Tattletale

“MOMMY! HE’S TOUCHING THAT AGAIN!”

Usually, when Ane is about to tattle on Tad, it starts out with a gut-wrenching, ear-splittingly loud “MOMMY.” Or, recently, “MOTHER.” She has started calling me “Mother” and I’m not quite sure why, though I do find it amusing.

More often than not, her tattling is actually something I do need to know about, but the problem is that she doesn’t tell me what Tad is really doing. For example, she once tattled, “He’s putting that on top of that again!”

“What?”

“He’s putting that on top of that!”

“What is ‘that,’ Ane?”

“THAT!”

I finally got in the room to discover that Tad had his large dump truck on the coffee table in the living room – a no-no, but hardly a dramatic emergency or screaming offense. “Ane,” I began, exasperated, “when I ask you what Tad is doing, you have to tell me EXACTLY what is going on. ‘That’ doesn’t tell me anything. You’ve got to be specific.”

As soon as that word left my mouth, I knew I’d lost her. But then she nodded very seriously at me. “Okay, Mommy. I’ll try to be more pacific.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 2:37 am and is filed under Children, Mommyhood.
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