Those Darn Kids

Nathan and I have been talking recently about how difficult it is to parent Ellie when she has the intellect of a 6 year old but the emotional maturity of, well, the 4 year old that she is. She constantly surprises us with what she knows and remembers:

• We were picking out a Bible story the other night and I started near the front, suggesting stories about Moses. She said, "No, I want something from the New Testament." New Testament?? Where did she learn what that was? I asked her what it was and she said, "It's the part about Jesus." Not bad.
• Yesterday our tour books about Chile arrived and Nathan was showing them to the kids. Ellie recognized pictures of Easter Island and said that she had seen similar photos of the statues on the islands at the Natural History Museum in DC over the summer. Wow. Even I don't remember that.
• Ellie just showed me how she hung her animals from the stair railings in our house. She explained to me that they are "bat kids" and they are sleeping upside-down like bats.

Now, the trick though, is that she still acts like a 4 year old. She fights with Ben, sometimes refuses to get dressed, doesn't always share, etc. But she sees right past all the traditional parenting tricks. When we give her two choices, rather than choosing between them, she wants to come up with other options she likes better. When we explain that she can't do something because "that's the rule" she'll say, "But you can take the rule away, Daddy." Argh. I guess we should count ourselves lucky to have such problems!

Ben has become incredibly verbal recently and loves to tell stories and chatter away. Despite the fact that we have no toy guns in the house and don't let Ben play violent games, he still turns mailing tubes into swords and legos into guns. He has this plastic stick--I think from either curtains or a play tent--that he uses as a sword, so one night at bed time I knighted him "Sir Ben" with the sword. Ellie wanted to be knighted as a Queen, but I explained I couldn't knight her into being a queen, though she could be "Lady Ellie." She said she wanted to be a knight like Ben, so I thought "Why not?" and knighted her "Sir Ellie." Then, in the middle of the night, Ben starts calling out for me. I somehow convinced Nathan that he should go check on him instead, but Nathan came back saying that Ben wanted only me. When I got into the room, Ben said, "I don't want to be Sir Ben anymore--I just want to be Ben." Aww. So I de-commissioned him on the spot.

Ben also seems to be fixated on talking about killing people. He tends to be very thorough when he gets angry, and will say something like "I'm going to kill you and put you in jail!" Wow--to have even your corpse imprisoned, that's harsh. He also has picked up the bad habit of calling things "stupid". His teachers tell us that other kids (especially boys) in his class do these things and that is where he is getting it from. So we try to have contests to come up with more creative insults and expressions of anger, like "I'm so angry I'm going to make you take a bath in mud!" He dissolves into laughter when we come up with these. His favorite insult for a long time was "You silly old cinnamon roll" though recently he has fallen back on a variation of a classic--"Silly poohpooh mouth boy". This morning, "You silly old wet noodle" was a hit, and Ben loved his latest creation--"silly poohpooh mouth noodle".