Winning and Losing

I vaguely remember last spring writing a post about Jake having trouble with the concept of winning and losing - how after I beat him out in a game of Candyland he cried for 20 minutes straight. I am pretty sure at least part of it is developmental and age-related and it is something that we are constantly working on with him but Jake has a quite a competitive streak ingrained in him.

It probably does not help that we learned awhile back that having Jake and Jadyn race against each other was a good way to hurry things along. "Let's see who can get their PJ's on the fastest!" We use the opportunity to teach Jake (and by extension Jadyn to the extent that she understands) how to be both a gracious winner and loser. If he wins, we teach Jake not to taunt Jadyn and to encourage her to finish and tell her what a good job she did anyway. If Jake loses, we use it as an opportunity to explain how we don't always win, not to be a sore loser and to congratulate the victor.

The pee-wee league Jake played soccer in recently did not keep score. That of course, does not stop the parents and even some of the players from keeping a tally of goals in their head. Although I never mentioned it to Jake, their team won all of their games up until his final outing. Unfortunately, Jake seemed to be one of those players who knew too much for his own good. He knew it was there last game and he seemed to realize that the star player of the opposing team was kicking goal after goal. I was happy when Jake managed to score a goal himself, thinking it was a great way to end the season but when the game was over he got very emotional and sobbed in my lap about how he did not want the game to be over and he wanted to score more goals. He was actually sulking. It was quite embarrassing. We had a long discussion about the whole idea of winning and losing but it took quite awhile for him to snap out of it.

More recently, Jake's imagination has come in to play with games and races. From simple childhood games like hide and seek (which I am assuming he learned from the school playground) to more elaborate games Jake makes up and recites the rules for, Jake's nature to compete seems to continual crop up.

The other day, as I was finishing putting Jadyn's PJs on for the night, I asked both kids to put their clothes in the hamper when Jake exclaimed it was a "Hamper Race".

He then explained that the winner of the race would get to lay down with Mommy at bedtime while Jadyn, I mean the loser, would have to lay down with Daddy. While Joe and I were musing just how Daddy had become the consolation prize and how Jake's words had assumed Jadyn would not win, I notice Jadyn get up from my lap with only her PJ top on, grab her dirty clothes for the day and rush down the hall. Apparently, she had been paying attention and the stakes for this game were too high to risk not coming out on top. So she took off for the hamper race. When Jake noticed this, he put his hands on his hips, huffed and looked at us quite perplexed while we tried our best to keep straight faces. When Jadyn returned from putting her clothes in the hamper, Jake declared that she fouled because she did not have her PJ bottoms on yet. Leave it to Jake to find a loophole in the rules of the race. And apparently, we are in trouble, because Jake's competitive nature is starting to rub off.