thank you notes

Henry frequently asks "how will --- feel when --- happens?"

Like many of his Henryisms, I think this has grown out of therapists asking him for so many years to predict an emotion.

If he is proud of a school assignment he is working on, he will say "what will Miss Emily think when she sees my homework?"  Wanting me to tell him that she will be happy, or proud.  And if it should happen that he hasn't finished his work or doesn't know the answer, he'll ask the same question and I'll tell him that maybe his teacher will be disappointed, or that he or she will understand once he asks them for assistance.

One evening over winter break Henry was asking me what the plan was for the following day.  This is another frequent conversation of ours.  He always wants to know what is on the agenda for the next day, and the next.  Since it was during the holidays, we didn't have a lot on our agenda, so I started rambling on about things we might or should do.  "Maybe we'll write your thank you notes" I said.

"How will you feel when I write my thank you notes?" he asked.

"Oh, I'll be proud of you for writing them" I replied.

"How did you feel last time I wrote my thank you notes?"

This was a new twist.  But I absentmindedly rambled with it.  "hmmm well, I don't think we wrote any thank you notes for your birthday gifts, whoops.  But I'm sure last Christmas when you wrote them I was proud of you."

He asked again "how did you feel last year when I wrote my thank you notes?"

Obviously I had answered incorrectly somehow, so I rephrased.  "I was proud of you for writing them."

This time he looked me right in the eye and, like you would to someone NOT getting your point, repeated slowly "how did you FEEL the LAST time I wrote thank you notes?"

And then I remembered: last year at Christmastime, Henry did NOT want to write those damn thank you notes.  But I made him do it.  We had typed out a note with blanks so he just had to fill in the person's name and what they had given him.  He argued every step of the way and then purposely wrote the wrong thing in one of the blanks.  I forget what it was now, but he wrote the wrong name or wrong gift, very purposely, looking at me the whole time.  And I freaked out and SCREAMED at him.

And he remembered it all year.

You know how sometimes you yell at your kid and then feel bad afterwards, but tell yourself that they have already forgotten it?  Ugh.

But, his thank you notes are already written this year.  He scribbled them out on tiny scraps of notebook paper, all in one sitting.  With no arguing.  So maybe "avoiding a mom freakout" is motivational after all.