Menorah Meltdown

Anyone else have a seven-year-old who thinks he’s seventeen?

Ben has attitude. Not all the time, but often enough. And really, from a seven-year-old once in a blue moon is often enough, thank you very much. Attitude!! Pretty sure I didn’t start with the attitude until I was at least twelve. Right Mom? Mom??

It started with giving Ben me a hard time about the clothes that he wears to school. He decided that he doesn’t like striped shirts. No reason given, just doesn’t like them. That’s just great, because guess what? Target had a fantastic sale on cute striped shirts this fall. I bought Ben three of them. And they still fit. Guess who has to wear his striped shirts? Did you say Ben? You’d be right!

Next was jeans. Ben just says no to jeans. And cargo pants, because they are too much like jeans, at least according to Ben. He likes track pants, but not on any day with outdoor recess, which is everyday unless it rains. Why not for outdoor recess? Because track pants are too cold in December.

Pretty soon, he’s going to go to school in the Emperor’s New Clothes. How would that feel during outdoor recess?

Then yesterday, Ben told me to relax. Relax! No doubt, I need to relax sometimes. No secret there, but my seven-year-old doesn’t get to tell me that.

We were getting the candles ready on our Menorah (we are holiday equal-opportunists in our home), when I pulled out what I thought was a full box of candles.

“Hmmm…” I said looking in the box. “Looks like we won’t have enough candles. I’ll need to get more.”

Ben walked over to the counter and peeked in the box, “There are more than eight candles in there. Relax.”

RELAX?!!!!

I whirled around, smoke pouring from my ears: “WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?!”

Ben took one look at the lasers shooting from my eyes and said, “I’m sorry Mommy! I won’t say that again.”

You bet you won’t!! Actually, he probably will say it again and much worse, but let’s not go there right now.

“Ben, count the candles. How many do we need tonight?

Ben looked at the Menorah. “We need four,” he said counting three nights and one candle to light them all.

“What about tomorrow night? How many will we need?”

“We’ll need five.”

“That’s right,” I replied. “Now, what is four plus five?”

“Nine,” Ben added.

“Good,” I thought, let’s get some math out of this. “In two nights, we’ll need six candles. What is nine plus six?”

Ben counted in his head, “Fifteen.”

And on it went until we came to the last night. We needed 39 candles in all to last us through to the eighth night of Hanukah.

“Okay, now how many candles do we have?” I spilled our box out onto the kitchen table.

Ben put the candles back in the box, counting each one-by-one. Nicholas, who has been equally naughty lately and could use some brownie points with the Big Man in the North Pole, came to help.

They counted 27 candles.

“We need 39 candles. We only have 27 candles. Do we have enough candles?”

“No,” Ben replied sheepishly.

“Right. And should you have told me to relax?”

“No Mommy.”

Lesson learned? Probably not. An hour or so later, I asked Ben to clear his things off the kitchen table for supper. He snarkishly replied, “It’s not all mine!”

At least he didn’t tell me to relax.

xo Naomi