This is Ruby playing her favourite board game. It’s called kids on stage and its pretty much charades for children. And she loves it. She loves acting things out. She loves making people laugh. She loves dancing around. She’s quite good at the game. Her little scenes are usually well thought out and, when its her turn to guess at yours, she comes up with the answer quite quickly. Probably because she has just about memorized the deck of clue cards.
Today’s lesson in parenting for me is yet another in the set of double standards that children have for the world. I suppose we all carry around a set of double standards but when you are playing a game with kids, theirs seem to shine through in such a telling way. Charlotte, for example, is in the “I’m going to make up the rules as the game unfolds” stage of game playing. It’s a pretty natural stage of development, I suppose, although totally annoying. To be fair, I make it up as I go most days too. Anyways. Ruby is in a different spot. When it’s her turn to guess at the scene you are acting out, she can’t blurt a response out fast enough and likes to get it right on the first try. When it’s your turn to guess at her scenes, she likes you to make a few attempts before you get the answer “right”. So much so that today, if I said the right answer on my first try, she’d tell me I got it wrong, make me guess a whole bunch of other things, and then, when she had enough of my guessing, she would tell me it was the thing I had guessed the first time. Big grin on her face as she did it.
I won’t read too much into this little developmental nuance. I’m sure it is as normal as everything else. It was just a small observation from a Sunday afternoon that I thought I’d log for future reference.
3 Ginger Snaps 