Olivia and the Sunscreen

I've really been struggling lately with Olivia, our three-year-old. Everyone keeps saying that her behavior is that of a typical three-year-old, but that doesn't make me dislike it any less. Olivia's latest method of acting out is to do the exact opposite of what we tell her to do. Sometimes, she simply looks directly at us with a smirk on her face, and then does what we just told her not to do. Sometimes, she qualifies her disobedience with "I'm just..." An example: we tell Olivia to quit clobbering her sister, June, over the head with a toy. Olivia's response is: "I'm just giving the toy to June." Or we tell Olivia to stop climbing into the dryer while we're trying to shift a load a laundry, and she responds, "I just have to check something out in it." This sort of thing instantaneously sets my blood pressure to "through-the-roof."

In my many rants when she has openly defied either me or the Mrs., I have predicted that one day, we'll tell Olivia not to do something for her own safety, and she'll do it anyway, winding up getting hurt in the process.

Today, that prognostication came true.

It is in the low 90's today in Central Indiana, with humidity of about 99.99%. I'd estimate the heat index to be roughly 12,472 degrees. Celsius. It's freakin' hot. And I hate the heat and humidity with an indescribable passion. How I survived living in Texas for ten years is a complete mystery. At any rate, Olivia wanted to swim in her plastic swimming pool. So she changed into her swimsuit, I went out to our storage building and got the pool (and, incidentally, it's about twelve billion degrees hotter in the storage shed than it is outside), put the pool in the yard, dragged the garden hose over to it, turned on the water, cleaned up a week's worth of dog poop in the yard (and our dog enjoys taking little walks while he's pooping, so it was like going on the world's nastiest Easter egg hunt in downtown Hell), got the patio umbrella up, got all the pool toys out of the storage shed, and got Olivia sprayed with SPF 90,000 sunscreen. As I'm spraying her with sunscreen, I tell her not to rub her eyes because her hands have sunscreen on them, and it will make her eyes burn.

Naturally, the very next thing Olivia does is announce that "I'm just gonna rub them real quick." But Daddy saw that one coming and was prepared with the arm block. I tell Olivia again that the sunscreen on her hands is going to burn her eyes if she rubs them, and I instruct her to go to the pool and wash her hands off in the water to get the excess sunscreen off.

Olivia then walks over to the pool, dips a microscopic portion of one of her toes into the water, and announces that it's too cold. I'm standing there, drenched in sweat from being outside for twenty minutes in what feels like a Brazilian rain forest, with my mouth hanging open. She's been nagging me about the pool for two hours, we've spent close to thirty minutes getting everything ready, and now she doesn't want to get in the pool?! Are you freakin' KIDDING me?!

So I walk over to the pool and put my hands in the water. "Feels pretty darn good to me!" I start to tell Olivia, when she begins crying and saying, "Ouchy ouchy ouchy ouchy." What has she done in the five seconds that I wasn't looking directly at her? Rubbed her eyes. We go back inside before I pass out from heat stroke, and you'd think she was having her eyes torn out by rabid monkeys, the way she was crying. (Fortunately, June didn't awaken from her nap that she was taking at the time.) Her crying, though, being only theatrical in nature, wasn't producing any tears. And I knew I wasn't going to convince her to sit still for me to put in some eye drops. So I came up with a strategy forged by years of being a Boy Scout and years of being a probation officer.

As a Boy Scout, I've learned first aid. As a probation officer, I've learned how to make people cry.

Olivia is very dramatic and needy. So as she's giving her Oscar award-worthy performance, I just crossed my arms and stared at her. She held her arms up for me to pick her up, and I calmly said, "No." That stopped the performance, and in a moment that seemed to last forever, she gave me a look like I had just broken her heart into a thousand pieces. What I didn't let on was that she was doing the same to me with that look. (I've also learned how to keep a poker face from my years as a probation officer.) But then the real waterworks started. Olivia cried and cried and cried, tears flowing from her eyes in a river of sorrow that her daddy is so cruel. Meanwhile, of course, those tears were flushing out the sunscreen. After a minute or two, Olivia realized that her eyes didn't burn anymore. She's now happily playing in her room.

I don't get the impression that Olivia learned anything from this experience like, "Listen to Mommy and Daddy, and do what we tell you to do." Hopefully, she will learn that someday. And hopefully she won't get seriously injured before she learns it.

No, what I suspect Olivia learned from this is that her daddy is a cold, heartless s.o.b. and that if she really wants some comfort, she'll have to wait for Mommy to get home from work. And I suspect that this won't be the last thing that I do for her own good, for which she resents me.