Lately Scarlette has discovered the joy of counting things.
I admit to being slightly nervous about this new obsession due to my own diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder. As an adult who has been through therapy my need to count things is very manageable, unless I’m embroiled in a game of ping-pong with Jeff and then I have to rely on him to keep score as I can not NOT count off each time the ball hits the table. I feel as though he is exploiting my weakness in this area on account of how many games he has won against me.
(It’s definitely my OCD that’s the problem and not his incredible ping-pong prowess and general athletic ability, y’all.)
As a child though, it was debilitating for me. I can’t even tell you how long it took for me to get home from the school bus because of all of the times I had to stop and start my walk over from the corner because the number of my steps did not coordinate with the placement of the cracks on the pavement.
(Also, there is a reason I don’t talk about my OCD on this blog because reading the above sentence sounds completely crazycakes.)
When we leave the house to drive somewhere, Scarlette starts off by happily counting the trees on our street.
“One twee! two tweesh! fwee tweesh! fowortweeshpibetweeshshixtwees!”
Then the trees all start running together, a blurry smear of green outside of the window and she gets agitated.
“HOW MANY MOMMY?! HOW MANY TWEESH?!”
“I don’t know darlin’. A lot of trees.”
“HOW MANY TWEESH?! HOW MANY?!”
“One hundred trees.”
So the other day we were on our way to school when she abruptly quit counting the trees and asked
“Mommy? Are dose MY tweesh?”
And I was all “Oh my gracious, now she thinks all of the TREES belong to her too.”
And I started to worry just a little bit about this thing I’ve heard of called “Only Child Syndrome” in addition to OCD.
But then, in a moment of parenting brilliance, I remembered that we are currently learning about how God created the earth and so I decided to turn that question into a lesson.
“Well Scarlette, God made the earth and everything in it so that we can take care of it. He gave us the trees so we would have air to breath and He asked us to take care of the trees. So yes, those ARE your trees and they are a gift from God.”
It was beautiful. I waited for her tiny little voice to ask me more questions about God and his goodness so that I could answer them and then maybe write about it here on the internet, like all of those other blogs I read about how to teach your kid about God and how their children always seem to get themselves into perfectly teachable situations.
And then Scarlette smiled sweetly at me in the rear view mirror and said
“Oh good. “Caushe I want to hit them.”
