How much do you love me?

Many of the books in our kiddie book collection were given to us, and “Guess How Much I Love You?” is no exception. To be honest, I’ve never really liked that book, feeling that the papa Hare was one-upping the baby Hare.

Little Hare: I love you as high as I can reach!
Big Hare: I love you as high as I can reach!

I never quite understood why that would be a good conversation to have with your kid . . . .”I love you WAAYYY more than you love me!” That is, until DS1 started playing the “I love you this much” game.

It started about two months ago. He’d come over and say, “Mommy, I love you 55 89!” And I’d say, “Really? That’s a big number!” Each time it was a different number, but it was always a big number. Then he started including nonsense syllables.

“Mommy, I love 55 89 beep beep 24 9.”

And then he started asking how much I loved him.

“I love you 24 66 beep beep.”

And then one day, just to be silly, I threw something else in.

“I love you 45 32 beep beep gonk gonk.”

And he thought that was the funniest thing EVER!

So that became our game. He’d say how much he loved me, and then ask how much I loved him. And it was like a little mini competition to see who could include the most numbers and silly syllables. As with any game, it got a bit old for me after awhile. And frankly, sometimes I just had a hard time coming up with a giant string of letters and numbers in rapid fire fashion. So when he would say:

“I love you 55 29 78 55 2 7 9 5 9 5 9 7 7 beep beep gonk gonk 3 22 6 tunk tunk 88”, the only appropriate answer was, “WHOA, that is A-LOT!”

And then the game changed. The numbers, thankfully, got smaller, and the nonsense syllables disappeared. (Unless DD was playing the game, in which case, it was all nonsense syllables since she doesn’t really know her numbers past 11!) He’d say

“Mommy, I love you 197. How much do you love me?”

“I love you 254.”

“No, that’s not right, that’s more, it has to be the SAME.”
Well, this was good, at least he knew that 254 was bigger than 197.

So then I would just repeat the same number as him.

Just today, the game changed to, “I love you 291. Do you love me 291?”

I’m interested to see how this little game keeps morphing. But, for the time being, I have a greater appreciation for the book where Big Nut Brown Hare one-ups Little Nut Brown Hare=)