Middle Child

I’m pretty much resigned to diverting any college funding for my second-born to extensive therapy sessions. The classic middle-child has shown us yet once again that she is a mental mess, and our abilities as parents are vaudevillian attempts to lead and educate her to be a well-rounded little person.
Yeah – Delaney is a trip. I need to divulge her recent display of oddity, and I don’t want to hear the adage “Oh, she’s a chip off the ‘ol block” because even when compared to me – this kid is OUT THERE. She LOOKS ok, but that’s pure evil for you. What goes on INSIDE… whoa.
Here’s the tip of the iceberg of evil. Waterfowl. I don’t know why, but the kid has something for them. For a while here ‘Laney has had a fascination with penguins. It started off with death-like abject terror, but then migrated to some type of idolatry. No – it’s got nothing to do the weak-ass hockey team. I’m talking REAL penguins. As parents we used this fear as a tool, getting her to comply with dinner and bath orders with threats of penguin invasions and such. Now she would welcome a large group of penguin visitors, and has been bugging us to visit them at the zoo. But what else?
The next bird of prey would present itself at the breakfast table. Quite non-chalant over her Rice Crispies the Child^TM tells us all about her dream she had that night. She dreamt of a pelican (and probably a large one) that swept down to her, chewed her into pieces, and ate her. Not quite done, the pelican announced that she did not taste good, and promptly spit her out. At that, she smiled, and went about finishing her breakfast, leaving the Wife^TM and I in parental shock.
Dream interpretation? Screw that – I don’t want to know how bad I messed up in parenting. I think we even started previewing the Animal Planet for a while. Visions of Dante’s ninth circle played in my head, and I had to remind myself that the kid just doesn’t or shouldn’t know about that yet. You boil all this down and what do you get? Typical middle child. I really wonder what bird will come out next though…