Bath Time
Tonight was bath night and as usual the four children were divided among two bath tubs, the one in the master bath and the one in the upstairs hallway. Joseph and Michael shared the hallway bath and Matthew and Rose got to use the big bath tub in the Master Bedroom. Everything was normal, they were loud and playful with smidgens of arguments over who got to play with what toy, nothing out of the ordinary. Then suddenly, while I was checking on the boys in the hall bath, Matthew starts wailing away.
I ran to see what had happened and there he was sitting in the bath tub, with a hand over his eye, crying.
“Matthew?” I asked, “What happened?” I couldn’t get an answer. He was crying, and rubbing it. Every time I tried to look at it he pulled away and rubbed it more.
“Matthew hurt himself,” Rose volunteered.
“How?” I asked.
“He hurt his eye!”
“How?” I asked again.
“He hit it!”
“With what?”
“My hand.”
I looked at her sternly. “You hit Matthew in the eye?”
“Umm, oh no… he fell down.”
“ROSE HIT MY EYE!” Matthew yelled in between sobs.
It was over a toy that Matthew refused to share. So, I had to discipline my sweet, angel faced daughter and educate her, again, on how she’s much older than her little brother and that hitting him was not an option. I also told her that someday Matthew was gonna be bigger than she was and he would remember all the times she hit him.
She was nice to him for the rest of the evening.
“… hit his eye with my hand”
it’s the universal excuse between children.
Good way of showing her how to think outside the box!
DJ: She has nooo problem with thinking outside the box.
This is eerily like an exchange with my daughter Melody, except without a guilty sibling.
“Did you just hit yourself in the eye?”
“No.”
“So what happened?”
“I poked myself.”
“In the eye?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t hit yourself?”
“I told you that!”