Negotiations

There is just no good way to say this: My daughter is a bit of a hoarder.

I don't know if I was like this as a child. I do know that Suzannah takes after me in many ways; she is very particular about where things should go, and she's extremely tidy, and she likes to be clean, and she's a little OCD when it comes to hand-washing. But her sense of order doesn't really mesh with mine at the moment. Meaning, I don't get it. To me, it just looks like her bed is covered -- and I mean covered -- with random stuff. Shortly before we left on our vacation, she spent a few nights sleeping on the floor of her room in a little tent; she was really excited to "camp," but also, I don't think she could get comfortable in her bed with all the stuff she had piled there.

I've tried to put things away. I mean, it's not just stuffed animals. It's books (she reads herself to sleep almost every night) -- okay, still normal. It's doll accessories, or random little toys. A comb. A piggy bank. Her Sesame Street doctor's kit. Two sets of mittens. A purple tutu. A teacup. A tiny plastic rake.

If you think that it might be possible to sneak in after she falls asleep and move any of these things (because you think she might roll off the bed in the middle of the night, otherwise, so precarious does her position appear to be), you would be wrong. She will wake up in the morning, take a brief inventory of her belongings, and crossly demand, "Where is my rake?" You will have about three seconds to produce the rake, and she will scowl and say, "You can't move my stuff."

Every now and then I lose my mind and ninja-clean her room. I'll set her up with a video, or I'll send her to the park or the grocery store with her daddy, and I will become a whirlwind of organization. I usually end up tossing or recycling several things (no, we do not need to save those stupid Happy Meal toys from four months ago, even if Matt Suzannah might still think they're fun). I usually end up returning several things to their rightful places in other parts of the house (my pens go on my desk, the key to Matt's gym lock goes in his backpack, the pumpkin basket can finally be returned to the closet stash of seasonal decorations). And then I put the rest of her things either in the stacking bins we picked out together at IKEA when I was feeling optimistic or in her toy box. I feel so proud of myself. I admire the expanse of carpet. I smile at the lovely bedspread I can actually see. And then my daughter returns. I hold my breath. I act a little too cheerful. I work a little too hard to play it cool, which must arouse her suspicion. And inevitably, Suzannah comes stomping out of her room one second after she enters it.

"Where's my stuff? Mommy, you can't move my stuff."

I try to talk to her about why it might be nice to have more space in the bed, or about how she would be able to find things more easily (although she has the uncanny ability to know exactly where everything is, no matter how chaotic it seems to me). She is not interested. (What's interesting to me is how neat she is everywhere else. At daycare/preschool, she has always been good about putting everything away -- in a "proper" place -- as soon as she's done using it. We went back for a visit so she could spend the morning with her friends a week or so ago, and it was like she'd never left. She knew where all her favorite things were, and no one had to tell her to clean up at the end. Even at home, she's good about putting away her toys in, say, the family room, even if sometimes she needs a little prompting.)

Tonight, we took a different approach: we bribed her with a "special" dessert. YEAH, I KNOW, you're not supposed to use food like that, I READ THOSE PARENTING BOOKS, TOO. Parents of the year, right here, and blah blah blah my kid was going to love her all organic vegetables and would never eat a chicken nugget and I wouldn't have to bribe her to eat her broccoli and I would never let her tantrums get to me because I would just patiently and lovingly redirect her and I would never find myself huddled in the study crying into my wine glass, and -- oh, suddenly this entry is about something else, isn't it? Anyway, yes, we talked up this special dessert, but in order to get it, she would have to consent to Mommy unearthing her bed from under this insane mound of Stuff. She frowned and thought it over for a moment.

"And you're going to wash my sheets, too?" she asked.

"That's right."

"Okay, then."

I probably should have just told her that in the first place, and I could have saved the Special Dessert for something else; she likes fresh sheets. We did end up adding a few more stipulations, though (unfair!); she had to eat all of her broccoli and a teeny-tiny helping of Cuban black beans, which is what we had for dinner tonight. I didn't know how that would go over. She watched me cutting up some green and red bell peppers while I was prepping dinner, and she very enthusiastically handed Isaac a couple of slices to munch on, but when I asked her if she wanted some too, she informed me cheerfully but emphatically that she doesn't like peppers, NO THANK YOU. (She does, however, like broccoli quite a bit, so I suppose I should be thankful for that.)

Food negotiations are both exasperating and kind of hilarious. I'll tell her she needs to finish a predetermined amount of food before she can go outside or before she can have more yogurt or cheese or whatever (because she'd happily eat nothing but that sometimes). I'll set aside a portion of broccoli, or half of a sandwich -- whatever I decide is reasonable. (Because I'm the mom! Hah!) She will then take a tiny bite and announce, "Okay, Mommy, I ate it."

"Suzannah, I said you had to finish that much."

"But I did. I did eat it."

"You took one tiny little bite."

"No, I took a REALLY BIG bite. That was a BIG bite, Mommy."

I mean, we are clearly just not even operating on the same plane of logic. She is trying to convince me that her bite was AMAZING and I am trying to explain to her that I see through her ridiculousness. Sometimes meals take awhile. I don't anticipate this changing any time soon, especially now that Isaac is learning how to feed himself "real" food, which mostly means smashing it with real gusto, stuffing it in his pants, and sporadically managing to shove some into his mouth. I don't really worry about whether or not he's actually eating; right now we're just letting him explore different tastes and textures. Our pug loves it; it's like she remembered that this is the part when having a baby in the house actually pays off. All she has to do is stand underneath his high chair and wait for the food to rain down upon her head. And I just smile and resign myself to the fact that every night is Bath Night now. I let it go last night, and my son woke up with the crusty remnants of some Trader Joe's flatbread on his nose. I kind of consider that a personal failing, like I was asleep on the job or something.

Anyway, in case you're wondering, Matt came home with fixin's for S'mores last night. That was the "special dessert." Suzannah actually ate the black beans without making any horrible faces. So she got to have a S'more, and unsurprisingly, she wound up with less chocolate on her face than her daddy did. And I did clean up her room and change her sheets, but she is still sleeping with one teacup, a tiny notebook, and her play wooden espresso machine.