Tuesday, June 11, 2013

The Miracle of Lollypops

My kids totally dig lollipops  I am sure part of the appeal is that they are only given pops in times of desperation - doctor visits, flights, etc. This is a deliberate strategy to keep the value high.

This weekend we were at Terry's niece's graduation. A class of 500+ students (larger than my entire high school!) called for a large venue, so it was at the Giant Arena in Hershey. It was loooong. You'd think it would take a while to hand out all those diplomas, but that was actually the speediest part of the day. Zoltan of course got antsy but we could get him out to the part of the stadium where there's concessions, bathrooms etc. Alex, however, was the model child she always is whenever we're in public. She sat in her seat, sometimes watching and listening to what was going on, sometimes coloring or having a snack. The only time she got up in the 3 hours of the ceremony was when I encouraged her to go to the potty so we wouldn't have any issues when we sat in parking lot traffic at the end.

Not suspecting the ceremony would go so long, we had been a bit too parsimonious with the snacks. So, by the time we were sitting in aforementioned traffic an hour past normal lunch time and creeping up to nap time, the kids were understandably crabby.

I had a glimmer of a possibility, and ransacked my purse to come up with 2 lollipops. Instant happiness.

About 2 minutes after handing over the pops, I noticed Zoltan's eyes were closed, with the pop dangling out of his mouth. Apparently, at least one kid would get a nap!

We've been thrilled to discover that Zoltan does actually have the ability to sleep in the car, an ability his sister lacks and has always lacked. The unfortunate part is that he usually wakes disoriented and unhappy and there's nothing very soothing we can do as we're all seatbelted and such. But, on this day, when he woke about 1/2 hour later, this happened:  he opened his eyes, took the lollipop out of his mouth, looked at it, smiled and put it back in his mouth. Easy-peasy.

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