S1 came home from the first day of kindergarten and announced that no one in his class could read (he taught himself at 4). I told him that’s why kids went to school—to learn to read. He thought about that and replied, then why am I there? I already know how to read.
D1, on a standardized test In 4th grade, had the prompt: describe a problem and how you solved it. She answered I have no problems. She scored a zero. The funny thing was she never had problems because she just took care of business and said that’s how she dealt with life. And it was true.
D2 in Montessori kindergarten solved one random simple addition problem out of 20. When I asked why she didn’t do any more, she said she didn’t like any of the others so she stopped. Same thing when she started piano at 8. After 3 months, the teacher asked to stop lessons because D was unwilling to work through the beginning books and only played songs she liked. She was and is a non-believer in busy work. If she knows something, she won’t repeat it. Irritated her teachers, but if they quizzed her, she proved her knowledge.
D1 was inconsolable at the end of her first year of preschool. She thought school was over forever. Oops, apparently no one told her that she would be going back to school again in the fall.
My youngest was a terror until she was about six. She attended a Montessori preschool and I had to pry her off my neck while she screamed every morning (talk about mom guilt). When I picked her up in the afternoon, she’d invariably break out into a fit by the time we reached the car. One day I told her “you know I miss you all day and then when I pick you up, you cry and scream. Maybe you want to stay here a little longer?” (I knew she didn’t, was just trying a new anti-hissy fit approach). She screamed at the top of her lungs “NO, I WANT TO BE WITH MY FAMILY!!!” Ok then. I quit my job when she started half day kindergarten and she soon found out staying home with mom was boring. She started going happily to school after that.
Not exactly funny, but one night I was lying in bed with my oldest who was about three at the time. I was thinking random thoughts about my neighbor, who gave her boys and husband horrible haircuts. At that same moment my daughter said, “Mommy, don’t give me a haircut.” Cue Twilight Zone music.
She had another psychic moment one evening while taking a bath with me. She was about the same age. I was facing her reading an article about rafting in Outside magazine. This time she told me “Mommy, I don’t want to go in the river.” I turned the magazine around to see if the was a photo of a river on the cover. Nope. Unfortunately her psychic abilities ended there. I think. ?
My son was super super angry at me about something, age 4ish, and STOMPS his tiny foot and goes “you, you, you…” and I’m thinking oooh, have we picked up a profanity somewhere…" you LADYWOMAN".
when he got married, he got me a temporary tattoo to wear that said LADYWOMAN
My kids went to Catholic school. At the first parent teacher meeting, the teacher said D1 needed to understand the meaning of prayer. Kind of a big concept, I thought, but teacher said she needed to know she was talking to God. Okay. I later asked daughter who she was talking to when she said her prayers. She said, “Oh, that’s Mr. Sickles. He’s in the office but we can talk to him through the box on the wall (intercom).”
A few days later she was practicing her prayers in the car.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, with liberty and justice for all, Amen. You may take your seats.”
D2 is my messy child. I call it stop and drop. Once when she was about 5 I had had it… I took a paper grocery bag went around the house and picked up all her stuff. I told her if she wanted anything back she would have to pay me a dime an article. She went to her room, came back with a five dollar bill, handed it to me, picked up the bag and went back to her room. All without saying one word.
Creepy post @LeastComplicated ! The quoted part reminded me of something
I didn’t go out to work when my kids were in school, one day when I picked up my the 6y/o D at the school gate, she came out is such a mood. I asked her what happened and if she’d had a bad day She looked at me with flashing steel in her eyes and spat "why can’t you be like the other moms and get a job? I want a nanny like the other kids’!
It was 1978. Me, my sister and two friends, both of whom spoke Spanish, were in the back of a pick up, collecting used newspapers. We belonged to a girls club and we collected old newspapers to raise money for our activities and charitable work.
It was December in So Cal, so it wasn’t too cold. One of my friends started singing Feliz Navidad as we drove all over town, slipping and sliding unsecured on heaps of newspapers. Dangerous times in the 70’s! We were having a jolly time, singing as loudly as we could. Suddenly, the pick up truck came to an abrupt stop. My furious dad, who had been driving, stormed out to us in the back of the truck and shouted “Stop singing police knock it off!”
We stared at him in confusion for a few seconds before my friend explained that we were singing the song Feliz Navidad. Obviously, my dad had never heard it at that point. That was the hardest I ever had to try not to laugh.
At S2’s 1st t-ball game, his team batted first, and in typical t-ball fashion scored a gazillion points. Bottom of the inning, his team is playing the field when suddenly S2 starts trembling and crying quietly. His coaches stopped the game, approached him wondering if he was hurt or sick. He just shook his head no, but didnt say why he was upset. I, OTOH, knew exactly why he was crying and felt mortified. It was because the other team had scored 1 run.
There were parents at the game who still remembered this incident years later.
This is funny or not, depending on how you look at it.
One day, when kiddo was 3-ish, I went to pick him up from pre-school. The teacher saw me approaching, came out, closed the door behind her, and put her arm around my waist to take me for a walk. I’m thinking, “Uh oh, what the heck did he do?” Instead, she asked softly, “Did you lose a child?” (Uh, no.) “Because, a few times, your son has referred to his “other brother,” and I thought he was an only child.” I immediately knew where this was coming from and had to cover with a sheepish reply, “Kids say the darnedest things, don’t they?”
The funny part is that anytime our son attempted anything potentially dangerous (touching the stove, running with scissors, etc.), I’d always say, “STOP THAT! You know what happened to your other brother…” Eventually, he asked how many other brothers he had, and I said, “About ten. You’ve lasted the longest, but you’re on thin ice if you keep doing .” Lest you gasp, you have to know our family. My mother always told us to “Stop crying or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor!” We just have our own sense of humor.
Anyway, the not-so-funny part is that his teacher, a pastor’s wife, and her husband HAD lost a child, and she was reaching out to me with compassion. I was mortified and never made that reference again.
Speaking of family sayings freaking other people out:
D was about 12 when she came hiking with me and a few of my friends. At one point a friend did something and asked if D was OK with it. The response: “It’s OK. I’m just scarred for life.”
There was no immediate response from my friends, but later they asked if D was OK. They had been talking between themselves all day, worried. I just laughed. It was our way of saying it was all good, no problem. My Ds had been saying it for years when something unconventional happened. I believe they got it from some movie once upon a time.
Heavily pregnant I was waiting at the supermarket checkout when my 3 year old son noticed an extremely overweight man at the next checkout. He piped up in that piercing tone of toddlers ‘Has that man got a baby in his tummy too’. I tried to look invisible and hoped the man was too busy packing to notice.