..and we're not even close to clothes-shopping age yet. Yippee!
Here's Rachel's side of it: I've told her over and over again that I am "mommy" to her, not "Lisa" in any form. So she has found a way around it: When she wants to exasperate me she'll start chanting, "Mommy Lee-sa. Mommy Lee-sa. Mommy Lee-sa."
(Parenthetically, she was upset when we went to Amy's this weekend and Amy kept calling me "Lisa." "No. Mommy!" Rachel protested).
I tried to put a stop to "Mommy Lee-sa," to no avail. So I tried some amateur reverse psychology: I say in reply, "Baby Rachel." Rachel, of course will be the first to tell you that she is not a BABY, she is a TODDLE. She didn't like that at all.
So our car rides sound something like this:
"Mommy Lee-sa."
"Baa-byy Rachel."
"Don't SAY that, Mom!"
Pause.
"Mommy Lee-sa."
"Baabyyy Raa-chel."
"Don't SAY that!"
And on and on.
Another way I annoy her is to imitate something she says that makes no sense (another leftover from St. James): "Oh my gosh, LADYBUG!" The "oh my gosh" part sounds just like Shirley Temple in her early movie days. I used to love watching that treacly stuff on WPIX, Channel 11. Remember that? The old black and white movie channel in NYC?
She hates it when I imitate her and says, "Don't SAY that!" So I've started to add, "Oh my gosh, SPIDER!" "Oh my gosh, FLY!" Oh my gosh, "BEE!" She seems to like that and joins in, so we end up trading insect names.
Anyway, this morning Rachel figured out an even better way to annoy me: By the time we got to daycare this morning, her socks were off, her shoes were off, the crayons were all over the floor where she'd thrown them, the bag of Wheaties was there, too, along with her "baby toy," a string of plastic that she played with as a baby, and a little lap blanket.
Not to mention the crumbs that are gunking up the car seat and snuggling into the crevices of the portion of the back seat that the grownups use...my car is no longer the ghetto vehicle, it's the soccer mom car. Ugh.
She looked down as I was unbuckling her and said, a bit sheepisly: "I make a big mess."
Yes, Rachel, you sure did. But I love you anyway.
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Funny, another mom just asked me if I had any advice on how she could get her 3-year-old to stop calling her names. I told her I just say, "That's Mommy to you." She reported today that she said, "My name is Mommy," and it stopped her kid cold.
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