Lola's keeping a chart

Yesterday Lola was in a bouncy mood after kindergarten. She told me that one of her friends has a behavior chart at home, and Lola had decided that she wanted one, too. "I will find out what kind of girl I am! Am I a GOOD girl or a bad one?" She skipped happily. I joked that we could make a chart for both her and her big sister.

Perhaps I shouldn't have made that joke, because as soon as she got home, Lola got to work making a chart to record her sister's sins. "How do you spell 'snatching'? How do you spell 'whining'?" Lola worked hard to draw good lines and found some little stamps which could be used to record the ills. Nine year-old Iris Uber Alles happened by and decided to interfere.

I knew that the chart was incendiary by design, but Lola was working so hard to draw the boxes neatly and was writing carefully, so I didn't want her work destroyed. I told Iris, who was slashing at her sister with a marker (this resulted in the addition of two new categories of sins, "Dreing [drawing] on Lola" and "Dreing On Mommy"), that she was NOT to mark up the chart Lola was making. Of course Iris grabbed a stamp and snatched away the chart, stamping it at random in a box which would be for a few days in the future, in a category which hadn't been named. Lola, who had been genuinely concentrating and working hard, burst into tears.

I was irked that Iris had deliberately disobeyed me, and I told her to go to her room. Earlier she'd disobeyed by refusing to come downstairs to do her homework at the table, where I could supervise it. Iris slammed upstairs, crying noisily and screaming, "I HATE MOMMY! MOMMY IS BAD!"

Lola carefully created a new chart, adding a new category of 'Hating Mommy" in response to the continuing shouts from above (later adding "and Daddy"). I could imagine that this chart was soon going to be wall-sized.

Lola happily recorded Iris's sins du jour as Snatching, Whining and Complaining, Dreing [drawing] On Lola, and Hating Mommy.

"WHEN WILL DADDY BE HOME? I HATE MOMMY! I ONLY LIKE DADDY!" was heard on and on. However, when her father did arrive, he was not the stalwart ally Iris could have wished. He found the chart hilarious.