Mommy Bloggers: Headstrong and Gung-ho

Last night, I wrangled my six-year-old daughter and five-year-old son into their beds and headed for the living room, with my three-year-old trailing behind me, brandishing her tattered copy of Goodnight Moon.

Sinking into the couch, I made my opening move. I sat her next to me and opened the cover of the book. She countered by kicking the book closed with her footie pajama clad foot. Aha!

Game on.

I trapped her flailing leg under my thigh, and flapped open the cover. She heaved her entire torso in my direction, freeing her leg and bellyflopping onto the book. She grunted with glee as I seized her around the middle and lifted her pinwheeling limbs high over head. "No, Mama! No, Mama! Nooooooo."

I took a heel to my forehead, and decided to get down to business. I settled her on my lap, her unruly hair tickling my chin as I trapped both her ankles between my thighs. With a quick whisper of "get your ear!" both her hands were instantly occupied, one thumb in her mouth, the other hand busily folding her ear into little packages. I opened the book and began.

"In the great green room..."

With a sucking noise, she yanked her thumb out of her mouth and yelled "dare were kittens!"

"Uh, yes. In the great green room, there was a telephone..."

"Kit. Tuns."

"Right. Kittens, too. In the great..."

"Meow." She began the pretend to smooth her whiskers.

"Do you want me to read Goodnight Moon tonight?"

"I kitten. Meow."

I closed the book and sighed. "Goodnight moon."

She sighed too, and patted the book cover. "Goodnight, kittens," she said, speaking around her thumb.

Then she pushed off my lap and jumped for half an hour on our mini-trampoline. Only then did she allow me to escort her back to her bed and tuck her in. When I turned off her light and said "Goodnight, kitty," she giggled and said "I not a kitty. I a telephone. Ring, ring."

That was a fairly typical exchange with any of my kids. We chose nice names for them, but I'm starting to think we could have named them by their attributes:

Headstrong, Gung-ho, and their little sister, Contrary.

Lately, life is like a choose-your-own-adventure story for these kids. Every option must be explored verbally and if possible, physically, before a path is selected. They have ideas, you see. About everything. And these ideas must be shared.

You can't just read a book. It must be acted out, and the plot altered to fit the whims of Headstrong, Gung-ho and Contrary. This spills over into their imaginative play, too. All three kids are 'set' players. They like the whole family together. But the roles of the individuals are constantly shifting as the game progresses. And in a particularly strange twist, they always add in narrative voice-overs.

Scene: 500 plastic dinosaurs are scattered across the furniture. The children are on their knees, moving the dinosaurs in jumpy motions across the room.

"Aaaaah! Sharp-tooth!"
"Quick! Run!"
"Oh no!"
"I don't want to get eaten!"
"Suddenly, the sky got dark, and the dinosaurs looked up at the sky." (said in a deep, narrator voice)
"I'm not going over there!'
"Let's get out of here!"
"As the dinosaurs came over the hill, they saw the safety of their valley, and they were happy." (narrator again)
"Yay! I'm so happy!'
"Me, too!"
"Me, three!"
"Yay!"

Do other kids play like this? I find it really bizarre that they have to set the scene and talk about the emotions and the weather as they play. They must have absorbed the flow of the stories we read and the television shows we watch, when they actually listened to them.

It can be frustrating, this constant redefining. I find myself getting impatient with the kids, demanding that they just "be normal" and "act normal" and "talk normal" and yet, the whole "normal" thing is something I can't define. I've been a weirdo my whole life. Why would my children even know what "normal" entails?

Listening to my parents talking about my own childhood, the stories and memories they share almost always focus on the silly or "abnormal" stuff that went on. I don't remember them saying "wow, you kids really were superstars at being polite at the dinner table!" No, I remember them saying "remember that time we had the blueberry pancake fight?"

I don't really want to squash the weirdness out of them, anyway. It is part of what defines them, and endears them to me in a way that "normal" behavior doesn't.

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Headstrong and Gung-ho

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