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It's been 1099 days today since Olive showed up; not a round number, but a good one. She got more presents for her birthday than on her previous two birthdays combined. Part of it is that her friends gave her presents this year, where previously she was too little to have friends; another part is that this is the first year she's really understood the concept of birthdays. If you asked you a week ago how old she was, she knew the answer was two; ask her now, and she knows the answer is three. She knows about presents, and parties, and cake, and that makes the experience more fun for everyone. Therefore: lots of presents this year.
The standout one of them, that she's probably spent more time with than the rest combined, is a doctor's bag containing toy versions of a bunch of medical equipment. She's already got a detailed script she can put you through: "Daddy, lie down on the couch! You're sick. I am the doctor! Pull up your shirt. I will listen to you." Pulling out her stethoscope, she prods your belly.1 Yesterday, she got into detail in this portion: "I can hear it! Here is some pizza." She moves the stethoscope to another part of my stomach. "And here is your coke2"
Moving on, she gets her thermometer, and sticks it in your ear.3 "Oh no: you have a fever." She turns and rummages in the bag: "Here! A shot for you." Her toy injector has no needle, of course, but she knows to press the tip against your arm and push in the plunger. "Ok! You're all better now."
Honestly, I don't know where she got most of that script; the last time she was sick enough to visit the doctor for anything other than a routine checkup, she was too small to remember anything, and the doctor spoke German at that point anyway. Still, she loves this game, and will dragoon anyone she meets into playing it.
Another part of her growth involves asserting some more independence: these days, when Christina or I tell her that the must (or must not) do something and she wishes otherwise, she'll just tell us so, and try to talk us out of it. German has an incredibly handy word for this: "doch". This just indicates contradiction without implying either the positive or negative stance.4 As might be expected, it's now a pretty favored word in her vocabulary.
This puts me in an odd spot. Part of our family lore is that as a child, I was good at debate, and my parents were willing to debate me; as a result, I talked my way into things that were perhaps not actually good ideas. I loved this, as a kid, and I determined long before Olive ever arrived that I wanted to show the same openness to good ideas from my child that my parents showed to me.
However, Olive doesn't actually have good ideas yet; her desires, a vast majority of the time, involve getting treats, and avoiding going to bed. Her debate strategy is as simple as an infinite willingness to keep telling us "doch." My goal is three-fold: instill in her the belief that persuasive debate is a good way to get what you want, while also keeping the bar for persuasion high, and also ensuring that my view of the appropriate course of action wins out most of the time. Perpetual "doch" is not actually persuasive, so I shut her out most of the time, but she does need to actually win some debates if I want her to keep trying it.
I haven't sorted out a real strategy for this, yet. In the meantime, when she starts repeating "doch" at me, I just tell her "You silly! You're the doch-tor." She doesn't quite get the joke yet, but she giggles anyway.
The toy stethoscope is pretty cheap, and doesn't have appropriate tubing; it can't actually amplify sound, which is too bad. On the other hand, the surface does get appropriately cold, which makes the patient flinch realistically.
It's not that she doesn't have a point: I have somewhat more stomach than someone my height requires, and I do enjoy eating pizza and drinking coke. It was still a bit startling to be called out like that about it.
We've been using an ear thermometer for as long as she remembers, apparently. Despite the toy being shaped like a mouth thermometer, she's never used or apparently seen one of those. It has a nice big bulb on the end, so if she says it's an ear thermometer, we have no reason to object.
The ambiguity goes like this. A: "Yes!" B: "No!" A now has a harder time contradicting B: if they say yes, that can be taken for agreement; if they say no, that can be taken for reversing their original position. Part of learning English, whether as a native speaker or as a second language, is learning how to continue phrasing disagreement. It's easier in German: A: "Ja!" B: "Nein!" At this point, both parties can just say "Doch!" to each other until someone gets bored.