I tend to think that I’m a fairly smart guy.  I’m well educated, very well read, and always looking for ways to expand my knowledge so that I too can be beaten by Watson on national television.  However, despite all of that and a significant age difference I have been fooled and manipulated on more than one occasion by my children, ages 3 and 1.

Our awesome minivan comes with one of those flip down TV’s that are now pretty standard for any car that will have children in the need of muting.  We came up with a rule for our TV that it will only be turned on for rides to places that are “far away”. Otherwise we would have to fight about turning it off mid show when we got to the grocery store.  At first our daughter was surprisingly ok with that rule, but then somehow came up with a fantastic plan to turn our words against us.  I was driving her to a doctor appointment about 5 minutes up the road from our house when she said “Wow dad, the doctor’s office suuuure is far away isn’t it??”  I responded with a distracted “Uh, yeah I guess it is,” since I figured a 3 year old sense of distance was “I can see my house so it’s close—– I can’t see my house so it’s far.” Then she said “Oh! Well since it’s far can you turn on The Little Mermaid?”  I just got lawyered by a 3 year old!  She used my own words and rules against me.  I wish I could say that I am savvy enough to not fall for this again, but I am not and I have.

Now with Joseph, I wouldn’t expect to be bamboozled since he is still in diapers and barely able to string a 2 word sentence together, but it happened.  Joseph has a tendency to get stuck in things.  He sits in a box for storing books and can’t get out. Climbs into a hamper and can’t get out.  Slides under the couch and can’t get out.  It happens pretty frequently.  All of a sudden I’ll hear him howling “STUCK” and I’ll have to go rescue him.  Granted, he could be yelling Truck, or Duck also because they all sound the same—GUCK, but I can tell when he’s just stuck.  Every afternoon he goes in for a nap for about an hour or two and when he wakes up we usually let him stay in the crib for another 10 minutes (every second counts).  One day we heard him wake up and call for us, but we let it pass.  Then a few minutes later he started screaming “GUCK!!!”  He’s gotten stuck in his crib before (of course) when he sticks his legs out of the bars and then can’t get them back in, so hurried in there to rescue him.  This time, however, the little schemer was just lying on his back looking at his stuffed monkey without a care in the world and most definitively not stuck.  Once he saw that I was there he sat up, stuck his legs through the bars, looked at me and said “Guck!!!”  You know I saw you do that right??? I was like….. right here watching every move you made!  He still tries it on me every now and then and I have to determine by inflection whether he is crying wolf or actually just stuck which with him is always an all too real possibility.

It’s hard to keep ahead of these two and clearly it’s only going to get harder as they grow older and increasingly wily. I’m sure one day they’ll start trying to scam some money out of me.  At least when it comes to that the joke is on them!!!