One of the parental challenges that has surprised me is getting the boys to be willing to hold my hand. There are lots of situations where you need to have a hold of the little guys, and you really don’t want each of those to be a battle. C, as you may have guessed, tends to rebel pretty much whenever you ask him to do anything. This means that every “hold my hand” occasion carries the risk of battle.

As usual, I’ve found that there are lots of approaches. There’s the “hold my hand or you’re in big trouble”, the “I’m so hurt you don’t want to hold my hand”, the “you’re being silly – we always hold hands”, and the ever-popular “hold my hand because if you don’t, I’m going to hold your ear”

A few months back, Nana was faced with this problem and she tried one I hadn’t heard before. She reached out her hand and said “c’mon. Hold my hand so I don’t get lost.” C looked at her for a second and then reached up and grabbed her hand with an “It’s okay, Nana. You won’t get lost.”

I was quite impressed. So much so, in fact, that that I wrote it down as a potential daddytale. However, this past weekend, something happened that gave it a different flavor.

As we were walking to the monorail at Disney, C went over and grabbed his little brother’s hand. “We have to hold hands, okay?”

N was not inclined to agree, but C persisted, saying “Hold my hand so I don’t get lost. Okay? Hold my hand so I don’t get lost.”

N looked at him, sort of shrugged, and they held hands while they walked. They held them for a pretty long time – all the way to the monorail, in fact.

Their mom, of course, was all but crying: “Look! Look! That’s so…sniffle…so cute! Oh, doesn’t it just make your heart break!”

Me, I’m thinking that C is using something he heard once over three months ago.

Three Months Ago.

That was, essentially, a throw away line that his Nana used once when they were walking. What else has he heard? What else have we said? Is he really remembering and storing up everything he’s heard for the past 3 months?

Yikes.