The Seat Belt Competition

Today is Mr. Sneaky Pants’ last day of being five!  That really has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but Mr. Sneaky Pants is definitely counting down the minutes until his birthday tomorrow.

More than a year ago, Mr. SP and The Banana were incredibly whiny every time we needed to get in the car to go somewhere.  They moaned and complained and carried on in an extremely dramatic fashion whenever it was time to buckle into their seat belts.  At the time The Banana could not buckle herself in, so Ya Ya usually helped her, and Mr. Sneaky Pants would just groan on and on for sometimes 15 minutes, refusing to buckle himself in because it was “too hard.”  It wasn’t really too hard.  He was just throwing a colossal fit.  At some point, Ya Ya developed an amazing coping system that involved having everyone “race” to buckle in when we got in the car.  She and The Banana were a team, and they’d try to beat Mr. SP.

The race certainly speeded up the process greatly, and allowed me to get to where I was going on time occasionally, however, the loser  was often in tears and there was much noisy squabbling and even more drama.  It drove me so crazy that I threatened many times to end the whole affair.  I’m not generally very excited about competition.  Ya Ya saved the day again, however, when she helped all the kidlets come up with a prize system that enabled everyone in the family to “win something” when they had successfully buckled in.  All the prizes are imaginary, and they have evolved and changed over several months.

Currently the first person to buckle in wins an invisible gold medal, second place receives an imaginary silver medal, and third place a bronze.  Just like the Olympics.  But the fun doesn’t stop there.  There are, of course six people in the family.  Fourth place receives a beautiful sparkling glass pendant, but fifth place just gets a plastic disk, and the sixth person to buckle in gets a foam trophy.  Sometimes the imaginary foam trophy has teeth marks all over it, depending on the day.

Let me just say that I rarely win anything but plastic or foam, but I am sometimes able to aspire to glass.