She would make Buzz Hargrove proud!

There are days that I think that work life was much easier than raising a toddler. I used to have negiotate with clients to schedule maintenance when I worked as a DBA. Many of my clients were engineers who had a severe lack of interpersonal communications skills and often acted like toddlers, ironically. They wanted things done on their schedules, no excuses..hmmm sounds like things around my house. So I took assertive communications skills and negoitating skills classes to make work easier. I thought I was getting pretty decent at it until I met my match.

My match isn't a big, tall person, highly educated or even someone close to my age. Her english language skills are limited but the words she does have are used very effectively. My opponent uses the broken record technique very efficiently. Although, she does lose her composure and is prone to meltdowns. This is where my in is which her and time outs are my weapon of choice in combatting her adaptness at getting what she wants.

Have you guessed yet who my foe du jour is? She's about 2.75 feet tall, weighing in at about 23lbs and have enough energy to outlast, outplay and outsmart the average adult.

She is my child.

Every morning, she wakes up with a big smile. We have a small battle over getting dressed and then she is off to the living room where she gets her morning sippy of milk while Mommy sips on her morning sippie of coffee.

Not two seconds upon arriving the living room, the opening pare of the negiotations begins:

T: Cookie? Milk?

Me: No, T, you can have cereal and milk.

T: Cookie? Milk?

Me: You can have cereal.

T: Cookie! (insert mandatory whine and optional pout)

Me: Cereal.

T: Cookie! Milk! (add a mandatory pout, whine and of course up the ante with a foot stomp)

Me: You know you have milk and cereal for breakfast.

T: Bar? (Her attempt to change her needs to see if Mom will cave...for the record, I sometimes let her have a cereal bar if we are rushed for time but this is an once in a while occurence)

Me: No T, you can have cereal with bran like Nan does. (Nan being my mom who has gotten T into eating 'Bran like Nan')

T: Bran? Hmmm...

Me: Shall we go have breakfast?

T: Bran? Ok...(she finally relents (begrudingly) but I likely also have had to sweeten the deal by letting her watch another episode of Calliou)

I think maybe my next career path might include union bargaining, its gotta be easier with adults than toddlers, right? Who said being a stay at home parent doesn't allow you to gain career skills? You learn to exploit wants and manipulate other humans as needed, it's very basic but something I think many of us forget as we age. We adults try too hard to make everyone happy and forget about getting what we want at all costs.

Forget all those costly career classes, we just have to re-learn this technique from small children via an outing to a daycare! Bean counters everywhere are rejoicing at the potential savings in employee training.

I guess our children can teach adults a thing or two.