Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Inability to Learn + Complacency = Repeat Incident

 Something strange has been happening for the past week...
The Terror has been good...
... Not just good, either... but amazing...
She's started to learn her numbers to the point where I don't have to talk down to her in that annoying  voice I hate using when she asks me a billion questions about the time. In fact, she's gotten so good that all I have to do is point at the clock and she can tell me what the time is. Of course, she still doesn't  have the finer points of time down yet, but she knows that four comes after 1 and that she has to wait... She still doesn't understand what an hour is, but things have been better...

The Terror has finally begun to understand letters, too. She can finally sing her ABC's without getting really confused, and just yesterday she managed to read off the name of a popular kids show about two inventing cartoon brothers while I was flipping through the guide trying to find her the cartoons she was demanding. It amazed me so much I almost danced.

In fact, the Terror has been learning a lot of things lately, and has been amazingly adorable and not very Terror-like... It took an hour of struggling, but I taught her how to draw a triangle... Yes,  it was one of those things that broke my heart a little and made me wanna kill something, because spending an hour going, "Nooooo. Straaaaight lines, not cuurrrved..." just does that to you.
We even learned how to play pretend last week! She was so good, staying in the yard and playing with her dragons and unicorns as she played princess. She didn't chase after Noodles when he ran out of the yard, she was real good and stayed in the yard, running in every so often to announce, "I found another dragon!"
She was so cute I started calling her my little Chick Pea.

As the Hedgehog has blatantly told me, however, the Terror often has these moments... and they are short, as she quickly relapses into usual Terror behavior. I learned this the hard way, because yesterday I let her play in the yard again. I opened the door and the blinds and watched her playing, but right away I began to notice there was something a little different. She was running in and out constantly complaining about Noodles, and the more I told her to leave him alone and play, the more she complained.

Finally I went outside to tell her when he went to run off with a neighborhood dog to just let them play, it was alright.

The moment I came back inside, I looked out the window and saw an all too familiar scene...
So I ran back out and yelled without thinking, managing to get the Terror back into the yard... but then she started to do that thing that the Terror does that drives me nuts. She froze, didn't move... just stood there with her head bowed, face like that of someone who only speaks English now in a country where no one did. She looked confused, worried... so I told her to come inside...
 The Terror just stood there, blank stare on her face, looking at the ground without moving... I tried a few more times, and the finally, frustrated, yelled that either she came in or I went to get her, and she wasn't going to like it if I did. Another moment of standing there, staring with this confused face at nothing, and I finally went to go get her...
And that's when she took off running like a bat out of hell.
Oh yeah, I caught the Terror and I gave her ten minutes of timeout, but still... Why don't I learn?

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