I was over at Horatio and Nises' home with my grandson Boo and they had not yet got their tree up, not from lack of trying, one tree had been up for a brief ten or so minutes before their Rottweiler(named Meat, fierce name for a marshmallow) managed to break it. Nise was headed out the door to work in the wonderful world of retail shopping at Christmas time and so Horatio had orders to get a different tree and get it up or else the spirit of his wife's anger was going to visit him. Apparently this threat works at their house, Nise must have a better mad face than I do, so Horatio promptly got the tree up from the basement storage and plopped the box in the front room of their house. Nise left for work satisfied that the tree would be taken care of.
Boo who had been playing around the house was impatiently waiting for something to happen, Horatio didn't seem to be in a hurry to get going and so with my three year old helper in tow I began to put the tree together. While I was sorting the branches into the correct piles, Boo was happily rearranging the branches behind me so that what we ended up with was chaos. Horatio finally took pity on me and came out and between the two of us we got the tree up and all the branches into their proper place. While they had perfectly good ornaments and Boo had already starting decorating the tree, Horatio decided they needed a new "theme" and decided we needed to go to the local Walmart to purchase decorations. We took my car since I have the car seat and away we went.
Boo is very three, he wants to do everything his way and only his way, he refuses to sit in the grocery cart, and wants to touch, EVERYTHING. So imagine my surprise when Horatio placed him in the cart, I expected objections, there were none, Boo sat happily as long as Horatio pushed the cart, up one aisle and down the next and there he sat, not pulling stuff into the cart, not kicking the cart just to make noise, not trying to climb out, just sitting and chatting to Horatio in secret boy language. I was stunned.
Everything was going so well, Horatio had decided on his theme, blue and silver and Boo was busy pointing out all the ornaments, we were making record time. That was when I spotted the tree skirts, and decided that the theme required a beautiful silver, glittered skirt to finish it off, I proudly took it over to place in the cart and that is when things started to change. You knew it couldn't last.
"What's that", asked Boo, "A tree skirt. It goes under the tree" I replied. Promptly Boo disagreed, "NO its not! Its my dress". I learned a long time ago that you can't win an argument with a three year old and that sometimes it isn't worth it to try, so I agreed it was indeed his dress and we would put it on when we got back to the house.
Once back to the house Boo insisted that we find his dress and so we put it on and he danced happily around playing in his dress until we had the tree decorated. "Okay Boo, time to put the dress on the tree", said I, hoping beyond hope a battle wasn't brewing. I was wrong of course, I had to pry it off his shoulders to place it around the tree and three year olds have long memories, for weeks he asked where it went. I finally bought him two "dresses" of his own. He loves them but he still wants his dress back, the shiny silver twirly cape we placed under the tree.
No comments:
Post a Comment