LouLa has been really into making posters, writing notes, drawing pictures, and the like for some time. She’ll do “math” and “spelling” at daycare and brings home paper with letters and numbers written on them.
Tonight I picked her up and she had an amazing picture that she drew. She showed the fence that separates our house from our neighbors, the two of us (I have curly hair, she has straight), and our three cats. Two of the cats are orange (BooBoo and George) with one obviously bigger than the other (BooBoo). The other cat is black (Knock-Knock). She also wrote the words “cat”, “Mom”, and “Boo Boo.” It’s precious and it’s the kind of thing that I want to keep forever.
She initially wanted to hang up the poster around town. She said she would put a map on the back of it and people would come to our house with it. We pointed out that it might not be safe to have strangers come to our house.
Plan B: To take the poster and put it on our neighbor’s porch and then sneak away and they would find it and bring it to our house.
We pointed out that it’s cold (“I can handle the cold!”) and dark (“I can see in the dark!”). We tried to get her to agree to send it to grandparents. I even offered to take it with me this evening when I got my haircut. Nope, she desperately wants to go out and secretly deliver this poster/note to our neighbors. She obviously is unaware that we barely tolerate our neighbors and aren’t really friendly with them. Not the kind of friendly that they would think it was cute that the 4.5 year old neighbor gave them an amazing drawing she made. They wouldn’t get it, and, to make matters worse, I wouldn’t get that drawing back.
We attempted to negotiate and make her see things our way. She’s strong-willed, that’s for sure. She also attempted to get us to see it her way. I’m pretty strong-willed, myself.
In the end, we went with a simple, “No.” There was less fussing than I expected, but the night is still young.
