Saying No

Let me be honest.  As a mom, I get tired of saying no.  I say no all the time, mostly because I regularly get asked fairly stupid stuff.
"Mom, can I have pink hair?"
"Mom, can I drive home?"
"Mom, can I have a granola bar?" This being asked as I am three minutes away from putting dinner on the table.
"Mom, can I see your gun?"
"Mom, can it be pajama day at church?"
"Mom, can eat the whole box of Wheat Thins?"
If I weren't so tired, I could probably record seventeen or eighteen more questions that all get answered the same way.  "No."  Pretty much only the tone of voice changes depending on how many times I've been asked the same question over and over, or how desperate one or the other participant in the conversation gets.  There is just a lot of no-saying around here.

Both the children and I are surprised when the answer is yes.  Today, as we were on our way home from swimming at my mom's house (that was a yes!), Blythe said, "Mom, when we get home, can we make cake?"  My instinctual answer is obviously "No," but before I let that negative response pass my lips, I thought to myself, 'Oh, why not?'  There are a number of reasons, but I ignored them and said, "Yes.  We can make cake when we get home."

And so we did.  Blythe got the box out of the basement, the children helped add ingredients, and we whipped it up in no time.  Then I had to say no a whole bunch of times when Blythe asked, "Can we frost the cake now?" when it had been in the oven approximately three minutes, "Can we put the sprinkles on now?" when the cake had been in the oven an additional two minutes, and "Can we have the cake for dinner?"

Fortunately, after much cajoling to eat dinner, mostly because the children both had a granola bar six minutes before I was putting dinner on the table, we were able to prepare the cake for dessert.  Both Brandt and Blythe helped with food coloring (I've never had a deeper shade of blue--Brandt squirted the equivalent of 15 drops of coloring into the frosting), and then they both liberally applied sprinkles.  Brandt especially threw caution to the wind and dumped whole bottles of sprinkles on his cake.  Hey, I had already said yes to sprinkles, so why not let them do their own thing?  It was ridiculous.  There were so many sprinkles, Brandt said, after snarfing his piece of cake, "That tasted kind of funny."

Replied Kent, "It was all the sprinkles."

I will try to look for more opportunities to say yes because, quite frankly, I think we're all tired of "No!"

 

Sprinkles with a bit of cake underneath.

A "YES!" treat.