Help! We’re being held hostage by a maniac child!


Our daughter and granddaughter are here, and the little one is in control. She has plans. Yesterday we played veterinarian for hours. Last night, before she went to bed, she wrote down her agenda for today: she wants to build a castle, and put name decals on her scooter, and feed some spiders, and ride her scooter (I helped with the last one, because she was using the list to procrastinate bedtime.) She put checkmark boxes next to her plans.

We’re in trouble. She’s a little girl with a clipboard, and an agenda, and she gives orders. I’m hastily scribbling this in our bedroom before she wakes up. I fear the daylight.

Comments

  1. angoratrilobite says

    Awww, she wants to feed the spiders. So cute! I don’t know why you’re afraid, she seems to have the makings of a great arachnologist.

  2. christoph says

    A friend who served in the Marines once told me that the most dangerous person is a corporal with a clipboard.

  3. moarscienceplz says

    The #1 item on my To Do clipboard list would be ‘buy a clipboard’, but I don’t own a clipboard, dear Liza, dear Liza.

  4. R. L. Foster says

    That’s just the list she puts out for public consumption, PZ. She has another one labeled Unfinished Business. Probably hidden in a plastic bag in the toilet tank.

  5. Tethys says

    I’ve also got a 4.5 year old Granddaughter who is learning to read and write. She and her little sister also have lists of all the things they want to do at Grummy’s house for Xmas. They are the cliched light of my life.
    Hopefully I will get to see them soon, a tree with unopened gifts is not festive once the holiday has passed, but it was so dangerously cold that we cancelled Xmas.

  6. René says

    Tethys @8″

    a 4.5 year old

    I seem to remember psychologists would write that down as

    a 4;6 year old

    — where the semicolon separates the years from the months.
    Is that still a thing?

  7. Tethys says

    René Is that still a thing?

    I’ve no idea if psychologists use a semi-colon to divide the years and months, I used a decimal.
    It’s mostly relevant that both of our granddaughters were born within a few weeks of each other, and are both learning to read and write at a somewhat precocious age.

    They are preschoolers, and all Grandparents should be proudly chuffed that their child has produced such delightful and obviously smart littles.

  8. llyris says

    When my kids were learning to write (only a few years ago, they’re 10 and 7) we got them to write grocery shopping lists and told them we would buy what they wrote (if they spelled it correctly. We could have ended up with an ‘orangatang’. Or maybe he wrote that so that choklate wouldn’t seem so ridiculous a request). Taking the small dictator to the shops to fill her list might be fun too.

  9. Silentbob says

    Trust me, give a couple of days and she’ll be obsessively writing, “all work and no SPibER makes Iliana a bad girl”. I’ve seen a movie about this.

  10. birgerjohansson says

    Stevie Griffin had a hidden room where he stored the futuristic guns and the time machine. Better measure the inner dimensions of the rooms and compare it to the blueprints so no chunk of space is “missing”.