While I lay in bed at the end of the day, I heard Sophie’s bath running as Mommy tried to talk her into taking one. This is what I heard from the other room:
Sophie: I don’t need a bath! I’m a superhero!
Mommy: You should be Bubble Bath Girl! You can kill monsters with bubbles!
Sophie: No!Mommy: Look how many bubbles you can kill monsters with!
(long beat)
Sophie: One… two…
Longest… bath… ever.
Sophie is learning higher reasoning, apparently. After calling Mommy and talking for a while, she said goodbye and hung up the phone. When Grandma asked to talk, Sophie explained the situation:
Sophie: Mommy hung up. She doesn’t want to talk to you.
Grandma: Why doesn’t she want to talk to me?
Sophie: Because then I’d have to eat before I play.
Naturally, if Mommy got involved, Sophie would have to follow her usual rules, even under Grandma’s care. She gets a lot of credit for reasoning that out, but she still needs to work a bit on subterfuge.
When I first learned to program in Microsoft’s QBASIC language, one of the first things I did was add a cheat code to the Nibbles game that would let my snake could pass through walls.
Sophie, at age three, prefers the Mickey Mouse game to Nibbles, but her instincts are the same. One of her games asks her to find all the shapes in a cartoon scene. First, find all the squares! Windows, sidewalk squares, fences, and even a suspiciously square tree are all valid choices. Each one she clicks gets a colorful outline and some praise from Minnie Mouse.
She’s learned, however, that pressing the “I” key offers a “Hint” by outlining one of the shapes not yet found. So how does she play now? The moment she’s asked to find squares, she just holds “I” until they’re all highlighted and the game is over!
What I want to know most is: how did she figure that out in the first place?
On our way home from the airport, Sophie found an opportunity to be cute. Seeing a school bus — one of her favorite things — she launched into a detailed explanation of how she had to go to school, and was going to be late. Halfway through, we had this exchange:
Sophie: I’m going to school!
Mommy: (playfully) Are you going to go away and never come back?
Sophie: (jubilantly) Yep! And I’m not gonna miss you guys!
She later conceded she might start missing us tomorrow, but definitely not today.
Sophie likes the arcade games at Chuck E. Cheese — especially the kind that win her tickets so she can get prizes. Admittedly, she hasn’t yet developed much strategy for these games. If she gets the skee ball all the way up the ramp (i.e., into the gutter) she gleefully rips off her single consolation ticket with the same elation as the kid who just hit the 100-ticket jackpot on a neighboring game.
Fortunately, she also doesn’t covet the 3,000 ticket prizes like older kids (and grown ups) do. She’s entirely content with a bouncy ball, a little plastic lizard figurine, or even a Tic-Tac-Toe game. (She doesn’t know how to play yet, but she really likes the shape of a Tic-Tac-Toe game.)
When we went just after her third birthday, she picked out a nice collection of prizes — a tiny slinky, two bouncy balls, and some stickers, to start.
The woman (high school girl?) giving out the prizes was very friendly.
Woman: You have 20 tickets left. What else would you like to get?
Sophie: Umm… an Orca!Woman: (beat) A what?
Sophie: Orca!Woman: …
Mommy: Fish.
Woman: Oh!
You know that show, Are you smarter than a fifth grader? I have a pitch for a version where adults compete against Sophie.
Even in a contest of Wicked trivia, where I should be an expert, I’ve now learned that Sophie knows more of the lyrics to Wicked than I do. She’s unstoppable!
Walking down the streets of Montpelier this afternoon, with Sophie carrying an umbrella (a device she loves to use even when there’s no realistic chance of rain, much less actual rain), we sloshed through some puddles of melted snow and mud.
At one point, Sophie tripped and fell, planting her hands in a particularly messy patch of mud. Unhurt but messy, she ran to me with horror in her eyes and showed me her hands.
Ben: Ooh, yuck! I bet Mommy has a tissue you can use to clean up.
Sophie: No! I wanna use your pants!
I guess I can’t complain too much when I’ve been known to do the same thing.
Sophie was very excited to go ice skating today. She first mentioned it weeks ago with high excitement and made me promise we’d go skating during our Christmas visit.
A few days later she realized she didn’t own any skates and called, greatly upset, to make me promise we’d get her some from the “store.”
This remained a major topic of conversation through this morning, when we got out to Cairns Arena in Burlington. We rented skates, got everybody laced up, and headed to the ice. Sophie walked with us, balancing somewhat precariously on her blades, and eagerly stepped out onto the rink, holding our hands. Immediately, she spun around in horror and announced:
It’s slippery!
We insisted she try it anyway (despite the unexpected slipperiness), holding the wall tightly, and holding our hands, but she burst into tears, and skated with us only grudgingly.
After a while she discovered (by chance) that falling wasn’t fatal, and so made her primary purpose on the ice to fall. Until she fell a bit too hard, and thereafter refused to set foot on the ice again, instead watching us from the sidelines.
Her summary of the event, recounted to anybody who asks anything about skating is simply:
It was slippery! I fell on my butt.
My stocking this Christmas included some scratch-off lottery tickets. Of course, I asked Sophie to help me scratch them off.
Each time she uncovered a number with the edge of her penny she gleefully announced what number she found. Being three years old and being thus unable to read, she declared most of them were “eight.” I took the chance to point out the numbers’ correct names.
“That’s a five!” I’d say, after scratching off one of the “winning numbers” spaces. When she later uncovered a second five under “your numbers,” I was able to say, “That’s another five, just like this one here. See? Five… five!”
Attentive readers will at this point suspect that uncovering such matching numbers would indicate a winning ticket. I, at the time, didn’t even notice. The only point of having two identical numbers was to show Sophie what they looked like. Immediately after saying, “it’s just like this other five up here,” I announced to the other adults, “aww, no matches; this one’s a loser.”
They had to correct me. And then review all the other tickets we’d done.
(It only won $2, but I could as easily have been discarding a $2,000 game in favor of a reading lesson.)
The phone rings at 11:12. I answer.
Me: Hello.
Sophie: I’m going to see Santa.
Me: You’re going to see Santa again?
Sophie: Yeah! I’m going to see Santa and get presents!
Me: Ooooh, fun! Did you see Santa at the parade yesterday?
Sophie: Yeah! Okay, bye!
The call disconnects.
0 minutes, 35 seconds elapsed
Sophie: I need two puppies!
Mommy: Here’s one… two… three… four puppies!
(later)
Sophie: I need two puppies!
Mommy: I just got you four puppies. Take two out of those.
Sophie: Noooo!