Still listening to the Wondermints, by the way. Damn fine music. Damn fine pop. Right now it’s “Fleur-de-Lis” from the Japanese import of their first album (I got it about two weeks before it was re-released in the US . . . would love to read the English liner notes . . . My Kanji isn’t exactly up to snuff.)
So, anyway I have an important question for all of you experienced parents out there. Is there a stage that starts, say at the age of eight, where a child feels the need to tell you everything in excruciating detail? And I mean excruciating detail.
Matilda seems to be going through this stage. It started innocently enough. We’d hear an inventory of her sock drawer. “I have a red pair, a blue pair, some with flowers and two mismatched. If I sort them by size . . .” But it has gotten increasingly worse in the last few weeks.
Yesterday, for example, I was finishing my dinner while she sat at the computer looking at the American Girl website on our new Kitchen computer. They’ve been running a contest where they give away a trip to Chicago every day. She’s been entering obsessively. At this time she has not won. This is painfully obvious to her. So painful, in fact, that she read me the name and location of each winner thus far.
“Rachael from Battle Creek, Minerva from Walnut Grove, Christina from Grover’s Corner, Edna from Winesburg, Ohio . . .” She read me a list of twenty names. And I listened like a good dad.
“Well honey, if we’re lucky maybe you’ll win too.”
“Sure,” she answered. “This is the order in which they won. Christina, Jennifer . . .”
And we went back through every excruciating name on the list.
This morning she not only read me the ingredients on the cereal box, but also her entire school lunch calendar for the month of October, our family calendar for the month of October and the five day weather forecast, broken down into daily segments, “And at drive time it will be partly cloudy and 58 . . .”
Mom finally came back into the room and saved me from the brain melting boredom. Matilda saw the fresh meat and started reciting the contents of her Halloween bag from the previous five years and catalogued every single costume she’s ever worn.
In recent days she’s recited the plot of every book she’s read, television shows she’s watched, the fantasy games she plays at lunch with her friends, each note on the piano, the songs she’s played on the piano in the past and the songs she wants to play on the piano, each item in the American Girl catalogue that she would like to save for (including a complex rubric for shipping costs based on a wide variety of possible combinations of items that all add up to the amount of money she has saved), what she ate for lunch, including a critique of the taste, the entire contents of her art box, how many pins it took her mom to pin up her Halloween costume, the friends she has that have the same name (“I know two Claires. One is Claire at my old school and the other is Clare at my new school. Claire at my old school spells her name C-L-A-I-R-E and Clare at my new school spells her name C-L-A-R-E. The new Clare has no “I” in her name and the old Claire does. That’s funny. What’s really weird is that Clare’s real name is Mary Clare, but she goes by Clare. Isn’t that funny? I know a Jessica from our old neighborhood . . .”)
My question is this: Does this phase end? How long does it last? Because, as much as I love this kid, it’s DRIVING ME NUTS. I don’t want to tell her that I don’t need to hear all these details because it may encourage her not to talk to me at all.
How do I handle this? My wife tells me she had this problem as a child and her mother gave her a tape recorder to talk to. That seemed to make everyone happy. But with my kid, I know that she’ll record all of her thoughts and then make us listen to them, rewinding periodically so we can hear the good parts over and over.
What should I do? Is this a case where I grin and bear it? Or do I explain to her, as Steve Martin did in Planes, Trains and Automobiles that,” Here's an idea: when you tell these little stories, have a point! It makes it SO much easier for the listener!"
I can’t do that. But I also fear that I’ve gone from having a smart little daughter to having Rain Daughter. “Yeah, definitely 250 toothpicks. Not my underwear. Whopner’s on at 4.”
I don’t know. But with her newfound interest in spewing out minutiae I think it may be time to get her a Blog.
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