The other night, Allison stayed up late working on a project. A project for school you ask? Nope, not at all. An art project. No, not an art project. This project was something she thought up in her head – she wrote out a list of 28 things that children can sometimes do wrong. After each item, she listed if she and/or any of her sisters were guilty of these wrongdoings and at the bottom of the list, she had a tally going – turns out Lydia is guilty of 13 of these items, while Meredith and Allison are only guilty of 9 each. We are, as a family, pretty well oriented towards gentle, nonpunitive parenting, so this is her own list – not inspired by parental judgments or external consequences. Items on this list include such infractions as – being bossy (Meredith and Allison are guilty of this), being careless (no one is guilty of this one), being destructive (all Lydia here), being mean (no one guilty of this one..aww!), being rude (all Lydia again), being selfish (all Allison here), breaking promises (Meredith and Allison), overdoing it (all three of them apparently do this one!), showing off (Meredith here..surprise surprise), being wasteful (Lydia), being greedy (Allison), being forgetful (Allison), snooping (Allison – good to know!), teasing (none of them – they are sweet kids) and so on and so on.
I wonder what spawned the creation of such a list? Sure is cute though..and I like how Allison didn’t just slam her sisters, she really put thought into it and listed her own issues as well.
And that same night, little pre-reader Meredith took our Kid’s First Dictionary, and methodically wrote the following poem:
A funny frog had a friend Fox
Giraffe had glasses
Goose had grapes
Ok ok, not the best poem, and I am sure she was just flipping through the dictionary looking for words to use (apparently she enjoyed the F section and the G section a lot!), but her sentence structure was spot on, everything was spelled correctly and I love it!
Interesting list!
And that is an awesome poem.
I love that list, but I can tell you which are lies
funny that she came up with that! I love that poem too! Hey, she could have been in worse sections of the dictionary….although you did say kids dictionary…..
That is funny!At least she listed herself on the list. I’m sure one of my kids would have left themselves off the list.
Meredith is a poet in the making.:-)