Emily lately has been applying nicknames to people and at age 3, she doesn't have any understanding yet of what is appropriate and what is not in regards to nicknames. Unfortunately she has a father who is king of the nicknames: he loves to give them to everyone... well, everyone in this house anyway. I once counted how many nicknames he's had for me since we met and it was well past 10.
When Hope was a wee thing she was on the plump side, in a nice, chunky baby kind of way. John called her (among other things), Chubs. Emily started calling her Chubs, just once in a while, and while Hope was really small, it didn't seem to matter. Now it does. Especially since Emily has erstwhile applied it to both John and I on occasion.
So, last week when she started to call other kids at preschool "Piggy" (and she hasn't yet delved into Lord of the Flies, that'll be a whole other conversation), I had to have a talk with her about nicknames. She was telling me about preschool and said "so I talked to a little boy and I said Hi Piggy and I laughed and laughed. He's a nice boy." When I told her that wasn't a nice name, she burst into tears. Clearly she had meant it in the nicest possible way (I'm sure his mother, who apparently was with him, missed the subtle nuance of niceness she was trying to convey). We talked for a long time about names, what's nice, what isn't and that when you call a person Chubs or Piggy, it's like telling them that they're fat. She felt a lot better afterwards and I think I made her feel better. She didn't do anything wrong. She just didn't know. And the fact is, she's too young to give people nicknames. I hope I got that across.
Well, since then Chubs has been pulled out a couple of times at home. We keep on top of her about it and re-explain about the whole Chubs=fat thing. She gets it now. As you'll see.
So today after preschool she looks at me and says: "Look, it's magic!" PAUSE. "Magic means you're fat."
She outright insisted that it meant a person is fat, although we argued back and forth like an old married couple for several minutes. I think she won. I gave up.
Maybe this means I can conjure up dinner with a wave of this chocolate bar I'm eating.
1 comment:
OMG, that is too funny! She is so sweet! She obviously listened and tried really hard to understand the message you were giving her, except she translated it as "all nicknames mean you are fat".
Maybe just stick to her being too young to give out nicknames until she's 10? :)
Heidi
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