "Sydney, what's in your mouth?"

Sydney: "Just, go away." Waves Daddy away.

Dad: "Sydney. What's in your mouth? Is that plastic?"

Sydney: "Stop talking."

Dad: "Sydney, don't put plastic in your mouth."

Sydney: "It's not IN my mouth. It's ON my mouth."

Dad: "Well don't put it on your mouth."

Sydney: "But it's my extra tongue!"

Dad: "What...?"

Sydney: "I have to put it on my mouth, it's my extra tongue!"

Dad: "....Can't you pretend your extra tongue is somewhere else?"

Sydney: "NOOOOOOO!"

Dad: "Well, I'm sorry, but its dirty so you can't do that."

Sydney: "What if I wash it off?"

Dad: "...okay."

What a three year old has to go through just to have an extra tongue!

Mekkers

Daddy and Sydney were sitting on the floor looking at a picture of the solar system. I expect the concept of other planets is a little out of her reach but she was gamely trying.



"See?" Daddy said, pointing at the various colorful spheres, "there's Mars and Venus, Earth, Saturn, Neptune..."



"..and Scotland!" Sydney exclaimed excitedly.



My maternal grandmother was Scottish. She did say she'd travelled a long way to get to America.

Just as Sydney is gamely trying to understand her world, we're gamely trying to keep up with her. The other day we told her it was time to go to bed when she told us she wanted to play a "short mekkers."

"What's 'mekkers?'" we asked.

"It's a game," Sydney said, and proceeded to bend over with her head on the floor and one leg in the air. This was how you played mekkers. Easy enough.

Yesterday I found my husband lying on the ground in the driveway while Sydney piled hay on top of him.

"What are you guys doing?" I asked.

My husband looked up at me wearily. "We're playing a long mekkers."

Oh. Mekkers is that kind of game. I see.

Y Knots

Things have gotten a little more complicated these days with the introduction of a new arrival. We have suddenly become the show stopper at every venue; restaurants, shoppng plazas, libraries--wherever we ventured so happily as a threesome before has become a veritable clan of look-alikes, albeit in various stages of maturity.

This explains, in part, why there is a stick taped to our sliding glass door and a plastic bag attached to one of our dining room chairs.

And it's the only explanation you're likely to get.

Meanwhile, Sydney has reacted to her new status by becoming Three with a capital T, conveniently ignoring requests she would rather not deal with, refusing foods she used to eat with gusto, and bursting into uncontrollable tears at the merest misstep by her over-tired parents, and instead of punctuating every response with a rhetorical why? has progressed into the more challenging question, why not?

e.g.

"Syd, please don't put dirt into the baby's bouncy seat..."

"Why not??"

It's all fun and games, here.

Mermaid Salad

Being three apparently has a lot of advantages I hadn't thought of before. We were at the dinner table the other day eating ham, which Mommy and Daddy were enjoying with a spot of mustard and a little horseradish, when Sydney insisted that she also needed to have some mustard and horseradish. Leaning on our past experiences with this child we were pretty sure that she didn't like either, and told her so.

"Three year olds like mustard," she said. And they do. They like horseradish too, it turns out. Plain, with no ham to interfere.

So my little gourmand came into the kitchen with her toy elephant last night explaining that she and the elephant were hungry and they wanted to go to a restaurant.

"Okay," I said, playing the role of the waiter, "what do you and the elephant want?"

"I want a peanut butter and samwich," she said, clearly, "and the elephant wants mermaid salad."

Don't blink, I thought, and said, "Does he want a mermaid salad sandwich or just mermaid salad?"

"Just mermaid salad, please."

So Sydney had a peanut butter sandwich and the elephant ate his mermaid salad.

A little while later she came up to me and asked: "Excuse me, how do you make mermaid salad?"

I have no idea. "First," I said confidently, "you catch some mermaids."

"Yeah?"

"Then you cut the tails off."

"Why?"

"Because that's the part you eat. Then you cook them for 35 minutes, and you put them in a big bowl."

"Yeah?"

"And then you add mayonnaise, onions, celery, pepper and salt." Essentially I have just subsituted mermaid for tuna. Yummy.

"Oh!" Sydney said, "My elephant is still hungry. Can he have some more?" And off she went with more mermaid salad for her elephant.

But what have I done? Is she going to traumatize some little girl with a Little Mermaid t-shirt by making yum yum noises at it? Is she going to ask her pre-school teachers if they can make mermaid salad? Have I altered my daughter's experience with half-fish, half-human mythological creatures for life? Or is she really just skipping all that and admitting that all they may be good for is a substitute for tuna salad?

I wish I was three... I'd probably know the answer.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Sydney's powers of reasoning have sky-rocketed over the past few weeks. Today she reasoned that, when asked what her grandmother said and her grandmother replied, "I didn't say anything," that it must mean that her grandmother's mouth was stuck up with glue. There are a few gaps in this reasoning, to be sure, but it's not bad for a first try.

When I was in college I took a logic course with the specific goal of being able to reason nonsense in such a fashion that no one could argue with me. This same desire may have been passed down to my daughter who the other day very sanely reasoned that soap was made of rubber. Observe:

1. Wild rice is yummy.
2. It is yummy because it tastes good and also because it has a neat texture.
3. The texture of wild rice is slippery, crunchy and a little rubbery.
4. Soap is slippery.
5. Therefore, soap is made out of rubber.

Obviously.

Third Time a Charm

Now fully versed in English and with a long memory, Sydney got exactly what she wanted for her birthday: a chocolate cake, vanilla frosting and chocolate (no, wait, I want vanilla) ice cream. She also had: three red balloons, a single candle with a three on it, a bunch of daffodils, a hat and a sweater, a veterinary kit, a craft table, play doh, a book of Curious George, a bubble maker, and a guitar.

Not a bad haul for a three year old.

She also definitely has the birthday, now-I'm-a-year-older concept down. This morning she told me she was still three. And that next year, she would be sixty.

From three to sixty in one year? The way time speeds up around here, I don't doubt it.

Building the Girl

Since we live on a farm, Sydney is exposed to probably more adventures than your average three year old, just by being at home. Last year she acquired a toy chainsaw and she can frequently be seen working along side Daddy or Mommy, cutting up sticks, grass, snow banks or whatever else gets in the way. Ever since Daddy had an accident, she's also realized the thing can be dangerous; consequently whenever she gets any kind of cut or scratch and a random stranger makes the mistake of asking her how she got it, she will bravely tell them she did it with a chainsaw.

Despite this statement we have not yet been visited by child welfare officers.

At any rate our pint sized farmer is coming along fine. While playing in the sandbox at her preschool the other day, she announced to the boys bunched along the sides that she was digging a trench.

"A trench??" the boys asked, increduously. They'd never dug anything but holes. "What's a trench?"

"A trench," Sydney explained, "Can be a big hole or a small hole. I'm digging a big hole."

I think the boys have some catching up to do, if they want to dig trenches with Sydney.

Manners

A few days ago I asked Sydney if I could have a piece of her cookie. She must have been in a good mood, since she answered, "Yes, you may sure can!" And she even broke off a sizable piece and gave it to me.

I fully realize that she picks up these phrases and mannerisms from the people around her (mostly me and my husband), but they are both amazingly endearing and hilariously funny coming out of the mouth of a not-quite three-year-old. And you never know when you might encounter them. Yesterday evening at dinner, my husband offered Sydney a cucumber slice, to which she waved her hand at him and said, "No, thank you for the offer, though."

A little while later, he offered her a bite of fish, to which she replied:

"BLECCCHHH!!!"

So at least we know she's still not-quite three and not some old soul stuck in a child's body.

A Day in the Life of a Sydney

Things are going well, and Sydney is cheerful, rambunctious and mischievous. Suddenly she removes both her socks and her sweater and throw them away, declaring that she is hot and doesn't want to wear them.

It is about 5 degrees Farenheit outside, and while warmer inside, it is definitely not tank top weather, which aside from her jeans is now all that she has on.

"Syd," I say, in my calmest, most reasonable voice, "You have to wear your sweater."

"I don't want to wear my sweater!" she says, still happily bouncing around.

"Yes, I know, but it's cold out, so you have to."

"Noooooo!" she says, and we're clearly going downhill from here.

"Syd-"

"I'm going to hide!" she says, and darts into the kitchen.

I try the Ultimatum as I follow her into the kitchen with the discarded sweater in my hand. "I'm going to count to three, and when I get to three, I'm going to put it on for you!" Counting is bad enough, but the threat of someone doing something Sydney knows how to do herself is to be avoided at all costs. I'm sure I have her now. But she's not moving, so I start my count.

"One...."

"NO! Don't count!!" she says, and gets up, always a good sign. I come closer and she comes closer, we've almost gotten Project Sweater under control.

"Two..." I say, and she darts past me, runs back the way she came, goes into the bathroom and closes the door.

My husband, who has been trying to cook dinner, now enters the fray.

"Sydney, you have to do what Mommy says."

"I don't want to!" comes the muffled, determined voice, and she leans against the bathroom door to make sure I don't come in.

"Fine," he says. "Stay in the bathroom then."

Well, that works, because she comes out, but still won't stand still long enough to wear the sweater. Now both parents are engaged, and we surround her from both sides. Desperate, cornered, she does the only honorable thing. She grabs the sweater from my hands, rushes to the gate which blocks the dining room, and throws it over the gate into the darkness beyond. Then she glares at us, defiant, and collapses into a protest heap on the floor. "I...don't..want..to...wear! the! Sweat! er!!"

Fortunately, she still only weighs about 25 pounds, so its still relatively easy to pick her up at this point, carry her upstairs, and deposit her into her room to think it over. She cries and cries and then finally falls silent.

"Mommy?" she says, in her calmest, most reasonable voice. "I'm ready to wear my sweater now." I go into the room, we put on the sweater, and we hug to make up.

Later, she protests that she already blew her nose and doesn't need to do it again, and makes her point clear by hiding the tissue under the dog's bed. We let it run. What's a little snot in the scheme of things?

Gondolas in Space

It was New Year's Eve, and we'd seen a circus, a taiko performance, some fireworks and a bunch of Loony Tunes cartoons, all part of First Night in Burlington, VT. Sydney had been going strong all day but there we were, napless, trying to eat dinner in a small Korean restaurant. One of the cartoons had made a big impression on her.

"I want to go in a rocket ship with Mommy and Bugs Bunny!" she said, restlessly toying with a dumpling.

"Okay!" I said, glad to have some kind of distraction that did not involve throwing food. "First, we need a countdown!" And I counted down from 10 to 1. Sydney was obviously anticipating the next maneuver, so with great gusto I lifted her out of her chair and made rocket noises at the same time.

Instead of giggling happily, she burst into hysterical tears.

"NO!" she cried between hiccups, "I wanted to go in a real one!" And she collapsed onto my shoulder with great, shuddering sobs.

Which is just as well, since I was suddenly overcome with hysterical laughter, even over my horror at unintentionally bursting her bubble.

Welcome to reality, kid.

Gently as I could, I explained that we couldn't go in a real one, at least not right now, and that she perhaps might like to practice first? Maybe go to astronaut school? Maybe someday when she was older and had gone to astronaut school, she could go in a real one. A few moments later she collapsed into a puddle on my lap and fell deeply asleep. So started Sydney's 2010.

We have these heartbreaking moments of disappointment more frequently now, as Sydney realizes more and more that the whole world is not actually revolving around her, that things can't always happen right now, that even fun things come to an end. We try to tread the fine line of not giving her false hope and also not breaking her spirit, and sometime we succeed, and sometimes we don't. It depends on the day, or maybe just the moment.

At any rate it's certainly not all bad. Today I came home to be greeted by an obviously excited child who couldn't wait to tell me about her day.

"We ate lunch in a gondola!!" she cried.

It's not a spaceship, but maybe it's just as good.