Friday, August 7, 2009

The Upside to Crying in Public (sometimes)

There is a picture in the downstairs bathroom at Nani and Grumpa's house, of a bear standing on a waterfall with a fish jumping into it's open mouth. Every morning Nani and Sadie go into the bathroom and look at the picture and name everything in the bathroom. At some point, about a week ago, Sadie started opening her mouth when she looked at the picture. Then if you asked her, "Sadie, how does a bear eat a fish?" she would open her mouth wide and say "ahhhhh." She's been doing it for about a week now and thinks its hilarious.

Today at lunch, however, I may have abused the bear eating the fish trick. It's a tactic that I try not to use, but that I have noticed, over the course of the last few weeks, is incredibly effective at speeding things up when we're waiting for unreasonably long amounts of time.

The first time I noticed it was when we'd come back from the doctor's office and were picking Sadie's prescription up at the pharmacy in town. They said it would be twenty minutes, which was a long wait with a cranky, sick baby, but we walked around the store and managed to keep her calm. Almost an hour later I was feeling considerably less understanding. We had been standing by the pharmacy for another half an hour and no one seemed to know what had happened to the prescription (not a good sign considering my husband works at the store and knows all the people in the pharmacy). Still nothing seemed to be being done to find out what happened to Sadie's antibiotics. Then she started to scream. Paul gestured for me to go sit down with her in a quiet place over to the side, but I had noticed something. When she started to scream, the people in the pharmacy started asking where are prescription was... because they didn't want to listen to a screaming baby either. So I stayed planted and swayed her and told her it was okay, they would have the medicine soon. Minutes later we walked out with the antibiotic.

Today at lunch our waitress, who was not busy at all, had decided to completely ignore our table. No refills, despite the empty glasses on the edge of the table. She was sitting against the bar talking to a group of people and Paul had commented on how we wouldn't be going there again for a while because the service, overall, had been so bad (we had flipped a coin because I had said that it hadn't been a great experience the last several times we'd gone there, but I had lost, which was how we ended up there). Then I asked Sadie what a bear said when it ate a fish. I was just trying to distract her the first time I asked her, because things were going very slowly. She giggled and I asked her a second time. She said it a bit louder. Halfway through the third time I asked her (the "ahhhhh" was not louder then many of the adults talking) we got refills. And I hushed Sadie and asked her to use an indoor voice for the rest of the time we were there.

She really is pretty good when we're out in public, but every once in a while her little baby voice really can speed things up!

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