Jane had a turbulent on-again, off-again relationship with a boy in our ward. She would come home and tell us "Wiw (Will) says he's not gonna be my boyfwend" or "Wiw and me awe getting mawied." Of course Will liked to wrestle/rough-house more than Jane cared to and he didn't seem to realize that Jane was seriously busy picking colors for the wedding. So I ignored the budding romance for a while, but when the drama continued for more than a month, I decided to change my approach.
I began to tell Jane that she couldn't be Will's girlfriend because she was my girlfriend. For the first week or so she would laugh and correct me "no dad! Wiw is my boyfwend." But soon I began making some headway and she finally latched onto the idea (... funny how girls can be so much like their mothers sometimes). So this seemed to alleviate the tension with Will's apparent fickle heart. However, it also introduced some unexpected problems. First off, all the discussion of girlfriends and boyfriends began to get Jane a bit muddled. And the terms "boyfwend" and "gillfwend" began to pop up in the most unexpected places. "No Emma ... dad is my gillfwend, not you gillfwend." I'll admit that the new title of "gillfwend" did feel a tad emasculating for me, but it provided hours of really enjoyable verbal tennis between Emma and Jane over whether I was a girlfriend or a boyfriend and whether I was Jane's or Emma's or Mom's or perhaps the boyfriend of some arbitrary subset of the three.
We also have been working on taking each of the kids out on what we call "dates." This is supposed to be a regular opportunity to spend some fun one-on-one time with each child individually. So one Saturday after I took Gabe out on a "date", Jane asked "Awe we going on our date tomowow?" I said "Yeah ... it's called church" ... so then she asks "will you kiss me on our date" and in an attempt to just finish off bedtime I said "sure." So then she asks "And you will not kiss mom while we awe at chuwch?" I still have no clue how to respond to that.
Anyway ... long story, a little less long ... We have evolved to the point where Jane, when she is feeling especially like being a gillfwend she will start shimmying her shoulders at me and looking at me with these half closed eyes and kind of a pouty little face. It is all kind of disturbing so I have told her not to do that, in fact I told her that when she looks like that at me she kind of scares me. So now she has started doing it to scare me and she tries to chase me around the house like that. So today when I came into the girls room to wake them up Jane immediately starts trying to scare me with her odd little "bedroom eyes." So I finally got it on camera. Honestly ... wouldn't it kind of scare you too?
1 comment:
Perhaps it is time to pull out the For Strength of Youth pamphlet and break it to Jane (gently) that there is no dating before 16 . . . Seriously, Jane sounds like a lot of fun. Perhaps she was could introduce her to my Harrison? (he's 5 and currently not seeing anyone.)
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