Throwing of the Lego

With children, particularly little children, but I think it holds true for all children ages 1-100, laughing only encourages them. Good laughing, not bad laughing. One of the most important tricks to parenting is learning how not to laugh like a loon when your children do something they shouldn't, but is absolutely hilarious nonetheless.

My daughter has the arm of a major league pitcher.  One night, at dinner, she picked up her slice of bread and threw it all the way across the table to land by my plate. "Are you done dear?" I asked sweetly trying (and failing) desperately not to laugh. Luckily Demon was outside, otherwise he would have picked up on it immediately, and it quickly would have become very unfunny as he threw everything not nailed down at me.  My husband and I had a good chuckle, we released Hellion from the highchair and went about our business.

The next day, all four of us were driving in the car. Family outings are fun! Demon and Hellion have this "game" where they scream at each other. Hellion is in the phase where she wants people to pay attention to her, and provide her with a specific thing, or activity, but she cannot yet articulate what it is she wants. This causes her to point and inarticulately scream until someone finally guesses the right thing, and hands it to her, or does it for her.  It happens a lot while she's in her carseat. She will attempt to take her shoes off, fail, and yell, "ahh!"  I've found telling her to leave he shoes alone sometimes shuts her up.

Demon's solution to this problem is much simpler. He screams back, louder. Then she screams at him louder, and he screams back at her louder, and eventually I just turn the music up. Amazingly enough me screaming at them to shut up does nothing to diffuse the screaming match. So usually I just ignore it until it hits glass shattering range, then ask Demon to stop screaming. I can ask Hellion as much as I want, she just screams at me.

The problem with this "game" is that I can't tell if she's happy someone is communicating with her, or if she's mad someone is mocking her.  I think it probably depends on the occasion.  On this particular day, it seems she was mad. My clue to the fact that she was angrily screaming, instead of happily screaming was when the Mega Block she had brought with her went sailing across the car and pegged Demon right in the chest.

Now, from our perspective in the front seat, it was hilarious. There was a screaming match, then a giant lego launched across the car pegging our screaming son right in the chest. (I mean, it's didn't hurt him or anything, don't' look at me that way. It was funny as hell)

I then had to chide Hellion for throwing things at her brother, without laughing. (She may not talk yet, but she knows exactly what we're saying)  Then, my poor Demon, he looks at me with shocked puppy dog eyes, saying, "Mama, she threw this block at me."   Here again, I have to tell him (with a straight face) that I'm sorry she threw the block at him, it was very not nice of her, and I told her not to do it anymore (plus, she only had the 1 block) but that maybe she didn't like him screaming back at her. (snort, giggle)

I look over at my husband who hasn't made a sound, and he's driving the car, eyes wide with one hand tightly clasped over his mouth, choking he's trying so hard not to laugh. Then we both dissolved into poorly repressed giggles. My hope is that is was far enough removed from the incident that they thought we were just laughing about something else they don't get. (which we do a lot.)

Unfortunately Hellion has taken this up as her main form of communication with Demon. She  chucks things at him all day long. Matchbox cars, monster trucks, food, stuffed animals, diapers, dog toys.  It's still hilarious every time, but I really am trying to discourage it.  I mean, he does shove her down at least a dozen times a day. It's hard for me to feel too badly for him when he has a matchbox car thrown in his general direction.