Toddlers are funny little creatures. For a while there, that the standard greeting among the three year-old set changed from a boisterous "hi!" to a quick hello followed by a rundown of owies; both real and imagined.
Each little nick or scratch is considered a badge of honour and much back-and-forth ensures about how the owie happened and how much it hurt.
Then last week, I cut myself while slicing onions and had to put on a bandaid. That was a revelation for Toddler. I'd been purposely hiding bandaids up until then. I knew full well that a bandaid married two of Toddlers most favourite things in the whole wide world: owies and stickers. Worse, the bandaids I had were pink. When I bought them a year ago, I had NO IDEA that Toddler would be into princesses and that she'd associate light pink with princess things.
With great hesitation, I pulled out a princess owie sticker. Toddler was so excited.
For a week Toddler tried her best to convince me that she needed an owie sticker. I told her that they're used to stop bleeding or to cover up a cut, not for decoration. She's not happy about that explanation and has been going to impressive lengths to con me out of the box ever since.
Fast forward to Saturday. The weather was fantastic so we decided to hop in the plane and fly to Seward for an afternoon at the SeaLife Center.
Hunter had the plane attached to the generator to warm up the engine. He and Toddler were busy untying the plane's tail and wings and taking off its snow covers and I got to work unplugging the generator and lifting it into the back of Hunter's truck.
I couldn't get the tailgate down so I decided to lift the generator up and rest it on the top of the tailgate, then lower it down into the truck. It was a great plan, so I thought. Sadly, I wound up crashing the generator on a finger as I brought it down on the tailgate. I still don't really know how I managed to do that.
As I danced around and tried my best not to let obscenities fly, I realized that a bandaid might make it better, even though I wasn't cut or bleeding. It would keep me from looking at my poor squished finger and pathetically over-analyzing the extend of the damage. Out of sight, a little less out of mind.
One of the mantras of parenting is consistency and walking the talk. So yeah, no princess owie sticker for me. I spent a lovely flight to Seward watching my finger nail turn a lovely shade of pink (ooo, a princess nail!) and sizing up all my nurse friends to decide who I'd call to help me fix the pressure that Hunter was sure was going to hurt like nothing else later that day.
Luckily, I didn't have to call a nurse friend. I don't have a princess nail anymore, I have a purple one. I might have to amend the owie sticker rule to include ugly injuries you don't want to look at.