My kids, who live with my ex about 500 miles away, stay with me over the Christmas holidays and the summer. They are 6 and 4, and like to sleep in my bed with me. It’s a king sized bed, so there’s plenty of room. I sleep on the right, next to the alarm clock so that I can turn it off before they wake. This way I can get ready for work without waking them up. I usually prefer that my daughter sleep in the middle since she’s younger and can fall off the bed. They’d both prefer to sleep next to me, so I let my son sleep in the middle once in a while. Last night was his turn, but my daughter put up a fight. Eventually, I told them that if they didn’t stop arguing, that I would sleep in the middle. My daughter quickly replied: “Okay!”. I then had to spend the next 15 minutes explaining to her why I couldn’t sleep in the middle.
This is when I remembered that earlier, while watching a Dora video with my daughter, I was also outsmarted. Dora asked us to identify the shape that was shown twice on the screen. My daughter yells: “square!”. I quickly correct her and say: “No, that’s a rectangle.” Dora then re-corrects me and says “square”. I was truly impressed with my daughter. She was able to figure out that we were watching a video meant for a 4:3 ratio TV on a 16:9 HDTV. So the squares only looked like rectangles since they were stretched to fit the screen.
My near-four year old girl twists my words all the time to try to get what she wants. This past weekend I told her “Daddy can’t speak Chinese today” to try to get her to speak more English with me. She wasn’t having it though and kept chattering on in Mandarin. Later on, though (after I had completely forgotten), there was a can of beverage she wanted to drink, that was labelled as “tea” in Chinese but “juice” in English. She knows that she’s not supposed to have tea, so she said, “you said you don’t speak Chinese today, right? See, it says here in English that it’s ‘juice’.” She’s perfectly aware that I can read Chinese in any case, but she also knows it makes it awkward for me to go back on what I might have told her earlier. So I did what any dad would do: I got her mother to tell her no, instead.
You should have told her that she’s welcome to sleep on the right, but then she’ll have to get up, get ready for work, make breakfast for everyone, go to work, deal with the Penske file, pick up the dry cleaning, etc, make dinner, etc.
umm…I hate to be a spoilsport, but maybe there’s another explanation:
She had seen the video before, and simply remembered the answer .
Four yr olds love hearing things repeated constantly, and remembering them. I enjoyed it when they would “read” to me an entire bedtime storybook , but I knew that they were only repeating it from memory.
Or did his darling daughter say, “It’s a square. Your TV just makes it look stretched out.” All this is saying to me is that she needs to be watching Nick in HD.
