Kids just don't get the "How're you?", "Good, good, thanks." social contract.

This one is by request.



James and I were out on a supply run yesterday.  Drug store for toothpaste and the like.  It wasn't too busy with the Christmas Shopping Living Dead yet so I was doing okay.  At the check-out the cashier was positively sunny:
Cashier:  Hi guys! How are you doing? 
James:  <mumble mumble>
Cashier looks curiously at me and I shrug.  So she tries again.
Cashier:  How are you guys doing?
James:  <mumble mumble mumble>
She gives me another look and I smile at her to give her a bit of encouragement, so she gives it one more try.
Cashier:  Are you guys having a good day? 
James (brightly):  On Saturday my butt threw up!
You can probably figure out the context.  I'm going to leave it like I left that other one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spooky Adventure

This one comes from way back in September.  I'd meant to post it then, but never quite got around to filling out the story. We've been reading to both of the boys quite a lot (not as much to Daniel as I'd like, but I'm getting better at that).  I may have written down before about how James tends to come to new things through books first, more than anything else.  He may see a new toy or something and be interested in it, but until he hears about it from a book, he's not really invested in it.  If he's going to throw a tantrum in a store, it's almost always because he isn't getting to read the new book he just saw quickly enough. When I first started writing this post, his favourite book was a Toy Story 3 book called A Spooky Adventure .  It was the one that, guaranteed, we would read every night, and he would want to read more than once if he could wrangle it somehow.  He was also pushing his bed-time back and back, but he's been very good about...
Keep reading

Independent Initiative

Image
Yesterday was James' fourth birthday.  That's a pretty big milestone because now's about the age when he starts really thinking about other people as people and not just sources of stuff.  It's tough sometimes to remember that kids go through a (fairly long) period where they simply can't understand concepts like "that makes me sad" and why they wouldn't want to make someone else sad.  It's normal brain development, but once you have empathy, it's really, really difficult to understand that these little people who don't have it yet aren't being mean, they're just being themselves and almost every one of them will grow out of it. For James, there was a bit of a gradual development of empathy, he would periodically announce some fact that he understood  — I shouldn't hit Brazen-cat because she will be sad .  — but mostly it still seemed to be a collection of facts, not something he understood implicitly.  Then, over the holidays...
Keep reading

Story Time

These guys make me laugh all the time.  I don't think there's a single day that goes by where at least one of them doesn't do something that makes me laugh out loud.  Today they both managed it. Daniel wasn't interested in supper -- at least not by his standards -- but when it came time to take him to bed and read his stories he spied the container of watermelon in the fridge and made it abundantly  clear that he wanted some. So I took the smaller one out of the fridge and we sat down to eat some.  I knew he was going to make a hellacious mess, so I sat him in his booster seat and belted him in before starting to put pieces in front of him.  The first few barely had time to touch down before he snatched them up in a wide, roundhouse swipe, and jammed them in his mouth.  After he'd consumed a few ounces of watermelon he cooled down a bit and started taking his time with them.  At one point he started smelling each piece before he ate it.  I can u...
Keep reading