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Last week, Thanksgiving night in fact, Hubby put the kids to bed while my parents and I sat on the couch and watched TV and made fun of silly actors. In my marriage there is an unspoken rule that the child of the grandparents who are visiting gets out of the bedtime routine and is allowed to lounge on the couch while the other parent does the hard work of wrangling two over-excited preschoolers into pajamas and clean teeth. And since his parents live only an hour away and therefore never need to spend the night at our house, this unspoken rule works out quite well for me.
My parents and I were sitting on the couch, fat and satiated from a day full of turkey and sweet potatoes, when the three of us heard Little Missy crying upstairs. Little Missy never cries at bedtime. My three-year old actually likes going to sleep and climbing into bed, and while she is usually hyper right before she crashes and tries to tackle her brother to the floor when giving him a goodnight hug, rarely does this lead to tears.
But something happened that night. It wasn’t the sound after she gets punished, but rather the sound after finding out her puppy died. But of course we don’t have a puppy. My mom, my dad and I looked toward the upstairs, then at each other, then back at the TV.
When Hubby came downstairs a few minutes later we asked him what he’d done to his precious daughter in order to make her cry. He looked at us and grimaced. “Well, Shane called and asked if I wanted to go duck hunting on Saturday, and when I told the kids, Little Missy started crying because she doesn’t want me to kill the baby ducks.”
My sweet husband actually felt pretty bad about Little Missy’s reaction, but his primal need to lie on the ground in the cold with a shotgun while barely talking to his brother won out and he went hunting. He also told her that he usually doesn’t kill stuff when he hunts. It’s more about the experience. And by the time Saturday rolled around Little Missy cried because she couldn’t go hunting with her daddy. I guess her love of baby ducks waned quickly.
Last week, Thanksgiving night in fact, Hubby put the kids to bed while my parents and I sat on the couch and watched TV and made fun of silly actors. In my marriage there is an unspoken rule that the child of the grandparents who are visiting gets out of the bedtime routine and is allowed to lounge on the couch while the other parent does the hard work of wrangling two over-excited preschoolers into pajamas and clean teeth. And since his parents live only an hour away and therefore never need to spend the night at our house, this unspoken rule works out quite well for me.
My parents and I were sitting on the couch, fat and satiated from a day full of turkey and sweet potatoes, when the three of us heard Little Missy crying upstairs. Little Missy never cries at bedtime. My three-year old actually likes going to sleep and climbing into bed, and while she is usually hyper right before she crashes and tries to tackle her brother to the floor when giving him a goodnight hug, rarely does this lead to tears.
But something happened that night. It wasn’t the sound after she gets punished, but rather the sound after finding out her puppy died. But of course we don’t have a puppy. My mom, my dad and I looked toward the upstairs, then at each other, then back at the TV.
When Hubby came downstairs a few minutes later we asked him what he’d done to his precious daughter in order to make her cry. He looked at us and grimaced. “Well, Shane called and asked if I wanted to go duck hunting on Saturday, and when I told the kids, Little Missy started crying because she doesn’t want me to kill the baby ducks.”
My sweet husband actually felt pretty bad about Little Missy’s reaction, but his primal need to lie on the ground in the cold with a shotgun while barely talking to his brother won out and he went hunting. He also told her that he usually doesn’t kill stuff when he hunts. It’s more about the experience. And by the time Saturday rolled around Little Missy cried because she couldn’t go hunting with her daddy. I guess her love of baby ducks waned quickly.
