Travelingjenny

Every day when we arrive home after picking Gracie up from school, the girls entertain themselves while I fix lunch. For some reason, they always play together well at this time of day, and I often delay lunch just because I hate to interrupt them. So today, while they were drawing pictures – with markers – I took advantage of their supposed good, harmonious behavior to run upstairs and check my email. What was I thinking? After a couple of minutes, Gracie yelled, “Mom! You have to come here! Tess is doing something very unkind!” Due to her choice of the word “unkind,” I assumed – wrongly – that Tess was merely drawing on Gracie’s paper, so I took my time going downstairs. And when I did, I was surprised to see that sweet, good little Tess had drawn on the wall and kitchen island with marker. She squealed when she saw me, as if she had discovered the most fun and amazing activity ever, and surely I would be proud of her. I have to admit that I did laugh before I realized that was not the appropriate response, and then I spoke to her in a stern voice and gave her a time-out in her crib. Tess was very upset about this, as she has seen her sister get countless time-outs (“Dodo bad!”) and she understood that this was not good at all. As I brought her back downstairs after her very first time out, she said, “Me bad.” And my heart broke a little.