Tales of life with a girl on the go

Like most families, we have established a “Daddy’s spot”, “Reid’s spot” and “Mama’s spot” at the table. Ever since Ken rearranged us because, he said, Reid and I picked at each other when we sat on the same side, Reid has sat at the end and Ken and I sit opposite her. When guests come over, Reid always has a vision of who should be sitting where. I suspect that she read etiquette books at daycare. When Aunty Amanda come to visit, she sits at the end of the table opposite Reid. That chair is the obvious guest chair. It is when we have more than 4 people at the table that things get rather odd. Grandma Joyce always get the guest chair if she is present but the other person gets placed according to Reid’s whim with the problematic condition: Reid likes to assign the fifth person to sit next to Ken. Reid sees some merit in having the 6’2″ guy sharing the side of a table with someone that escapes Ken and me.

Reid has been reassigning our places at the table lately. I’m not sure why she has decided to switch things up since she is generally pretty insistent on each of us being in our regular spots. We indulge her in this because for much of her daily life, Reid doesn’t have control over what happens to her and it just doesn’t matter where we sit as long as there are chairs and food. The main problem with the situation is that Reid can be so sl-o-o-o-w to come to the table to make her decisions. Add this to her concerns about who gets which pasta bowl, not to mention a generalize before-meal hunger, it can be kind of stressful.

For some reason, since I started drafting this, Reid asked me who would sit in the chair at the opposite end from hers when she is a grownup. We considered the matter, wondering whether Reid had an expectation for my answer, and proposed that when Reid is a grown up, she might get married and then her husband could sit there. You’ll remember that Reid sometimes doesn’t like to imagine being grown up and so I waited for her reaction. There pretty much wasn’t one. She nodded and then moved on to some other brain teaser that is de rigeur in life with a child.

You should come to Ottawa, Reid will choose a good spot at our table for you.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 12:18 am and is filed under Daddy, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.