Ethan has been in this 'Not me!' phase for quite some time. Not all the time, but there are situations when he knows you are going to point the finger at him (or at least ostentatiously to check with him) or start blaming him and he'll say he didn't do it, it's not him, it's Jethro etc. Sometimes we choose to believe him, sometimes it is quite obvious he's not telling the truth, like yesterday. And it was quite hilarious.
On certain days we have dinners at home instead of going to the grandparents' place. For the dinner yesterday, I had used some pork ribs to boil some soup (old habits die hard) and given him a couple of the pork ribs. They are his favourites, among other junks like ice cream, fried chicken, crackers etc.
Our dining table is the kind that has a second level under the table top (glass surfaces and chrome legs, bought at the time when we had no kids and just wanted the furniture to match the stainless steel window grills the previous owner left us). After awhile, I noticed the pork rib bone which was initially placed on the table top having been transported to the lower level. So I asked Ethan, "Why did you put the bone there? It'll make it dirty." Ethan's immediate reply was, "I didn't put it there! It flew by itself!"
The answer was so incredulous I had to laugh, when usually I try to keep a straight face to his fanciful reasons. Jianming tried to hide his amusement as he asked him, "And how does it fly it there? How can it fly by itself?"
"The wind blew it..." followed by some action sounds and gestures showing how the bone could have been blown by the wind and 'moved' from the upper surface to the lower surface.
This brings to mind one book I read about child development. The author said that 'children who cannot conceive of the contents of the mind of another cannot really be said to be lying. They are probably describing the situation as they wish it had occurred... “2 and 3 years olds are such terrible liars, they hardly qualify as liars at all…"' She gave the age when children generally are truly lying (what an oxymoron) at about 5 or 6. So we are probably getting a preview of Ethan's lies now. However, the reason given was so highly improbable that I feel we cannot really begin disciplining dishonesty yet.
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2 comments:
heheee he's v imaginative! hmm does he thk u're gonna buy his argument tt it flew there, or does he truly really believed tt it did? a child's mind is so fascinating!
din manage to meet u up on 5 mar, n this week was down cos i caught ah B's fever (grrrr i get watever she gets #^@#&!@^#), hoping to meet up end march, sms u again!
Ha ha, I don't know. I think both. he's naive enough for that!
yup, hope to meet up soon and glad to know both of u are getting better. It's so easy to catch the children's flu because u are always the one attending to them. Whenever E or J has flu or cold, I live in 'fear'. :p
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