Here’s the story. Molly & I picked up Alex from daycare yesterday. We brought him home. It was one of the first sunny and warm afternoons in a long time, so I figured I’d take Alex outside while Molly made dinner. The wrinkle in the plan: Alex decided he didn’t want Molly to put his pants back on after getting his diaper changed.
“Don’t you want to go outside?” I asked him. “You can blow dandelion seeds!”
“Yeah!” he answered.
“Well, then, you need to put on pants and shoes!” I picked him up to carry him upstairs to get dressed.
“No!” he said.
“Well, if you don’t put on pants, the monsters will eat your legs!” I tickled his knee and carried him upstairs. I got a pair of pants, but instead of sitting still to let me put them on, he kept running around and then ran over to our bed.
Playing on our bed is his new favorite activity. He likes jumping, he likes squishing me, he likes piling pillows on top of me… in general, he has a great time, and we can go on this way for a good 30 minutes. So we started playing on the bed. He piled the pillows. He jumped. He squished me. It was fun and cute. Then, after 10 minutes, he stops, gets a concerned look on his face, and says, “Monsters eat the legs?”
“Nooo,” I said. “Monsters won’t eat your legs.”
He still looked concerned, so I put on his pants. I was kind of amazed he let me do this. He’d been so rowdy just second earlier.
“There,” I said. But he still looked worried, and then he said, “Monsters eat the toes?” (He still wasn’t wearing shoes and socks.)
“No, the monsters won’t eat your toes. If they tried, they’d go, ‘Bleh! Yuck!‘”
He looked at me and smiled. “Bleh! Yuck!” he said. But then he got worried again. “Monsters eat the toes?”
“No, the monsters won’t eat your toes. Do you know what monsters eat?”
He just looked at me.
I said, “Strawberries. Monsters eat strawberries.”
He smiled again. “Monsters eat the strawberries,” he said.
And that pretty much wrapped up the monster encounter for the night. But this morning, he surprised me when he was on the changing table, still in his pajamas, and he says out of the blue, “Monsters eat the strawberries.”
I swear I only said the monster comment once. I’m a little surprised he even knows the concept of a “monster.” The only monster he has regular exposure to is Grover in The Monster at the End of this Book. But I guess he gets it. It’s just a little reminder that we have to be careful what we say these days!