8-Jul-08 - Conniving, Copycatting and Conversing

The fact is that Parker is a bit more devious than Liam. He pushes Liam's buttons subtly and silently and then sits back and watches the show. All day long, every day, what you hear from the next room is the absence of sound as Parker maneuvers Liam, and then the very audible sounds of Liam's reaction. "Momo!" Liam shriek-whines. "He won't..."

To put it differently, Liam is in a way more innocent than Parker. You do get plenty of table-turning, where Liam pulls one on his brother. But he tends to copy the methods Parker thinks up. His own style is more direct. It really cracked me up when we had all that fighting over the UPS truck the first day I brought the cars back. It was like watching a cartoon. One of them would see that the other had absentmindedly put the truck down and would tiptoe-dash with those springy, hunch-back steps of the caricatured thief to snatch it up. You could practically hear the little "dink dink dink" sound effect. When Parker did it, he just quietly took it into his own corner to play. When it was Liam doing the snatching, he absolutely could not sneak off with it. He would wrap his arms around it and hold it to his bosom in the caricatured pose, but he would swivel from Parker to me with a look of wild defiance that may as well have been a neon sign on his forehead: "I took it! I couldn't help myself! What are you going to do about it?"

I feel a little sorry for Liam, at the mercy of his brother as he is. Right at the moment he is getting the short end of the stick. But I cannot stand over Parker's shoulder all day to make sure he is playing fair, and I will not tolerate Liam's constantly running whining to Momo. It gets pretty comical sometimes. Liam breaks down and cries while playing with cars on the rug. "Momo, he's telling me what I don't want to hear!! I just don't want to hear things like that!!"

I pretty much tell Liam he has to find his own way of dealing with it. "I understand he is not always nice to you," I tell Liam, "and I can also understand if you feel like I'm not being fair. But sometimes I have to handle you differently from the way I handle Parker, and we are not going to have this whining." It is hard to know you are not being fair. But life is not fair, and who said parenting would not follow that model? Even though Liam is too young to understand it, there really are times when nipping one evil in the bud is more expedient than addressing the other evil that provoked it.

I have tried to help Liam by explaining how he can put a stop to Parker's teasing. Park only pushes buttons because he gets reliable results. "You just have to say, 'Oh, well...' and go do something else," I say, "and Parker will quickly get tired of trying to make you mad." But it's over his four-year-old head, naturally, and too much for his little four-year-old heart. He resorts to copycatting Parker's devious little pokes right back at him. But Liam is not subtle, and I catch him quicker. Poor guy!

Parker does do some copying of his own. "Why???" he whines whenever I say something. Two-and-a-half is just too young to start with the why questions, but his brother has shown him the proper way to behave. It's hard to tell how much he understands what he is asking. I think he has figured out that "why" is another way of asking "what are you doing?" But whether there is comprehension or not, believe me, anything Liam does Parker is capable of imitating with finesse.

One thing you've gotta hand Parker: he has mastered the art of conversation. At his age, Liam was far too busy doing things to converse about them. Parker, by the time he turned two, was initiating conversations like this:

"Da[dd]y?"
"Yes, Parker?"
"[What are you] Doing?"

"Da-y? Doing?" was heard forty times a day. Eventually this has progressed to "Daddy? Wha' y' doing?"

Outside on his bike-slash-imaginary-motored-vehicle, Liam will determine a new and better place for the ignition. "Parker!" he calls out. "Yes?!" Parker calls from ten yards down the sidewalk, where he is walking the toy lawnmower. "Look!" calls Liam. "This is where my key goes!" "Oh!" Parker calls back agreeably. Then, with a cheerful frown, "I don't see it!!" That's my little conversationalist.

He is poking his chin over the counter now, knowing that his breakfast is cooling, and asking, "Can I have dem oats?"

Liam is sitting down at the table, announcing, "Soon it's going to be time for bed." "It's only breakfast," I say. "We have to get through lunch and dinner before it's bedtime." "Yeeees," Liam says. "I know that. I'm just saying it's almost."