Well, actually...

I struggle with Meg sometimes. She's too different from me in many ways, and too similar to me in other ways. I was a tomboy growing up and Meg is very girly. I'm a career-oriented independent woman and Meg's goal in life is to be a mommy. In addition to our personality differences, we have one dangerous thing in common: we both like to be right.

Meg displays her "rightness" by correcting everyone else as often as possible by saying "Well... actually... [insert correction here]". Personally, being corrected by a 5-year old drives me absolutely NUTS! Especially because most of the time she's correct in her small version of the world, but not in the grand scheme of things. For example:

Torrie: Meg, would you like some parmesan cheese on your spaghetti?
Meg: Well... actually Aunt Torrie, we call it snow!
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[Torrie reading Rapunzel from an old fairy tale book]
Torrie: Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair!
Meg: Well... actually Aunt Torrie, that's not how it goes. In the movie it just says "let down your hair" not golden hair!
Torrie: Well, books are more accurate than movies, sweetie, so the movie must be wrong.

In both cases she was right according to her world, but I was MORE right.

This morning Meg was on a roll and in period of playing a game with Ben for 15 minutes I heard her do her "Well... actually..." at least 5 times at him. Then she came into the kitchen for lunch and tried to "Well... actually" me. The following ensued:

Torrie: Meg, if you say "actually" one more time I'm going to be upset.
Meg: Can I say "well"?
Torrie: I guess so
Meg [with a very correcting tone]: Well...
Torrie: Nevermind! You're not allowed to say "well" either. It's annoying when you do that and nobody likes a bossy girl.
Meg: But I wasn't bossing you!
Torrie: Well nobody likes a know-it-all either.
Ben [laughing]: Here we go.
Torrie [to Ben]: Well it's true, people don't like know-it-alls so I'm just trying to save her from having to suffer the social disdain of being a know-it-all when she's older.

At this point Meg started crying. I quickly tried to reassure her and thankfully it blew over pretty quickly. Hopefully at some point I'll learn how to deal with little girls, but in the mean time, I'm hoping to only have boys when it's my turn for kids.