Big Pancakes

There's something both awesomely wonderful and awesomely terrifying about the autonomy that Simon has begun to show.  He's not quite two and a half, and he's already begun to turn into a real boy.

Up until pretty recently, he's been pretty much a parrot and a yes-man.  He would often reply, "OK" to almost any demand or request, and would obediently do whatever we would command him to do.  At some point, like every human who has escaped the yoke of oppression, he suddenly realized that he can have his own opinion.  And like every American who finds their way to an online political forum, he discovered that he can assert this opinion, even if it is wholly misinformed or simply factually incorrect.


This is exhibited in areas that I imagine are quite common among parents - informing me that it's currently not actually naptime at all and asking/demanding that crackers and granola bars constitute 100% of his diet - but it also appears in a different (more surreal) way.

Sometimes, I'll be reading a book to Simon and he'll correct me.  Except that he'll correct me with a word that is often incorrect.  For example, we were reading one of his current favorites - Pancakes, Pancakes - and the first page has a rooster crowing: Kee-ke-ri-kee!

I read the first line and Simon said, "It's not a rooster.  It's just a roost."  I paused, then asserted that it was, indeed, a rooster.  I pointed to the word - rooster - as if he could read and that this was solid proof that I was right.  "No, it's just a roost," he said again.  He was starting to get a bit agitated.

At this point, I have no idea what to do.  Should I push the point and insist that he agree with me?  After all, I was right.  It did say rooster.  It was a rooster.  Nobody I know calls that animal a roost.  I don't want Simon to grow up thinking it's OK to call that animal a roost, and end up getting chastised and/or ridiculed in school because of it.  I can see it now; Simon coming home in tears halfway through first grade, as he shouts, "It's called a rooster, daddy! Why didn't anyone tell me?!"  I tried, kid.  Just not hard enough.

But.  But.  I felt in my heart that Simon knew what he was saying.  He knew that animal was called a rooster - he had called it a rooster countless times.  He was just - to use Internet comment-speak - trolling me.  And the more I argued with him, the more angry he'd get, and the more likely it'd be that this naptime story would become the intro to Crying Time Station, afternoon edition.

So I let it go.  I turned the page, ignoring the fact that we had just had an argument about whether a rooster was called a rooster.  There were bigger battles to fight, after all.  I mean, what if Simon suddenly decides he wants to be a Cleveland Browns fan?  I shudder to even think of such a world.