It’s (almost) all fun and games

Sugar and spice and everything nice, right?

Well, last week, my two precious ones were playing with Amma Jennie’s reading glasses, a favorite pastime of theirs in the pretend world of reading books. During this brief “study session,” Jennie decided to empty the kitchen peelings bowl in the outside compost pile. She was gone maybe a minute. When she returned, the girls were in the bathroom/laundry, with the door closed, laughing and giggling. The last time that happened, they were applying skin cream to their hair, which always ends up a gooey mess. But this time, they took it to the next level and flushed the reading glasses down the toilet. For good measure, they also deposited a can of tuna fish and a can of whipped cream in the dryer.

What can you do? They’re so young! Punishment is out of the question.

But they instinctually knew they had done something bad, most likely by reading the body language and voice tone of Amma, which was sweet with a slight underlying current of knowing that a plumber was most likely in our future. We all know those words when faced with a sewer-line problem. The oldest granddaughter, Addie, is a little quicker on the uptake vis-vis her cousin, so she quickly pointed to her younger co-conspirator and reported, “Rockie did it.”
 
The “toilet doctor” couldn’t come for a few days. When he arrived, only Rockie was with us, as Addie had taken sick. The young plumber unraveled his snake contraption and began the process of clearing the drain. Rockie looked on inquisitively and then offered the only comment that made sense to her, “Addie did it.”

Such is the beauty and innocence of childhood.