Rhetorical Questions
Three-year-old Drake has a habit of stating a question that he wants us to ask him. I went to get him up the other morning, and he said, “Is my nose itchy, Mom?”
“I don’t know, is your nose itchy, Drake?”
Sigh. “Yeah.”
Or he’ll ask a question that is more of a statement. “Mom, do you need a truck sticker?”
Apparently, that means that I do. I went out the other night, and returned home only to find I’d been out in public with a mass excavator sticker on my back.
He also is very clear sometimes about what kind of attention he wants.
“Mom, will you talk to me about playing with the cars?”
Or he’ll invoke a third party in one of his loveys.
“Mom, will you talk to Daisy about the trucks?”
He’s also getting very direct and demanding. I went into his room to get him up the other morning, and he greeted me with, “Don’t talk to me, Mom! Go back in the hall! Don’t come in my room!”
I covered my mouth to stifle a grin, as well as signal that I wasn’t talking, then backed slowly out of his room.
His capacity for imagination is growing, too. He takes his Ikea plush snake and spreads it out on the couch, and says it’s a car, then sits with his other loveys, asks me to get in the car, and says we’re going to their house, where there’s a pond for the fish and the ducks, and a meadow for his sheep. He says they’re going to play with cars there–do you see a theme, here?
And even though my husband G. Grod doesn’t carry a briefcase, Drake picked up his truck box the other day, clutched it in his fist and announced that he was going to work. I asked him how he was getting there.
“The friends’ car,” he announced matter-of-factly, and with a certain weariness, as if I were stupid for not knowing something so obvious.