2002-04-16 -

Manipulation

Liralyn demonstrated her immense powers of manipulation again today. She was acting up at McDonald's, so I told her we were going home.

"I'm going to eat my McNuggets first."

"No, we're leaving now."

"I'm going to eat them."

"If you do, I will be very mad."

Liralyn ate them. I gave her my mad look.

"Are you mad at me, Daddy?"

"Yes. You did something I just told you not to do."

"But Daddy, I just wanted to eat them so I could grow up to be big and strong like you!"

At which point anger became futile, so I let her apologize and called the entire episode a net win for the child-rearing process.

I had dinner with Tish last night, which was fun but set off some sort of weird delayed jealousy reaction in Julie. I'll omit the details to protect Julie's privacy, but suffice to say that stress makes women act weird sometimes. It's cool as long as I'm relaxed when it happens, but I always worry that one of these days we're both going to be tired and angry about something and end up fighting with each other about nothing. Feh. If the morons at Oakland would just tell her whether she's getting tenure instead of constantly pushing the deadline back, my life would be a wee bit happier.

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