A Good Little Citizen

I've decided that is what sums up Skeetie. A good little citizen. I would venture to say, a model citizen.

As mentioned before, Bea is more the quiet, pensive type. Partly due to her innate personality, and if appropriate for G & I to take credit, partly due to her parents (not sticking her in daycare.)

Let me list some of her attributes:

• She sits nicely in her chair at the table, carefully eating her food. We believe she has already learned to savor the tastes and textures.
• She doesn't participate in random acts of screaming. Before I even had a kid that was one thing I could not STAND--when kids randomly start running around screaming for no reason. It's rather annoying.
• She doesn't destroy everything in her path. Skeets actually comprehends "no touchie" and responds. Skeets gives the appearance of respting other people's houses. For instance, she will unroll the toilet paper at home, but will not at our friends' houses.

She's just an all-around well-mannered little kid. Quite impressive for 16 mo. Bearing in mind this is her mother singing her praises.

To be honest I didn't realize how good she was until I was exposed to our acquaintances' son. Hopefully his anonymity will be effective enough so as to not ruin a my professional relationship with his mother. If not, that's fine, we don't really care for them anyway. So I'll refer to the little guy as Charlie.

Charlie is around Skt's age, but he has a really big head and an unnatural amount of hair. If you put pointed ears on him he'd very closely resemble a hobitt or troll. Although his mother insists he talks in full sentences, I've never heard him utter anything other than grunts or growls. He just stalks around the room grunting. But perhaps most endearing is how when we are eating he makes his way to the table, plants his stocky little hands on the table, tilts his head back, opens his mouth and growls and until his mother drops food into his mouth. Highly disturbing. It's like feeding a dog scraps, only Frau has better manners than Charlie. Meanwhile Skeets is sitting nicely in her chair enjoying crepes.

Charlie is also very aggressive and destructive. I have witnessed him single-handedly destroy our friends' living room, including expensive equipment, while his mother smiled upon him lovingly. He has tossed candles, bitten through glass bulbs, and broken cabinets. If Skeets has something he wants, he stalks over, grabs it and eats it - especially if its non-edible. Bea honestly just looks at him increduloulsy and vacates the premises. Sometimes she runs to Frau for cover. As expected, Charlie's mom will make a show of telling him electrical outlets are "dangerous. No, Charlie. Danger." What the hell Woman?! We all know he's never heard that word cross your lips before. She clearly does it for the appearance of discipline. Charlie usually just growls, then runs over to a corner to squat down, grunt and poop.

To further the contrast, Charlie also engages in random acts of screaming, for no valid reason. He will be skulking along and all of a sudden let out a whooping war cry. Over, and over, and over. Maybe this is the full sentence in which his dear mother refers. I've seen poor Skeetie jump out of her hide when he randomly screams next to her. Once again, runs to Frau for cover.

I don't mean to pick on the kid. I know its mostly not his fault; it's his parents' complete failure to set any boundaries. Besides, we don't really need a horribly-behaved child to reinforce the fact that Beatrice is model citizen.