Sparkle Girl’s Socks
The other day, Sparkle Girl was sitting at the kitchen table while Garnet and I were talking about a sensitive topic. I stopped to tell Sparkle Girl not to say anything about this to other people.
OK, she said.
As I was thinking about it later, I decided that the context of telling her not to say anything to anyone was ambiguous enough that she might think that I was encouraging her to lie.
It seemed best to clarify the point when I the time seemed right. That moment arrived the next day.
We were sitting next to each other on the couch in the living room. Before I launched into my little lecture, I asked Sparkle Girl what socks she was wearing.(She was wearing boots so I couldn’t tell.)
Why, you might ask, was I interested in her socks?
Sparkle Girl’s socks are one of the things I check when I pull out the Cute-O-Meter before she goes off to school. She has a good color sense and she usually picks out socks that complement some other element of her outfit.
It was the weekend so her socks hadn’t come up earlier in the day, and I was curious. More particularly, I was wondering whether she was wearing her hot-pink socks.
One day a while back, it occurred to me that I had seen her wearing those hot-pink socks just the day before. When I asked, she acknowledged that she had not only worn them the day before but also the day before that, too, because she likes them so much.
Naturally, Garnet and I immediately launched into a lecture about how you can’t wear socks day after day, that you need to put them in the wash.
OK, Sparkle Girl had said.
Back to the couch: She told me that she was wearing a pair of white socks. Without any prompting from me, she added that she hadn’t worn them yesterday.
That made me smile.
I launched into my lecture about telling the truth. I said that, if someone asked her about the topic that Garnet and I had been discussing, she certainly should tell the truth but that it can be OK not to bring something up. I added that, sometimes, you do have to bring up stuff up even when you didn’t want to.
I circled back around to highlight certain points and was just wrapping it up, when she burst out with, “All right! All right! I wore these socks the day before yesterday.”
