file under: awesome

Zane, my little Bee-Gee, has quite the curly mane. He hates, hates, *hates* it when he gets out of the bath and I comb his hair. Dianna is convinced that I have forgotten what having hair feels like, so I'm too rough with him when I comb his hair. Whatever.

Tonight I told Zane that he was being ridiculous when he was carrying on about my combing the knots in his hair out after his bath.

He said, very seriously, "Daddy go to tiiiiime up (out)."

[A little context here - Zane has carted his terrible twos well into his threes, so we do time-outs when he is out of control and can't calm down. Getting upset does no good when he's incapable of processing it. The gist of the time-out is that he has to sit in a particular chair for three minutes, and can't touch the floor. Of course, he contorts himself like an olympic gymnast to get his foot as close to the floor as possible when we're watching, and when he's really pissed he taps the floor with a smug look on his face.

To counter this we've come up with the concept of the 'penalty box', which is a box that a favorite toy will go into if he doesn't sit calmly for the remainder of his time out. Once a toy is in the penalty box, it takes 24 hours to get the toy back. He usually chills when you drop the penalty box in front of him and threaten putting 'Air Force One' or 'motorcycle' or 'purple bug' away (the kid has about ten thousand toys, so I am not sure why this form of punishment works). Probably too much information about our parenting style here, but important background. Now back to the story]

"Uh, Zane, you think I deserve a time out for trying to prevent you from growing dreadlocks? I dream of shaving your head to avoid this nightly ritual".

"Daddy go to tiiiiime up. If daddy touch floor, Zane put Daddy's computer in pennnnalTEE bocks".

Awesome. He's been on fire with the funny lately.