Kids notice EVERYTHING. Never think for a second that a two-year-old is not observing your every move and absorbing your every word, because they are. Think you're being tricky and secretive? To a two-year-old, trickiness and secrecy are merely added layers of complexity they'll quickly decipher and probably emulate.
Take today, for example. After dropping my wife off at our store, I decided to swing by Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch and. . .
You know what? First, a little background.
Last weekend, my family went to the Mall of America, and we browsed through a small store called "Pepper Palace," which carries every possible brand and gradient of hot sauce imaginable. My wife--knowing how much I love hot sauce--asked a clerk for the hottest hot sauce the store carried, and she then bought me a small bottle of "The Hottest Sauce in the Universe," which struck me as a bold claim that could very well be disputed by aliens from millions of undiscovered inhabited worlds. However, having since tried "The Hottest Sauce in the Universe," I can collectively tell all those aliens to shut up already, because "The Hottest Sauce in the Universe" is really, really, really, really, REALLY hot.
OK, so I have a bottle of "The Hottest Sauce in the Universe," and I picked up KFC for lunch. Now we're all on the same page.
When I got back home with the KFC lunch and with my two- and one-year-old in tow, I decided to spice up the KFC barbeque sauce with a few drops of "The Hottest Sauce in the Universe," and my two-year-old took a keen interest in the activity. It was at this point that my one-year-old daughter started pitching an angry fit, indicating she needed to be put down for a nap immediately.
Now, before you judge me too harshly here, you should know I made a point of putting the hot sauce-infused barbeque sauce on the kitchen counter before putting my daughter down for a nap. Presumably, the kitchen counter was out of reach--although, admittedly, very little is truly out of reach of a determined two-year-old, which is particularly true of my boy, who apparently figured out how to use kitchen drawer pull handles like a ladder.
I had just put my daughter down in her crib when I heard my two-year-old son either jump or fall off the kitchen counter while simultaneously yelling "HOT! HOT! HOT! HOT! OW! OW! OW! MOUTH! OW! MOUTH! HOT!" I came running out of my daughter's room to find my boy circling the living room coffee table, saliva running copiously from his lower lip. It didn't take much in the way of deductive reasoning to know he'd dipped a French fry in the barbeque sauce and was experiencing extreme regret.
For the next several minutes, I encouraged my boy to keep drinking water (he won't drink milk, for reasons that elude us entirely), and he gradually came down from his scoville-induced panic, and he even laughed about the whole ordeal about an hour later.
Laughter or no laughter, I'm definitely out of the running for "Father of the Year" now, and I wasn't really in contention even before this hot sauce episode.
Fatherhood is tough, man.
Posted by Ryan at August 9, 2012 01:26 PM | TrackBack
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