Sharks, Option Zero, and Red

I like tutoring, especially when we get to do science projects. Currently the class is researching animals so I got to learn all sorts of things about animal feet. I kind of manipulated my tutee into choosing elephants and chameleons as two of her animals because I was curious about their feet. Is that selfish? Perhaps, but she is a cat-lover like me and had selected cats, tigers, and panthers as the animals whose feet she wanted to study and I thought that was kind of redundant. So I convinced her to lump cats together and research elephants and chameleons as well. Both have fascinating feet.

She had to find four “facts” about each animal’s feet. Unfortunately she had only grabbed cat books from the library so we ran out of resources pretty fast. Her teacher suggested that we turn to the internet to do further research and listed a bunch of lame websites at the bottom of the page. We went to a few of them but, as I said, they were lame…so I introduced my tutee to the world of Wikipedia. I hope her teacher doesn’t hate me. It’s just so convenient.

This week she had to choose one animal to write a report on and she chose dolphins.

Did you know that dolphins are born with whiskers?

Did you know that dolphins shed their skin constantly?

Did you know that dolphins only rest half of their brain at a time and can therefore sleep with one eye open, actively watching for danger?

I’m learning some crazy, crazy stuff about dolphins. I should have branched out from researching cats when I was younger. And I kind of wish that I could sleep with only half my brain at a time. Do you know how productive I would be if I were a dolphin? I’d be awesome.

See? Tutoring is fun!

Sometimes, though, I don’t like tutoring. Like everyday when we leave. As soon as I announce it’s time to leave Rachel throws a temper tantrum. Every single time.

Today was no different and she started yelling at me the minute I asked her to locate and put on her shoes. I don’t remember what she was yelling this time but she was getting rather sassy.

“Oh, you’re going to get in some trouble if you keep this up,” I warned her.

“Yeah,” said my tutee’s mom, “Yelling at Mommy is dangerous.”

Rachel scoffed and responded snarkily, “Well, no, because sharks are dangerous!”

She has a point. Sharks are dangerous.

She has this way of taking anything logical and twisting it until it makes almost no sense at all. That’s probably because she’s two.

A few nights ago Andrew was bargaining with her about bedtime. It was 11:30 PM and she was still awake in bed and being quite noisy, too.

He told her she had two options. Option one was to keep playing with the condition of absolute silence. Option two was to go to sleep immediately.

“I want option three!” she said without missing a beat, but after thinking for a few seconds she changed her mind, “Or better…I want option zero! Because that means no option, right?”

We’re really in for it with her.

Tonight she insisted that she needed socks—I don’t know why since it’s like 90 degrees—and was in a tizzy because she could only find one pink sock. After unsuccessfully trying to convince her that her feet wouldn’t get cold if she didn’t put socks on, I gave up and handed her a pair of red socks.

“I can’t wear those!” she wailed and cast them aside, “I can only wear pink socks! I can’t even wear red socks!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because,” Rachel sniffed, “I don’t like red because it makes my heart feel sad. Every colour makes my heart feel sad, except for pink.”

With much sweet-talking I was able to convince her to wear the socks and she’s currently in bed with red socks, five or six blankies, and probably twenty toys. What I want to know is how she got me from trying to talk her out of wearing socks to trying to talk her into wearing socks.

Who’s in control here, really?