She Turned Down Ice Cream. She’s Two.

2y 5m

We’re regulars at a massage parlor in Siem Reap. We’ve been going for over a year and the manager loves Cami. Genuinely loves her. The kind of love where she asks where Cami is if I show up without her and the question isn’t a joke.

On this particular visit I brought Cami by after my appointment. I stayed in the tuk tuk out front and let the manager take her inside. I could see them the whole time. 

After a few minutes I watched the manager walk into the gelato shop next door with Cami in her arms. I stayed in the tuk tuk and waited.

They came back out with a bottle of water. When they got back to the tuk tuk the manager told me she had offered to buy Cami some gelato and Cami said no.

We’re both lactose intolerant. We’ve talked about it the way we talk about everything, honestly, in the moment, connecting the dots when they’re there to connect. Ice cream is a sometimes food and she knows why. We hadn’t had that conversation that particular day. There was no reminder, no prompt, no me standing next to her guiding the answer.

She already knew. And when the moment came, she made the call herself. That’s not a rule she was following. That’s something she had internalized and made her own. The foundation was solid and I didn’t even have to be in the room to know it.

The unfiltered version of these stories lives in my emails. That’s where I say the things I hold back here. 

If you’re looking for a simple starting point, I put together a free guide on building vocabulary through everyday moments. You can start with that here.

If you’d like to read more, you can find my book, Your Daughter Is Weird…, here.