Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Day One-Hundred Ninety-Nine: Thinking Stinky

No, this post is not about the kitchen area at Saint Street.

No, "Saint Street" is not the hip hangout spot for middle schoolers at my church.

And no, this is not a gross story.

It's often fun to get reports from Robbie about his school. He usually tells Kim when he did something bad during the day. For example, "No hit friends, Robbie sit in stinky chair." We've determined that the "stinky chair" is where the kids have to sit when they are being punished. At home, it's simply "time out." Robbie knows what time out is, where it is, and what it means, and I usually have him tell me what he did to earn time out before I let him up to play again. So, stinky chair = time out. (I always wondered why they would call it the stinky chair, but I figured that small children generally associate stinky either with bad, i.e. stinky food, or shame, i.e. stinky diaper, so I just sort of went with it)

The other day, Kim went to pick Robbie up from day care and found that he had a bit of a black eye. She asked what had happened, and Robbie said that you don't climb on the house or else you go to the stinky chair. The day care worker explained to Kim that Robbie had climbed on one of those three-foot-high plastic houses and fallen off, and in addition to majorly conking his head, he had to sit for a few minutes alone in the thinking chair.

The thinking chair. You know, where they can sit and think about what they've done wrong.

And suddenly, that one small corner of my world made so much more sense.