Some Captain Merriement
Jan. 18th, 2012 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danieldwilliamThe Captain has provided two moments of surreal merriment in as many days.
In recent weeks he has become very interested in water. He has always enjoyed baths and helping with the washing up. We’ve started taking him swimming and he now has access to the water play table at nursery. He’s all about water at the moment.
He’s not so keen on showers. He’ll come into the shower with either MLW or me occassionally and he tolerates them when we go swimming but he’s not a huge fan. Pretty much any other water source is of highest excellence.
The fortnight or so we’ve often found him sitting on the spare bed in his room looking up at the ceiling muttering to himself about water. MLW and I were a bit puzzled about his. Water from above happens in the shower or outside but not in his bedroom. I spent twenty minutes or so one bedtime asking him about it. He was adament. Water from the ceiling. No, he wouldn’t like a shower. He was too busy looking for water from the ceiling. Did he want to go outside? No, it was bedtime and time to look for water from the ceiling. He seemed more sad than anything that I didn’t understand. For a few moments I even began to wonder if he’d developed precognition and we were about to be flooded by our upstairs neighbours. (I blame watching Watership Down on the tele earlier.)
I was so puzzled by his behavour that I asked nursery if they had read any stories about a flood. No, they hadn’t. And then we looked up, at the large velux windows in the nursery ceiling where the rain would fall and turn into streaming water. On the ceiling.
If water happens on the ceiling of one nice, safe, happy place, why wouldn’t it happen on the ceiling of other nice, safe, happy, places.
His other moment of genius is about discipline.
The Captain is not allowed to climb onto the table. It is one of the rules.
Once saying No and explaining the rules and the reasons for them has failed our prefered method of discipline is to put the Captain on his back and repeat the rule and then let him get himself up from the floor. It worked very well with his older sister.
Over the weekend he was placed on his back for climbing on the table. Yesterday I got home from work and MLW told me that he had been climbing on the table again. He’d keep doing it despite being picked up and put back on the chair. He then climbed back onto the table, pointed at the floor and then asked to be put on his back on the floor. When he was he made the required sad and contrite face and then bounced off to do Captain business elsewhere.
The world inside the head of a small child must be as strange and wonderful as small children find the world.
In recent weeks he has become very interested in water. He has always enjoyed baths and helping with the washing up. We’ve started taking him swimming and he now has access to the water play table at nursery. He’s all about water at the moment.
He’s not so keen on showers. He’ll come into the shower with either MLW or me occassionally and he tolerates them when we go swimming but he’s not a huge fan. Pretty much any other water source is of highest excellence.
The fortnight or so we’ve often found him sitting on the spare bed in his room looking up at the ceiling muttering to himself about water. MLW and I were a bit puzzled about his. Water from above happens in the shower or outside but not in his bedroom. I spent twenty minutes or so one bedtime asking him about it. He was adament. Water from the ceiling. No, he wouldn’t like a shower. He was too busy looking for water from the ceiling. Did he want to go outside? No, it was bedtime and time to look for water from the ceiling. He seemed more sad than anything that I didn’t understand. For a few moments I even began to wonder if he’d developed precognition and we were about to be flooded by our upstairs neighbours. (I blame watching Watership Down on the tele earlier.)
I was so puzzled by his behavour that I asked nursery if they had read any stories about a flood. No, they hadn’t. And then we looked up, at the large velux windows in the nursery ceiling where the rain would fall and turn into streaming water. On the ceiling.
If water happens on the ceiling of one nice, safe, happy place, why wouldn’t it happen on the ceiling of other nice, safe, happy, places.
His other moment of genius is about discipline.
The Captain is not allowed to climb onto the table. It is one of the rules.
Once saying No and explaining the rules and the reasons for them has failed our prefered method of discipline is to put the Captain on his back and repeat the rule and then let him get himself up from the floor. It worked very well with his older sister.
Over the weekend he was placed on his back for climbing on the table. Yesterday I got home from work and MLW told me that he had been climbing on the table again. He’d keep doing it despite being picked up and put back on the chair. He then climbed back onto the table, pointed at the floor and then asked to be put on his back on the floor. When he was he made the required sad and contrite face and then bounced off to do Captain business elsewhere.
The world inside the head of a small child must be as strange and wonderful as small children find the world.
