Tonight, my little clever girl was sitting in her ballet pink leotard and tights telling me how she needed to start taking ballet again so she could be in The Nutcracker next Christmas. She knows exactly which characters she wants to be. “The little girls wearing tutus carrying baby dolls, not the little girls that do yoga.”
It was bedtime, so I said, “Let’s clean up your nursery before bed.”
Annabelle: “Mom, I don’t really like to clean up. It’s not very much fun.”
Me: “Well, you have to make it fun. Don’t you remember Mary Poppins? In every task that must be done, there is an element of fun, just find the fun and snap! The job’s a game!”
Annabelle: “Well, Mom, I’m not magic, I don’t know how to snap!”
Me: “You certainly are magic! And you don’t have to snap to clean your room, you just have to sing.”
(I start singing A Spoonful of Sugar while dancing to put the toys away.)Annabelle thinks for a minute and then she starts singing along with me while dancing to put her toys away. She even arranges her Barbies in a neat pile covered with a silver string of mardi gras beads so they look extra beautiful.
Me: “See, isn’t this fun?”
Annabelle: “Yes! Let’s go clean up the bathroom too!”She happily brushes her teeth, cleans up the stack of envelopes I’d left all over the floor of the powder room, and climbs into bed. Amazing!! (I’m going to play Mary Poppins more often.)
Earlier today, we were eating carrots and she asked me why carrots were good for her eyes. I told her they were filled with Vitamin A and besides, you never see rabbits wearing glasses. (This is something my mother used to tell me which drove me crazy.)She was silent, chewing her carrots and thinking, and she finally said, “What about the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. He wears glasses.”She’s seen about fifteen minutes of that movie six months ago.I couldn’t argue with that reasoning. I just pointed out that that rabbit lived in a movie and she would never see a rabbit out in the flowers wearing glasses.
I’m not sure she believed me. But a spoonful of sugar should fix that! Magic everywhere!
