Ugly Babies and Old Maids

The thought process of a 4-year-old can be....interesting. Here are two examples from just the last week. For her birthday, Lily was given the card game, Old Maid. Most games we'd played up to this point had a single winner (Memory, Candy Land, etc.). Old Maid, on the other hand, is really more about not being the loser. So the other day, she and I sat down for a game of Old Maid. I dealt out the cards and we started. As we had fewer and fewer cards in our hands, I realized there was still an even number of cards in play. Now think about this for a second: Old Maid is all about making matches and the one with the Old Maid loses. An even number of cards means they should all match up. I knew I didn't have the Old Maid, so I cheated a little and asked Lily to see her cards.

Me: Lily, where's the Old Maid?

Lily: I took her out.

Me: Why?

Lily: If you have that one, you lose, so I took her out before we started.

So no loser means everyone wins, right? She's so diplomatic.

The second venture into Lily's mind is a little less diplomatic, and I hope I don't have to explain to some poor mother why my kid just said that. When we first brought Timothy home, we said something along the lines of "He's pretty cute. Do you think we should keep him?" The answer was always yes, of course, and now she says a variation of it at least once a day. "Should we keep him?" "Are we going to keep Timothy? He sure is cute." But out of the blue on Saturday, Lily confronted me with this question:

What do people do with the babies that aren't so cute?

Trying my hardest not to laugh, I asked what she thought people did with them. Apparently, they get rid of them. See where I could have problems if we run into someone with a not-so-cute baby? Luckily, there's no such thing as an ugly baby, right? Then again, maybe it's time to introduce her to the word, breathtaking.