Slow Down. Take Your Time. Please.

Maddy tends to talk to us from the back seat while we are in the car. A lot. I don’t mean she really likes to talk, which she does. I mean she really talks a lot. Sometimes, I’ll admit, that I don’t catch every word of everything she says. Tonight as we were making our way home from picking Luke up from work she said something that stopped Luke and I mid-conversation.

“Mama, I’m lookin’ forward to talkin’ like a grown-up.”

Luke and I both stopped talking. I don’t know what Luke was thinking, but I was suddenly worried that my slips with adult language were not going unnoticed by the little ears in my house.

“When will I be an grown-up? Will I be a grown-up tomorrow, Mama?”

“Oh no, Honey. You won’t be a grown-up for a while. You get to be a kid for a long while and have fun and play.”

“But Mama, I want to be grown-up like you and Daddy.”

Luke and I could only look at each other shaking our head. It’s exactly what we do not want to hear.

I want her to have a nice long childhood before moving onto her pre-teen and teen years, which in a perfect world would also be lengthy and free of adult-ness. I don’t want her to be in a rush to grow up. I don’t want the things around her to move her through the stages of her life faster than necessary. This desire is one reason Luke and I joke about buying a large plot of land in some secluded place and then homeschooling her without the influence of MTV, cable TV or the Internet. Little House on the Prairie style all the way.

So of course Luke and I started listing off all the things about adulthood that are not so fun. Mortgages. Work. Laundry. Bills. Responsibilities. Responsibilities. Responsibilities.

That’s when Maddy added her own item to our list.

Eating cereal in the kitchen. Which is obviously an awesome part of adulthood?

This morning she asked me why Luke and and I sometimes eat our cereal in the kitchen standing up instead of in the dinning room at the table. I explained that sometimes grown-ups need to eat while they are doing other things like packing their lunch for work or getting things together for the day.

I guess that sounded pretty exciting to her.

Also exciting to Maddy? Being tall enough to reach the high cabinets in the kitchen so that she can get her own vitamins. So guess we’re safe in saying she isn’t interested in rushing into adulthood so she can use some of that adult language that I might let slip sometimes.

She never did say why she wants to talk like an adult. We got a little sidetracked talking about things like eating cereal standing up and doling out your own vitamins. She most likely meant that she wanted to be apart of the conversation taking place between the occupants of the front seat and not so much the occupant in the back. She probably wants to weigh in on Mommy’s recap of what drama happened today on Twitter.Which would make her 10x more interested in it than Luke.

Either way I just wish my three-year-old would stop rushing to grow up so fast. She should be happy to let me handle all the grown-up issues while she plays with her herd of stuffed puppy dogs, train table and dress up clothes.