Today I was reminded of the fact that we learn by associating. It hurt. Though it was also quite fun. The story goes like this:
Sofia likes to show her affection, towards favorite people and things, by slamming them with her hand. For very special people, she likes to squeeze their nose, as hard has she can. Naturally we try to show her that affection is better shown in more gentle ways. So far we have been only partially successful. She does not poke your eye with her finger anymore, which is a good thing.
More recently I tried to show her that it hurts when she squeezes my nose that my eyes are shedding water. So I always say very firmly “Aua!!”, underlining it with a face in pain. Coming to the fun part of the story, today I squeezed her finger in the door (by accident) and I sat down with her to comfort her. It turned out it wasn’t all that bad and she started to run off, when I said “Do you have an ‘Aua’? Does it hurt?”. At that moment, she turned around, ran back to me and firmly squeezed my nose. She had a face full of happiness and affection. I am glad she likes me so much!
Ah, I wish I had been there! Should I be waiting to see if she will squeeze my nose in Florida? I’m so happy to see a new blog post! Sofia is so beautiful and dear! Love from a not-at-all-prejudiced Nana.
Elek has a a “painful association” as well! It started right befor he turned 2. He loves to pinch, but it is solely out of affection for the receiving party. His favorite location is the neck and he’ll take a little piece of skin and sort of roll it between his two fingers. Now this isn’t so much painful as it is dreadfully annoying.Whenever he gets within arms reach of you he grabs for the neck. We have tried to break him of this using every method we can think of and have yet to succeed. Sigh. He will be 4 next week and does not seem detered in his choice of affection demonstration. We find ourselves joking that he will need to find a very patient wife with a very thick neck!