Daily Herald | Posted: Tuesday, November 4, 2008 11:00 pm
No election coverage in this column: Instead of telling you how my wife spent Tuesday morning trying to get me to tell her how to vote, I'll tell you about the craftiness of a 2-year-old bent on consuming Halloween candy. This is not unlike the craftiness of a politician trying to win votes, but that's for another column.
You see, the kid saw where my wife hid the Halloween candy. The treats are in a bucket with black cats on it, so she calls them "kitty snacks." Each times she passes the closet where they are stashed, she asks for kitty snacks. The answer, at 7:30 a.m., before she has had any breakfast, is no. "Please, Dada." No. Then there's a pause.
This pause is where the strategy is crafted. In the blink of an eye, the 2-year-old, who cannot use the toilet or lick the Cheetos dust off her fingers, comes up with a way to get her father to give her candy. I was previously unaware that she was capable of such high-level thinking.
She begins waving to the spot where the candy is hidden, and says "Hi, kitty snack." I, the unsuspecting dolt who thinks everything his daughter does is cute, ask if she wants to just say hi to the candy. "Yeah, yeah," she repeats. I pull the candy from the shelf while she continues waving.
As the bucket nears her level, she grabs onto it with one hand and reaches in with another. Before I have a chance to stop her, she's running away with a package of Laffy Taffy. She is not stupid. But now she knows I am.
She employs similar tactics to get out of naps. "Poopy," she yells from her room. When my wife heads in to take care of the problem, there's no dirty diaper, only a little girl racing out a now-open door. She claims to need bread, or kisses from whichever parent is away from home, or one more book. These are not legitimate requests, and we're beginning to get wise. So she breaks out the 2-year-old's secret weapon: a wailing, flailing tantrum. There's no response for that.
-- Logan Molyneux