Ms. Bossy Pants on the Slide

Juniper, Violet, Luke, Thomas, Ocean, and a host of other kids have gotten an immense amount of joy out of our climbing structure. (Not to mention Aaron and his siblings, who played on the same structure when they were kids.) Hazel has shown a surprising lack of interest in it, and only recently began to go up the steps. She'll happily climb to the top of the steps and then mewl for assistance, unwilling to go back down or climb onto the platform. "Up, up" means pick me up and put me back down on the ground. "Weeee, weeee" means pick me up and put me on the top of the slide.

It's pretty obvious that she's physically capable of doing this. The barrier may have been that she hadn't figured out how to do it, or that she was a little hesitant to try, but it clearly wasn't a lack of physical skills. So today, I left her mewling at the top of the stairs while I went about my business in the kitchen. She became more and more insistent in her requests for up, up, UP, but she never started crying or got upset. After several minutes, she obviously figured out that no one was coming to her rescue and carefully climbed from the stairs onto the platform. Once she was on the platform, she had another round of asking for me to put her on the slide. When she gave up on that, she tentatively put one foot and then the other onto the slide, pushed off, and slid down approximately as fast as a sandpaper block on a rough and gentle slope (she was naked, except for a diaper, and the friction from her skin meant that she basically had to scoot herself down). When she got back to the bottom, she gave a giant grin, yelled "WEEEEE!" and toddled quickly back to the steps. Repeat. Again. For the rest of the day.


I have no idea what Juniper was doing at the end of the video that earned such harsh disapproval from Hazel. Hazel loves to discipline Juniper, Luke, our dog Kayla, her blankets and other inanimate objects, but almost never her parents or other adults. She's clearly learned that this particular manner of speech is reserved for people at or below one's own level on the totem pole. We weren't quite sure where she picked this up, until one day when I heard Juniper give her sister a harsh NO! in exactly the same tone of voice that Hazel uses to discipline the people and objects around her. If I were in a cartoon, there would have been a light bulb over my head at that moment.