Soapy sass (or, sassy soap?)

Recently, Paige has stepped up the sassiness, taking it to an entirely new level. She's always had a little sass in her step, but now she's just downright rude.

For example, she will ask if she can play games on my phone, and I will nicely (seriously, notice no crossed out words here?) say "No, honey. Not right now." To which she will reply (often while taking a swat in my direction), "Yes I can, Mommy! Now just stop it!"

Or, I will say (less nicely, as my patience is usually wearing thin by this point), "Paige, go sit in time out until you can stop being sassy." To which she will reply, "No! You go to time out, Mommy! You being sassy!"

Um. Yeah. In the words of a famous clown from my youth, "Homey don't play that." (Bet you thought I was going to quote Bozo or Ronald McDonald? Not so much.).

So, we've tried time outs, which clearly aren't working. We've tried ignoring her. I've even bopped her in the mouth a few times. To no avail. I turned to my sister-in-law, who is the mother of 4 young kids. And to say she has dealt with her fair share of sassiness would be an understatement.

She reminded me that when her oldest daughter, Gracie (now almost 9, and possibly the original 'Bis mini-me') was little they got to the point where they had to put a bar of soap in her mouth to stop the mouthiness. And they only had to do it once or twice - after that, the threat of it was more than enough.

Assuming that it would be too much trouble to buy enough duct tape to remedy our problem, I decided to go the soap route. Derrick and I had a talk with Paige about it yesterday (after she kicked her sister and told her to "go find your mommy, Bear!"). She FREAKED out, and all day long all we had to say was "tomorrow when you talk this way we will be putting soap in your mouth." Not because we were dishing out idle threats, but just because we didn't happen to have any bars of soap in our house (I mean, who keeps those around? I'm pretty sure we used to have them...right by the phone books and butter churner).

This morning I loaded the girls up in the van and we headed to this little boutique down the street. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. It's called "Target." Well, I should have learned from past experience with Paige and folks at Target. She proceeded to tell everyone...seriously, EVERY-SINGLE-PERSON... we passed that we were there to buy soap to put in her mouth. Because she's so sassy. And that it will probably be disgusting. And she may or may not have tossed in a dramatic dry-heaving sound every now and then.

The reactions were pretty uniform - mostly a lot of people with what I am hoping were confused looks (and not a look of trying to remember if they had the number for Child Protective Services programmed into their phone). I'm HOPING people were assuming they had misheard her. She did repeat herself multiple times, probably to clear things up for them. She's very helpful like that.

I wanted to tell them that I wasn't going to cheap-out on her. To point out that it's not like I was going to buy one of those bright yellow bars of Dial or anything. For cry-eye-eye, I'm going to spend almost $6.00 on a bar of all-natural, fragrance-free Tom's soap!

But then I realized I should probably just keep my mouth shut. "Clarifying" would probably only make the situation worse.

That, and the other moms would probably think I was a big idiot for wasting the money on "nice" soap when any old soap will do.