Monday, October 29, 2007

Ruff ride

Dang, it’s a long ride from one end of the city to the other when you have a toddler who doesn’t want to be in her car seat anymore. An afternoon of returning too-small shoes, running to two grocery stores to get what the other didn’t have, and barely getting to Sam’s Club for vitamins before closing yesterday left Ladybug a bit cranky. Ladybug’s whimpers quickly turned into brick-breaking wails and karate kicks to the back of my seat.

I went through my usual bag of tricks to try to calm her down: a sippy cup that flew into the passenger seat, a mini box of Goldfish that was ripped apart and dumped upside down, a stern warning that was ignored. So I pulled out the old standby for times like these: Old MacDonald Had a Farm. The “E-I-E-I-O” part always sends Ladybug into hysterical laughter as she tries to repeat it with a garbled “ee-ya, ee-ya, dee.”

We’re usually five minutes from home when I have to resort to the Old MacDonald trick. But yesterday we were 20 miles away. That might as well have been the distance to the moon. After five minutes, I had gone through every farm animal. Another five minutes and I was done with family pets and garden critters. At the 15-minute mark, I was on to exotic animals, aquatic mammals and fish. Twenty minutes brought out the hyena.

There were only a few animals left to go, but jackass wasn’t one of them. I used that one up before I even started.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I used to have to sing Amazing Grace to calm down J ... whatever works :) Good job to you! Sounds like it calmed her down!

October 29, 2007 at 5:12 PM  
Blogger Michelle Mahfoufi said...

Yeah, but someone really needs to invent new animals so I'll have more to pick from!

October 30, 2007 at 8:49 AM  

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