Smart: The Opposite of Stupid

Children are smart. While they do not yet have a fully developed sense of logic or reason, they get the basic idea of right/wrong, good/bad, appropriate/inappropriate... all of those dialectically opposing factors that teach us to view the world and ourselves from a black and white perspective.

My 3-year-old son is currently working with the whole sleepy/not sleepy concept. He has mastered the art of making himself believe he is not sleepy, simply because he doesn't want to be the opposite... sleepy. He knows sleepy means bedtime and he definitely doesn't want bedtime because he knows he won't be able to "borrow" Mom's arm to keep in his bed for longer than two renditions of Twinkle Twinkle (the traditional version and the Batman version). Mom has unfortunately not mastered the art of detaching her arm so he can cuddle with it the whole night (in case you're confused, you may have missed previous statements of his obsession with my arm- he loves it so much that he wants to "cut it off, play with it, and then put it in his cubby at school" because I'm the "best mom"). I can choose to polarize myself either on the side of feeling alarmed/concerned about his psychiatric state or feeling loved and cherished knowing that just having a "piece of me" is comforting for him. I'm somewhere in between.

On one particular night, Mason was not happy about bedtime and was very unforgiving that I needed my arm back to go pack Sofia's lunch for the next day. After Twinkle Twinkle x2, a little whining, a bit of protesting, I walked across his floor toward the door.

"StupidAss."

I stopped. Then paused. Then turned. "Excuse me? What did you just say?"

"StupidAss."

I returned to his bed... tried to elicit from him just where he learned this word (he claims daycare... from a "fwend") and proceeded to lecture him about the word "StupidAss" not being a nice word and not being a word that we use in our family. He was quiet and as I let the room, I heard the faintest whisper... "StupidAss". I ignored it and kept walking. I had a lunch to make.

The next day after I picked him up from daycare, he looked at me with a big smile and in his 3-year-old attempt to make amends for the "not nice" name he called me the night before, he looked me in the eyes and in a prideful voice said:

"Mom, you're a SmartAss".