Literalism

Nicholas hasn't quite figured out metaphors yet.

On Tuesday, I picked him up from school mid-morning to run him to a doctor's appointment (by the way, he's fine). When we got back to his classroom, everyone was mid-play, and he did not want me to leave. He grabbed me by the hand and walked me around to various stations, showing me around (which I suspect he also wanted to do).

At this point I hadn't been to work yet at all, and was a bit anxious to get going. I also didn't want to give in to what seemed like a little separation anxiety. So after about five minutes, as he was leading me to yet another station, I said, "Okay, Nicholas, I'll look at one more thing but then I'm going to rip off the Band-Aid."

He immediately started looking at his body trying to figure out where the bandage was that I was about to forcibly remove.* Oops. I then compounded the problem by saying "It's a metaphor!!" which made his teacher laugh, but only further confused him.

[* Note: To be fair to Nicholas, it would have been logical coming from the doctor's office to have gotten a band-aid of some kind. Though we didn't on this trip.]

Something similar happened just this morning. We were going through our morning routine, and trying to keep him on task so we could go run our errands. So I started to go through what he had to do: "Step 1," do X; "Step 2," do Y.

His response? To stomp around the room chanting, "Step 1! Step 2! Step 3!"

Sigh. He'll figure it out eventually.