Crucial Conversation?

Sometimes, if it weren't for my kids, I'm afraid I might end up like the girl in this commercial:

Because yesterday was beautiful.  And I was in class in the morning (if anyone is interested, I now have all sorts of mad Crucial Conversation skills) and should have been aching to get home and play/run/workout/get outside.  But really all I wanted to do was sit inside and stare at my computer.  I had blogs to read, by gawd.  Comments to make.  E-mails to respond to.  Life to live out there in cyberspace.

Enter the 4-year-old. 

While I was in class, Tanner and Ellery had our superfun babysitter, Sondra.  When I'm home, I tend to hide behind the guise of "parenting my kids"  (read:  be a big fat meeny) or "picking up the house," when the girls ask to play; on the contrary, Sondra just loves it.  She's like their Denver grandma, and they love her.  She plays outside, let's them do hair, never gets tired of pushing swings.  By the time I got home from my class, Ellery was already worn out from her morning of play and was napping; Tanner (who doesn't nap on Fridays - what a special treat!), however, was just gearing up.  So you can see how Tanner and I had different ideas of how this afternoon was going to play out. 

Just as I sat down and opened the computer (which wasn't cooperating with the internet, if you remember), Tanner started in, "Moooommm-eeee, can we go outside and play?" to which I replied, "Honey, Mommy just wants to look at the computer for a minute.  You watch TV." (I should be strung up and hanged, I know.)

When that minute turned into lots of minutes, Tanner got increasingly impatient and after waaaaaay more minutes and waaaaaaay too many put-offs, I finally gave in (at one point she may have told me my minutes were up).  All the signs were there - pictures weren't loading, the internet was being all heinous and awful, blogspot was being pissy, and the 4-year-old was asking every 30 seconds about going outside.  Finally I got it:  go outside and play with your daughter, stupid (ya, I'm thick-skulled sometimes.  But I really wanted to play on the computer, dammit!)

So play we did.

For starters, I didn't help draw all of these (just a few) - Sondra and the girls did most.  But I did get an honorable mention in the drawing since I played outside.  "Mommy, Hanleqqn Hallqqeen." [Mommy, Happy Halloween, in 4-year-old writ, obvi]

After a little chalk art, we swung for a bit:

This girl LOVES to swing.  Do all 4-year-olds love it so much?  I think I did - and I still might - except the swing set acts like it might topple.  Total Self-Esteem Killer.

After a while, swinging wasn't enough and she wanted to play something different.  On any other day, this would be when I said "no, Mommy's ready to go inside," but today I decided I would stay and play.  A moment of good-Mothering, I suppose.  So, we played kitchen.

What would you like, Mommy?
What do you have, baby?
Pizza and ice cream. 
Sounds wonderful.

And so it went, for THREE WHOLE DAYS worth of meals.  (and snacks!  I was STUFFED! :)

Then, pretend-eating got old, so we moved on to something else:  Pirates.

In case you didn't know, our crow's nest is a fully functioning pirate ship.  You can't really tell from ground level, but once you're up on the top and your 4-year-old "Driver" (I was the Captain) is shouting orders at you (Driver outranks Captain, duh) - "Captain!  Pull the ropes for the curtains!"  "Captain!  Put down the blinds!" - you know you're really at sea.  I mean, it's legit (and if you don't follow orders you get reprimanded.  Not sure where she got that idea).

You can't see the steering wheel, but she's driving our ship right now.

As in any good pirate ship tale, you have to be on the lookout for "minimies" (enemies, of course). 

Aye, you have to keep an eye on rogue sea-scum, ya do.

After many times not seeing the enemies, we finally spotted them - and what a battle it was.  Life was not spared.  The Driver is a vicious driver, apparently, despite the Captain's unheeded advice.

Tanner celebrates after "killing the minimies dead!"  Next time I told her we were to kindly ask "the minimies" to leave us alone and go back to their own sea.  She begrudgingly obliged.

That's it.  That's all it was.  Chalk art, swinging, kitchen, and pirates.  And before I knew it, we had been outside for an hour and a half - Tanner loving having her usually-un-motherly-inclined Momma outside; me enjoying the simple conversation a 4-year-old can offer.  It was (dare I say for risk of being cliche)... awesome.

I decided this evening that maybe Tanner had her own form of Crucially Conversating that was left out of my curriculum - Persistence.  I gave her a thousand reasons why I had too much to do and couldn't go play, but she wasn't gonna let me off that easy.  After all, my minutes were UP!  I had said that LAST time.  Wasn't I ready YET???

So thank you, Tanner, for saving me from myself, from this computer, from technology that was making me bizurko.  Thanks for the ninety fun minutes outside in the sinking sun.  Thanks for making me feel like a good momma for once, even if it did take a little (okay, a LOT) of nudging.  :)