The 10 Most Disturbing Things My 4-Year-Old Has Said (This Week)
If you’ve read my posts in the past, you may have picked up on a theme: My 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Nora, is kind of a handful. She’s spunky, sassy, smart, spirited, whiney, defiant, and pretty much constantly testing my mettle as a mother and a human. She is also my middle child. The stuff that comes out of her mouth can be infuriating (and sometimes, I’ll admit, hilarious) but lately her chatter has been particularly shocking. And, maybe I’m giving her too much credit here, but I’m pretty sure says most of these things on purpose just to see my reaction. Here’s a list of the current top 10:
1. “Mom, I just licked that penny.” [That penny was in the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts.]
2. “I want to be a doctor when I grow up … so I can see people naked.”
3. “Jenny [the babysitter] let me carry Molly [the 7-month-old] down the stairs today! I do it all the time.”
4. “Yes, I wiped. No, there was no toilet paper.”
5. “My husband is going to have to drive me everywhere because backing up in a car looks too hard to do.”
6. “Let me take a selfie.”*
7. “Look, Mom, you can’t tell I’m commando when I wear a dress!”
8. “When I grow up I want to be a character from a movie. Like … Elsa.” [She recovered from this one by adding]: “Actually, I’ll be Elsa for Halloween. When I grow up I want to be the girl from 'Ratatouille' because she’s a chef.”
9. “I don’t care if the lightning bugs can’t breathe in my jar, I want to keep them even if they die.”
10. “Mom, yesterday at camp when we went to wash our hands after art, the water in the sink came out all brown.”
Bonus: “$@&$” And while we’re at it: “*@#%!”
You see why I’m constantly kept on my toes with this one? Don’t worry, I follow up on the concerning statements and I explain why she can’t say and do some of the stuff she says and does. (Most of the stuff she says and does falls in that category, come to think of it.) That said, she is also capable of saying super cute, non-disturbing things to remind me that deep down underneath all that sass and those sharp-tongued declarations, there is a funny, sweet, loving little girl. Last night she told me she would like to be an artist when she grows up. "But I will be the kind of artist who only makes paintings for my mom and dad," she said, "because I don't want to give my paintings to people I don't know." While this is a step up from aspiring to be an animated movie character, this kind of artist is also the kind that likely lives at home forever. Which is kind of disturbing.
*This may be the most troublesome to me. When I asked her where she had heard the word "selfie," she said camp. The same camp where the water runs brown. Perhaps it’s time to investigate ...
