“Mommy, why is she saying ‘I’m so fancy,” Emma asks from
the backseat.
“Uh….she thinks she’s fancy,” I leaned over and changed the
radio station. Yes, I was listening to
Iggy Azalea’s ‘I’m So Fancy,’ in the car with my children. Is that so wrong? It probably is.
“Why is she saying I-G-G-Y?” Emma asks a moment later.
For that one I really had no answer.
Just because I had kids doesn’t mean my love for bad pop
music has gone away. I’ve always said the
day I hear, ‘Hey baby drop it to the floor,’ from the backseat is the day that
I will stop.
So that basically happened.
I have never heard Scott giggle so much. Later on he told me that I totally deserved
that line of questioning.
I did.
Emma is in that ‘questioning stage.’ Every conversation is a litany of
‘whys.’ She asks me stuff that I know
that she knows the answer to. Which is
frustrating. Or the exact same ‘why’
question that she has been asking for the past several days. I often get hung up on some of the ‘whys,’
when I know that the true answer to what she is asking is a concept that is way
too large for her to understand. I know
that it is developmental, and I take deep breaths and try to not let the
constant ‘whys’ get under my skin.
I can remember asking ‘whys’ all the time as a child. I remember wanting to know the deeper
meaning, why did they do that in the story?
What was their motivation? What
were they thinking? I just wanted MORE.
So I Googled it. ‘Why
do children ask so many questions?’ I
wanted to know what developmental function was driving a child’s need to constantly
pepper you with questions. I was given a
few links to question and answer forums.
Quite a few of them said some version of ‘kids don’t know much and
that’s the only way they have to gain knowledge.’ I thought that was a bit arrogant and
weak. Kids know a lot, they have lots of
ways to gain knowledge (sight, touch, taste, observations, etc.), and, I mean,
I know I am a god of knowledge, but I don’t know everything. I clicked enough to find this webpage. I do know what it feels like to answer a
child and receive a deflated response from them. I
guess I had thought that was because the answer wasn’t quite as magical as they
thought it would be. I liked the thought
that they are just trying to engage you in conversation and they don’t have a
better way of going about it. I’ve tried
just exploring her questions with her, especially when she asks the same question
over and over again. I know that child
has a mind like a steel trap, I am pretty sure that she didn’t forget the
former answer.
But it remains annoying.
Which is hard. Because it’s just
a stage. I don’t want her to internalize
my annoyance and begin to believe that she is annoying. She is just four, and four year olds do
annoying things. The other day I had
about quite enough of it, I turn to her and say,
“Why are you asking me so many questions?”
“Because I just don’t know what is going on all the time,”
she responded.
There you have it.
From the mouths of babes.
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