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May 1, 2007
Very warm puppy
There are no words for my frustration with Jamie tonight.
Chick-Fil-A included these Mensa for kids puzzles in their kids meals. The cards have little questions, jokes or puzzles on them that you're supposed to decode with a key page. I don't think Jamie's really ready for that yet, so I was just asking her questions and telling her the jokes. Everything was going fine. Until.
The question was: What food do the coded words playfully define? The coded part was "very warm puppy," which I read to her straight off the answer section. She had nothing. And that's ok, it took me a second too. So I started asking her things like, "What's another word for puppy?" and, "What kind of animal is a puppy?" and, "A puppy is a baby...?" She finally got the word dog. Every so often I reminded her that we were looking for a food.
Then we started working on the hot part. I led her. I fed her hints. I got frustrated and we went to brush teeth and read a story. I gave it another try. I finally got her to say the word hot. I asked her what kind of food we could be talking about.
She said peas.
At this point, I was about to put my fist through a wall. I would lead her to say both words close together, but for some reason she still could get "hot dog." At some point, I stood up and told her I was going to take a little walk. As I left the room, she started to cry. Not about the freaking word puzzle, but because she thought I wasn't going to read to her.
That was the point where I lost it. The child will giggle one minute and be crying the next. I yelled a little. I threatened some. I gave her one quick spank. Then I yelled a little more, since spanking obviously didn't help the crying. She is irrational when she cries. I follow about 20 seconds later.
I am not proud.
I left and cooled off while she calmed down. Then I went back, and very nicely told her we were going to try again. And this time I kept my temper. For all the good it did me, since she still wouldn't put the words together. Finally I called Rex in. He failed. He went for something to write with. That pretty much failed. In the end, he basically had to tell her what we wanted.
If you can run Rex out of patience, you have a talent. We just need to find a way to market it.
There are days when I would swear my kid is a genius. She has a memory that amazes me every day. She sometimes says things that I would swear she pulled out of thin air. Other days, I wonder if she was deprived of oxygen in the womb. She can be incredibly obtuse. She hates to do anything "hard," which basically means anything that doesn't come easily to her, physically or mentally. We thought she was stubborn, but then we met Katie.
I love my kid. Really truly love her. But goddamn I can't wait until someone else has to take care of a big part ofher education.
Posted by me at May 1, 2007 9:40 PM