As we were leaving yesterday, Nathan made a dive under one of the chairs saying, "Wook Mom! There's a race car!"
I said something to the effect of, "Hmmm... Okay let's go shopping for rain boots now".
Well, today while playing with his little race car track, he squealed on himself. "Mom, I got this car at the dentist yesterday".
I looked up and sure enough, there was the little blue race car I had briefly seen under the chair the day before.
All of a sudden I found myself defining the word "steal". We talked a little bit about why it wasn't okay to take it. He started to have the look he gets when he knows he's in trouble so I backed off a bit (for the record, I was not being that harsh to begin with...he can just be my sensitive guy at times), but we decided that tomorrow we are going to take it back to the dentist's office.
I don't know if I would have ever noticed if he hadn't mentioned where it came from today. I used to know where all of his toys came from, but it has gotten impossible to keep up! I wanted to make sure he knew it was not something we should do, but I didn't want to make him feel bad for "outing" himself so I have walked a very fine line today. He really didn't think he'd done anything wrong and I don't think shaming him was the best thing to do, but I did teach him about the words steal/stolen/stole today. This afternoon he was playing with his cars and looked up asking, "Mom, where's that car that I stealed yesterday?" Hence the grammar lesson...
I'm just making this up as I go along and completely wasn't prepared for this lesson at 3 1/2 years old. Poor first, experimental child. If I don't get his one phone call in a few years, then we'll know it was a lesson well taught. Either that or he'll get really good at it since he's off to such an early start.
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