Beating My Child

Presley is a dawdler. The more you ask him to to hurry, the more he will try to make your objective a painfully slow process, and in most instances, it becomes extraordinarily frustrating. For example, we live in a second-story apartment. For reasons I'll never know, it's always taken a great deal of coaxing, begging, and threatening to get him up the flight of stairs upon returning home from an outing. He'll just never go on his own accord. After awhile, it occurred to him that my pleas and threats don't mean a whole lot. Especially when I've got four bags of groceries on each arm that are starting to dig into my flesh. I ask politely through pained grunts to please hurry up the stairs before Mommy loses two very important limbs, and he stares at me blankly like he hasn't even heard the request. Or more often, he giggles at my helplessness. The little brute.

I, with my motherly observatory skills, have come to notice the competetive side in this kid as he gets older. He doesn't like to lose, and everything is a game he must win. Particularly, everything is a race. I realized I could use this to my advantage, and a couple months ago I tried out a new trick to get him up the stairs without such great efforts. And it worked! In fact, it's been failproof every single time since the first day I used it.

Me: "Presley, please go upstairs."
Him: (blank stare)
Me: (louder) "Presley, I said please. Please go upstairs, right now!"
Him: (giggle)
Me: (very loud) "Uh-oh! Presley . . . if you don't get up there right now, I'm going to BEAT YOU!"

And I put one foot on the bottom step to let him know I mean business. Sure enough, he'll have none of that. He races past me and gallops to the top, cheering, "I won! I wooonnnn! Mommy, I beat you!"

Did I mention that the walls in our building are paper-thin? Standing in the outer hallway, I can hear everything that goes on in all four units. Every word, pretty much verbatim. And it dawned on me a few days ago that every time we get home, three other families with children are hearing me bark, "PRESLEY! I'M GOING TO BEAT YOU!"

I'm surprised that I haven't yet been visited by Child Protective Services.