"I WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD!"

I got out in the garden a bit this morning -- picked the last of the beans and started digging up the bean plants. (You see, by about late July I'm usually so frustrated with the weeds and ugliness of my garden that I'm ready for fall so I can dig up all the annuals, move some perennials and have an idealized picture in my head of how much better my garden will look next year. Though, next year it never quite lives up to the picture, and I'm ready to start digging in July again!)

Yesterday, I found sidewalk chalk at Superstore for $0.94 for a big box of 40 (Crayola no less!). Madeline had drawn pictures and had got us to draw some pictures for her on the driveway last night while we were working in the front yard. She came into our bedroom just before 8am this morning announcing that she was ready "to go outside and draw more pictures". I held her off a bit so I could sleep in a bit, feed Luke, and get all of us fed and dressed. We were outside before 10am. I drew her a hopscotch game and she was quite content playing and drawing and jumping there for quite a while, until...

The heaven's opened, the wrath of God was poured down, and... one of her pieces of chalk broke. Now we've always known that Madeline is quite a particular little girl: Little People dolls must be facing a certain way, a while back she wouldn't eat burgers that we'd cut in half, even when she was just over one year old I remember VERY carefully opening a Nutrigrain bar for her in church, pleading with the Lord to help me not to break it as I was taking it out and for Madeline to hold it in the middle, not at the bottom, so that it wouldn't snap in half with the first bite and subsequently unleashing her fury. She just doesn't like things broken. I don't know how many bananas she has refused to eat because they broke in half. Now before you think we're some push-over parents who give in to our daughter's OCD tendencies, believe me when I say there has been much yelling and many tears over the broken articles and she has been forced to eat these things, and she is getting better. But what can I say, when you take after your father that much, what can we really expect of her?!

Meanwhile, back in the yard...Madeline comes to me very distressed and demanding that I fix the chalk. I explain to her that it can't be fixed. And try to make her feel better by saying, "now you have two pieces of chalk!!" Ya, that doesn't work. I was trying my best to ignore her and hope she'd get over it herself, but I seem to recall a lot of "but I really want you to fix it... but it needs to be fixed... but it wants to be fixed... can you fix it?" And then came the waterworks and the pent-up aggression. She started getting significantly more mad and I got significantly more irritated. Finally I said, "Madeline the chalk is broken. We can't fix it. That's just the way the world works." (You know, the usual lines that all two year olds understand!)

Then my daughter, who never ceases to amaze me, proceeded to say off and on for the next 10 minutes. "BUT I WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD!!" And I thought (and here comes the "hugs and learning"), what an idealistic little girl she is. (Of course, her mother did have great plans as a teenager to fix all of the world's problem's by "simply" converting Satan...) I was trying to think of the best way to explain the chalk thing to her, and give her a good life lesson at the same time. I told her that we couldn't change the fact that the chalk was broken, but that we could change how it made us feel. We could be happy about it, by saying that now we have two pieces of chalk. We could think about how the boys and girls in the hurricane didn't have any chalk right now, and how they'd be so happy to get a piece of chalk to draw with, even if it was broken.

Well, it didn't work. She still went on and on about the world "needing to be changed", that she wanted to change it. (And good for her!! ... really.) But this still didn't solve her crankiness over the broken chalk. So I resorted to the old, "if you don't stop about the chalk, I'll put it away". Still cranky. I asked her if she'd like me to draw her some new squares with the broken chalk. That seemed to appease her. Then a few minutes later she was yelling because she couldn't get the last piece of chalk in the box (because, of course, the broken piece was now taking up two spaces). Shortly after that, the mosquitos were "too bad" and she needed to go inside. Oh well, at least no more screaming about chalk and changing the world...

UPDATE: Madeline woke up from her nap while I was proof-reading this entry. I went in to change her diaper and I (who now officially hates Eric Clapton) started singing "If I could cha-a-ange the world". (You know because I was changing Madeline. That's the reason why Madeline at 18 months old knew the words to Bob Marley's song "Get up, Stand up" -- because I would sing the first few lines as I would "stand her up" on her change table after changing her. Anyway...) And then I realized my mistake. She started saying in her usual post-nap whiney voice, "I need to change the world by fixing my crayon". Then there was some mild crying and a bit of kicking when I tried to put her pants on. Luckily the threat of taking her "Pontoffel Pock and His Magic Piano" (Dr. Seuss) video away was enough to get her in full hysterics. So ya, just a typical day at the Vandersluys home... a bit of crying... too much idealism... and rhyming cartoons to make us feel better.