It looks like a wiener

Yesterday evening my daughters, ages 8 & 6, found an old pack of balloons somewhere in the house and were bound and determined to blow them up. While I was busy folding laundry in the same room I could hear the sounds of little girls without experience trying to blow up some very small balloons…

Whuuuh… whuuuh… whuuuh…

It was obvious they weren‘t getting any results.

Whuuuuuuuh… whuuuuuuuuh… whuuuuuuuuuuh…

Still, nothing.

I wanted to stay on task and get the laundry done and out of the way. It isn’t good having a huge basket of clothes sitting in your living room just waiting for someone to run into while they’re carrying a beverage or liquidy food item and not paying much attention, and then discover you have to rewash the basket’s contents when you still need to get a few hundred other things done before you pass out for the night. But I could sense their frustration. So what’s a mother to do?

I scolded them for getting into the balloons, of course.

I should’ve just ignored them. Their reaction, since Mom was too busy to take and put away the balloons, was to continue on with even more determination. And after about a minute or two, my youngest daughter began to shed tears, as if that was going to change my mind about the situation.

“I can’t do it,” she cried.

Okay, it worked. I sighed, and told her to keep trying. That made her cry even more.

“I can’t do it, I just can’t.”

She had pulled me into her corner and I was rooting for her, but now she was going to just, give up?

“Don’t be a quitter,” I said. “Keep trying.”

After a few more minutes, a breakthrough. They both had managed to get just a teensy bit of air into their balloons. Suddenly their sadness turned to smiles. Their disappointment turned into confidence. And before long, little balloons were zipping around the room. Ffffffffffffftttt. They kept blowing them up and letting them go. Oh, the fun. Oh, the amusement.

When I finished up my chore the younger one was holding her inflated balloon, preparing it for take off. It had now grown to a whole 4 inches long and 1 ½ inches in diameter. It had funny bumps in it after being repetitively inflated and deflated.

The older one looked at it and said, “It looks like a wiener.”

I said, “Hey - what?”

“What!?!”

She said, “You know, it looks like a hot dog after being cooked on the grill.”

“Oh.”