Last night we were around the table for dinner and Andi, as usual, was bouncing off the walls, reaching too far and knocking things over. Andrew as usual threatens a ridiculous threat that he won’t follow through with, I hope, and tells her if she reaches instead of asks again he will cut her fingers off. I decide to play along and tell her that daddy used to do that for a living. If kids were bad the daddy’s would call daddy in to cut the kids fingers off. She of course didn’t bite and said, “what’s their names?” I said “well I know about Billy whose son Jacob wouldn’t listen so daddy went to their house and cut his fingers off”. Then I added in that was how daddy used to made his money, but he quit doing it because he didn’t want to be mean anymore.
Andi sits for a minute absorbing this and says “you should do it again dad”, “why” I ask astonished, “so you can make more money and I can go to Ayden’s (her cousins) birthday party in South Dakota.”
Wow. I knew she wanted to go to his birthday party, and I told her we didn’t have enough money to fly there for it, what I didn’t know was she’d risk little children’s fingers to get there. Who is this child? She couldn’t possibly have come from me.
**note to public** no fingers would ever be cut off. No CPS calls necessary.
Calm Amongst the Chaos 