Up, Up, and Away

If you are an experienced observer of what makes children do the things they do...you will be able to see "what's wrong with this picture" right away.  Obviously prior to this incident, it had not crossed my mind but Lynda noticed immediately.

So let me set the scene for you.  Lynda is nine years old.  We were living in Batesville and Kevin was just about a year old.  The cute blond is dressed in a cute pink jumpsuit made by her Grandmother Anderson (Nana-Hot) and if you could see more closely you would most likely see a big safety pin through the zipper and covered in duct tape to prevent, no slow down her pulling on the neck and popping the zipper out.  She is actually still wearing her sandals and usually she played out in the yard with her "things" until she got tired or thirsty and came to the back door and knocked.  It was pretty awesome that we had "graduated" to this level of independence. She didn't put dirt or grass in her mouth (usually) and most of the time she came in looking pretty much like she did when she went out.  Still, I didn't take my eyes off of her very often and these pictures were made looking out the den window. 

So in the first picture what do you see?  Well, first there is a rose bush that I hadn't planted but we had pulled away from the fence so she didn't try to play with it through the fence.  But the biggie is the blue wading pool that had been in the backyard and I just threw over the side before she went out to the yard to play.  Now you would think that after parenting Lynda for about four years or so by now I'd have realized what a temptation that was going to be but in my defense I did have a one year old son I was nursing so it wasn't like I had a lot of spare time on my hands to run through all of the possible scenarios.  LOL  This WAS a no brainer though.  There is water.  There is Lynda.  So I went out and moved the wading pool.  Problem solved.  Nope.  Lynda had learned how to scale the chain linked fence and challenges were always fun.  She had tremendous upper body strength.  Heck, she had tremendous strength period so hoisting herself over a chain link fence was a piece of cake (another one of Lynda's favorite things).

Life was never the same after that day.  We did finally get her attention focused back on the inside of the fence instead of the greener grass beyond her fence but it took a while.  That lesson from Lynda taught me something I've used ever since and helped me as I worked on becoming a behavior analyst in recent years.  I can look at a scene now and quickly see the opportunities for my agenda to be overridden by my students (especially those on the autism spectrum).  Understand though this never gave me the advantage to get ahead of Lynda. When I got close... she just changed the rules.