yucky, sad, nasty, stinky, dirty...

For as long as I can remember Lily has been a very observant little back seat driver. She keeps careful track of which streets we use to get to each destination. I can remember when she was just two, she once started crying because I had told her we were going to gymnastics and we turned down a different street, to mail a letter before going to gymnastics.

Lily is always talking about our journey, this is the road with Wal-Mart, this is the road with the water, I don't like this road, etc. A few months ago I decided to take a new route to Lowes, and Lily was furious with me, as she always is when I don't take the path that she is expecting. I thought to myself that perhaps I should teach her the names of all the streets, so that she would be better equipped to tell me off when I went the wrong way.

It took me about a week. Jeff drove her somewhere and came home utterly amazed that she told him which way to turn and the name of every street along the way. At the stop sign please turn right on Main or at the blinking red light please turn left on Front. It is hilarious. Except when I go the wrong way, she is even more upset than ever and has the vocabulary to explicitly tell me which way I should have gone. I thought that giving her the tools to communicate her thoughts more effectively would help her to not get made, no. She wants what she wants.

We do have some interesting conversations and negotiations about our routes. I still love to go off on the road less traveled and Lily still likes to take the familiar route we have traveled a thousand times before.

Yesterday when we were traveling home from a day spent out and about, we were several hours past her nap time and it had been quite some time since she had last eaten. Let us just say she was not being the nicest person. She was in fact disagreeing with everything, and no amount of coercion could deter her from her path of being a pain. I tried offering different routes home in an attempt to get home without the screaming melt down from hell. She did not want to take any of the paths I suggested. It was so funny. I would say, we can take Main Street, and she would say, Main street is stinky. I would say we can take Front street and she would say Front Street is dirty. All through all the possible streets we could take home, they were yucky, stinky, sad, nasty, dirty, groady, and rosen (I think this is her way of saying frozen which she somehow thinks is a bad descriptive word). I was pretty amazed at her vast vocabulary of descriptive words.

After we got home and had a bit of a nap. I had to wake her up to go and get Mandy from one thing or another. Lily was in a better mood and assured me that the roads in question were no longer: yucky, sad, nasty, stinky, dirty, groady, and rosen. It was also funny that she remember all the various roads and their specific descriptions.