Competitive Spirit

Ada loves to hit balls with sticks. Plastic softballs with whiffle bats, floor hockey balls with hockey sticks, foam red balls with toy light-sabres - all a good time. Whether she has any talent that would translate to an actual sport remains to be seen, but she definitely has enthusiasm.

To expand her arsenal of objects to swing, we recently picked up a few youth golf clubs. And no, we don't have any delusions of raising the next Tiger Woods - this was just for fun. Whenever we walk into a Sports Authority (which is fairly often in our family) Ada makes a beeline for the putter testing green, where she will spend as long as we let her trying every putter and whacking the balls around.

Recently we brought her new clubs out for a test spin, playing with them in a grassy field. After randomly whacking some balls around the field we developed a little game where Ada and I would each have a ball and a club and we race from one line to another, using our clubs to knock the ball over the finish line first. Ada thought it was a hoot.

Now, Ada loves to play games, but what she really loves is to win. After each race she would raise her club in triumph and declare "I beat you, Daddy. I won!" This is not something new. If we're out running Ada will insist on going ahead with Mommy so she can yell back "Daddy, you're too slow!" If we are going to get something from her room, she'll push past in the hallway and run ahead to declare victory. If she finishes her morning toast before I do, it will come with a jovial "I beat you, Daddy."

While it is a mystery to us how our daughter could have ended up with such an ardent competitive streak (surely it couldn't have been from her parents - we're not competitive at all...), we're pretty happy that she has the drive to win. What is tricky is teaching her how to not win.

After letting her win a few golf races, I decided to edge her out in a close race, popping my ball across the line just a few seconds before she did. Ada, upon finishing, immediately declared herself the winner and launched into a celebration. Katie, acting as ref, informed her that in fact Daddy had won. Ada did not take that well at all. Like a miniature John McEnroe (with less swearing) she argued adamantly that she had indeed won. When it became apparent that she was not going to change our minds, she stomped off and collapsed to the ground in her best I-can't-deal-with-this-unfair-cruel-world pose.

Several minutes later, after a long discussion about the impossibility of winning all of the time, the virtue of rising to meet the challenge again, and some conciliatory hugs, we packed up the golf clubs and headed home. Which lead to a race to the bathroom. Ada won.