Cute Without Realizing It

A couple of years back, while we were driving, my daughter saw a stuffed toy she liked in the rear window of another car. “Let’s ask that kid to give it to me”, she said. Why would he give it to you, we countered. “Because my ma’am says sharing is a good habit”, she responded.

More recently, we’ve noticed that anytime we ask her to respond fast or to complete whatever she’s doing early, she’ll respond by saying, “You should learn to wait”. That’s a line we’ve used on her many, many times. Without effect, of course.

The common theme of both those lines? She’s taking the same approach that all adults do:
Do as I say, not as I do.
You’re growing up fast, kiddo!

At other times, though, she’s still a kid (obviously). Like the time when her yoga teacher (a neighbor) shouted at her for something, she told us about it. Seeing that “You must have deserved it” look on our faces, she continued:
“But nobody other than you is allowed to shout at me, right? So how can she shout at me?”
I could imagine her agreeing with Calvin the time he told Hobbes that “I had you wriggling in the crushing grip of reason”.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t rational. So when she still didn’t get the desired reaction from us, she gave us that “I expected little else from you” look and told us that she’d taken matters into her own hands. How? By asking her friend from the same class to be kutti with the yoga teacher… even though the yoga teacher was the grandmother of that very kid!

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