The Line Crosser

“Gosh, Jennifer, your girls are so well behaved,” our friend and host for our Thanksgiving dinner in Shanghai last week said to me, proving why he had crafted a successful multi-decade career in sales.

It was true that Millie had been an excellent conversationalist and gamely tried most of the creative interpretations of an American Thanksgiving feast prepared by a Chinese chef. Eliza, too, has sat quietly and politely through the meal and later slipped off to sleep in her padded dining chair around 9 pm.

By contrast Beatrice, our resident line-crosser, had scraped the caviar off her scallops and submerged the tiny black seeds into her over-priced bottle of Evian before the end of the first course.

“She’s busy,” Sean said, making the understatement of our parenting career, “but she’s flexible too,” he added thoughtfully, and I have to agree he is right.

By the end of the evening her shoes were off, her ponytail out, and she was covered in the remnants of her palate cleansing mid-course raspberry sorbet. After playing a messy game of house, using her butter knife as the Daddy and her gravy-laden spoon as the Mommy, she was very carefully trying to cover sleeping Eliza with her own sweater.

She can be busy, naughty, and cute, but most of all our three-year-old can be flexible. She can survive a low-lit Thanksgiving eve at a five-star hotel restaurant without complaint, nimbly navigate security at airports, and survive long international flights that have adults begging for a cocktail and an eye mask within an hour. By her first birthday she had hiked the Great Wall in a Snuggli, and by two was snorkeling with the family in a pair of arm floats. She tries new food and also, at times, our patience. When we draw a line or set a limit, she is the first to see if we mean it. Why else would she be the one in the photo standing with one foot poised for the wrong side of the “Do Not Cross” Line?

“Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich