Magic

I watched my wife work magic this morning. Seriously, it was magic.

See, our three year old is pretty picky about what he wears, for example, he must wear brown shorts and will only wear certain t-shirts.

This morning, being the morn o' laundry, everything he wanted to wear was dirty. As I pulled shirt after shirt from his drawer only to have him reject them, I came to a point and a shirt which I was ready to force onto him if negotiation did not work. This particular shirt is basically a striped t-shirt, the lines are made up of different bugs. " Look! this shirt has bugs on it! isn't that cool! He was mildly interested. I had his attention but not enough to have him put the shirt on. Then my wife got into the act.

"What kinds of bugs are on your shirt?" she said. He quickly identified a spider. She found a beetle. "hey, if you put this on I will read you the poem about Alexander Beetle."
He was skeptical about the shirt at this point but definitely wanted to hear the poem, so she gave him the first line " I found a little Beetle, so that beetle was his name, And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same." He put the shirt on and in no time she was reading to him from A.A. Milne's book.

Had it been me dealing with him, there would have been a struggle, some tears and eventual acceptance of defeat. Usually that means the kid wears the shirt and me being frustrated that he does not see that a shirt is just a shirt...."so put it on." My wife on the other hand, and this by the way is not the first time I have seen her do this type of engagement, actually made him interested in it.