I would say my 3-year-old son is so good at negotiating that he should become a lawyer when he grows up. But I’m technically a non-practicing lawyer in the great state of California and I have quite poor negotiation skills, so I don’t know how strong the negotiator-lawyer link actually is. Maybe he should be a litigator?
Either way, he’s an annoyingly wonderful negotiator. I don’t know how to win with him. I can’t win. Or, I should say, I don’t have it in me to try hard enough to win with him. It would take superhuman strength and willpower to win a negotiation with my son, strength and willpower that he seems to possess and I seem to … not. I guess it’s his youthful energy and tenacity versus my kind-of-youthful non-energy and former tenacity that has been beaten out of me by two toddlers.
I wrote an Instagram post about his negotiation skills this morning, and the story that inspired it is the perfect example of our interactions, in which he wins 100% of the time and I win 0% of the time. One might respond to that by saying you shouldn’t be trying to “win” an interaction with your toddler. To that I would say: Well, he started it. I don’t try to win – I just try to fight back. And it’s an uphill battle.
The Instagram post reads: Last night I told my son that under no circumstances would we be watching Paw Patrol or buying temporary Wonder Woman tattoos before daycare. Guess what we did this morning?
That’s an apt example of how his negotiations are wearing me down.
Here’s a summary of how I ended up at Target at 8 a.m. with a 3-year-old and an almost-2-year-old on the way to daycare dropoff the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend.
The Monday of the long weekend ended with a fun trip to a playground and petting zoo with some family friends. On the drive home, my son asked if we could go to the store and get “something special.” When pressed, he said “something special” is a collection of Superman Justice League temporary tattoos. Specifically, he was looking for Wonder Woman and Hawk Girl (took me awhile to realize my toddler wasn’t asking for a “hot girl tattoo”), but he’ll settle for Batman and Green Lantern.
I told him he had two choices: 1) We drop off his dad and little sister at home, then he and I go to the store to search for temporary tattoos, or 2) We go to the store after school tomorrow to search for temporary tattoos. (Key word being search, by the way, I didn’t expect to find Hawk Girl tattoos in the drugstore aisle, but figured I’d deal with one meltdown at a time.)
After much hemming and hawing and trying to convince us that the entire family of four needed to go to the tattoo store RIGHT NOW–either that or mom and dad go to the tattoo store together, leaving the tiny children home alone–I actually kind of won. I got him to agree to wait until the next day, after daycare, to go to the tattoo store.
But I shouldn’t have celebrated so soon.
Here’s how our morning went:
5:55 a.m.: My son stumbles, bleary eyed, into our bedroom, mumbling about Wonder Woman tattoos.
6 a.m.: I help him take off his pull-up, while he continues to mumble about Wonder Woman tattoos.
6:30 a.m. He lies down on the couch and drinks some milk, then tells me he’s ready to go to the store to buy tattoos. I tell him we can’t go to the store to buy tattoos because it’s too early, we have to stay home with his sleeping sister, and besides, I told him we could go to the store after school. He argues. I argue back. He says that if he can’t go to the store, he wants to watch either Blaze or Paw Patrol on the TV. I remind him that we don’t watch TV before school in our house.
“We can watch Paw Patrol after school.”
“No, I want to watch now.”
“I told you that we can watch after school. The rule is no TV before school.”
“Brody watches TV before school.”
“That’s fine in Brody’s house, but we don’t watch TV before school in our house. You’re lucky you get to watch TV at all!”
“I’ll only eat breakfast if I can watch Paw Patrol now.”
“After school.”
“I’ll wake up sister now if I can’t watch Paw Patrol.”
“Fine, we can watch now but that means we definitely are not stopping to get temporary tattoos before school.”
“Why?”
“Because we won’t have time.”
“We do have time.”
“No, we don’t. I know you can’t read the clock, but your sister isn’t even awake yet, you’re going to watch Paw Patrol, then we have to eat breakfast and brush teeth and get dressed. There’s not enough time.”
“If you wake her up now, we can watch one episode then go to the store.”
“You get to choose. One episode of Paw Patrol or stop at the store for tattoos.”
“One episode AND we get tattoos, then I come home and watch movies all day.”
“Fine, one episode and we get tattoos, but then you go to school instead of watching movies.”
“Deal.”
So we watched Paw Patrol. We went to the store. We bought tattoos. For some reason, we also bought a Superman coloring book, Cocomelon stickers, a Moana figurine and a bottle of spray sunscreen he had to have.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mother of the year.