Sozlet stories

Hehe massively overworked but having fun all the same! We have a saying in Oxford that there is work, play and sleep.... and you can only ever do 3!! Doesn't help that I had 6 weeks of tonsilitus over the vac and came back already shattered!!

And I agree with the sweet mom / sweet kid thing hehe

Tonsillitis, eek!

Sorry you're overworked, happy to see you when you're here.

Another sozlet drawing:



The heart is because the aliens (from different planets) love each other though they haven't realized it quite yet...

Soz--

Your daughter is very lucky not to have been hatched by literal minded parents.

You are all delightful.

I was helping her get ready this morning and she was in one of those sloooowwww moods. Everything was taking absolutely forever. She rejected the underwear I supplied as too big, dithered forever about which ones she DID want to wear, and then put the selected pair on backwards (sloooowwwly) and complained about how they didn't fit, then slooooowly noticed they were backwards.

I stepped in saying, "I've been trying to be patient, but I've just about lost my patience" and helped her out of the undies and back in, the right way.

As I was doing so, she mused, "Ya know, when my patience[patients] are trying to get loose, I just lock the door in my brain, and then they can't get out! That's what I do." (The last in a "Not that I'd presume to advise, but my way is obviously better" tone.)

How nice that she lived to tell the tale.

I hate molasses mornings. Hate 'em.

Molasses mornings, exactly.

Yes, they make me batty.

molasses morning - what a wonderful phrase



the Christmas pudding aliens are charming

Vivian--

Thanks for the kind words.

Things are getting interesting as she's writing more and more. I just flipped to the next week of my datebook and found that somebody had written on every day of next week, "GO TO ZOO."

E.G. bought her a scratch-off lottery ticket for a buck, and she won $10. So he collected that for her, to her great delight. She doesn't want to spend it, and has been treating the $10 bill like one of her baby dolls -- she made a little bed for it on her desk out of Kleenex, with a pillow and everything, and every now and then makes pronouncements like, "Oh, it's time for my money to have lunch!"

heh, she seems to know the value of money, soz. Not a bad thing to have an early handle on.

LOL!


Raising a right little capitalist there, you are ... fifteen years, she'll be a hardnosed investment banker, regaling her colleagues with this story.. ;-)

:-)

Oof, I'm in one of those ruts. Want to get back to this, so will start with something not particularly cute or funny, but interesting, I thought...

Sozlet's been going through some friend angst, has a few levels to it. Basically, a group of girls at her school are all kind of jockeying for position, and she's at the center of much of it (two of them want to be her "best friend"), though it's more complicated than that, too.

Anyway, last week was spring break, and we had several playdates. While her friend D was here (her thus-far best friend), D had a total scary meltdown, hysterical sobbing and screaming "SORRY!!!" in sozlet's face when her mom urged her to apologize, etc.

Sozlet was a bit shaken, but not too bad. We talked about it afterwards, and came up with (I don't remember who was first) the idea that D is nervous about starting kindergarten next year; she doesn't know where it will be, yet, except that it definitely won't be with sozlet (they live in another school district), and she's always been rather emotionally dependent on sozlet. Was relieved that sozlet would be in ballet with her, etc. So that seemed to fit with a certain control freak aspect that was evident at the playdate. (D = "If you go downstairs I won't be your friend anymore," etc.)

Anyway, it was an interesting conversation.

Today, they (sozlet and D) saw each other for the first time -- everything was fine. D apologized sincerely and of her own accord, sozlet had no hard feelings. What surprised me/ was interesting is that sozlet said that she'd talked to D about the whole kindergarten thing. It just never occurred to me, for some reason, that she would do that. I think of them as talking about Groovy Girls and who will be the mom when they play house, but part of this whole thing is that they're really maturing in terms of what a friendship means and how they communicate.

(The result of the conversation wasn't too ground-breaking -- D said "no, that's not it", and didn't want to talk about it further -- but still interesting, to me, that that was happening at all.)

Like mother, like daughter.

Girl politics can be very complicated.

What was D so sorry about anyway?

Wow. I love this thread. What a fascinating child you have.

Girl politics can be REALLY complicated!

Then there are the woman (mom) politics on top of that... (D's mom was just mortified, worried that we'd say D could never come over again, yadda yadda... all seems fine now though.)

The incident was one of those spiralling things. I had offered to watch both D and her little brother T, (usually just D comes over), and D wasn't happy about that because D wanted sozlet all to herself (while sozlet was happy to include T). So there was some disgruntlement from the start, and the "...or I won't be your friend anymore"-type stuff. (T came to get me and I went upstairs to find sozlet stuck at the top of the stairs because if she moved, D wouldn't be her friend anymore... eek.)

But things went basically fine until D's mom arrived to pick 'em up and it was time for clean-up, then there was some sort of power jockeying ("I'm in charge of clean-up!" "No, I am, it's my house!"), which culminated in D snatching a tablecloth they were vying to put on a table and throwing it angrily. D's mom (DM) took stock of the situation and thought it was time to get going. D went ballistic, and started yelling for her teddy bear. Sozlet offered her own teddy bear; D angrily swatted it away. DM started getting D ready to go -- socks, shoes, etc. D continued going ballistic. (This was when "SORRY!" was being aggressively yelled. )

Then they (D and DM) went off to get ready, while sozlet, T and I finished cleaning. T was playing with a little cheapo snowglobe of sozlet's and didn't want to give it up. When we got downstairs, where D and DM where wrapping up, sozlet said that T could keep it, stipulating that he had to share with D. That set off a new round of hysterics from D, culminating with something like, ""Nobody's keeping anything until [sozlet] DIES!"

That was the main thing. DM went ashen, apologized profusely to everyone (D wasn't having the apology business, she was still mid-tantrum), and hustled D outta there.

Whew.

But, again, everyone's over it now.

Lead-in to Woman Politics...

Ah, soz, I posted that before I read the whole thing. Wow. Interesting re the .... or else, a mode of manipulation children just pick up, I guess, and use themselves in inventive ways..

"...or I won't be your friend anymore" is pretty standard kid-language -- sozlet first encountered it from her friend Jack, and it was occasion for major, major angst. (But Jack -- and especially Jack's dad -- handled that one so well that it seems to have lost a good deal of its power. Well, it had the power to keep her pinned at the top of the stairs for a while, but she wasn't particularly angst-y about the fact of it.)

I vaguely remember one kid from my own childhood that liked to pull the "I won't be your friend" card, but he did it so often we'd just laugh. It was nothing a night's sleep didn't cure. If we needed him sooner, to fill in a yard-sports position or something, ice-cream or a candy bar would do the trick.