Starting Her Early

Alfred and I go to Starbucks quite often. We are caffeine fiends, no doubt. Over time, our kids have developed their own "go-to" drinks. Desiree usually has a green-tea frappacino with no whip, Alana likes the sweetened lemonade, Katelyn and Jacob will get the Horizon's chocolate or vanilla milk that's a box drink in their little cooler section. One day Alfred was at Starbucks and they had run out of the Horizon's milk so they offered to make the vanilla milk from scratch. A couple squirts of the vanilla syrup into some milk, topped off with whip. Imagine Katelyn's delight! Alfred said that Katelyn commented that "it tastes even better than my sister's latte!" You know that we frequent the coffee shop a little more than we probably should when our 5-year-old is using the word "latte" in a sentence with such confidence.

A few days later, I pick up the kids from our parents house and have this conversation with Kate:

Me: I wonder what we should do for dinner tonight?
Kate: How about we go to the "cathay"?
Me: What's a "cathay?"
Kate: You know, a "cathay" like Starbucks.
Me: Ohhhhh. You mean a CAFE?
Kate: Yeah, a "cathay" and you can buy me a vanilla milk.
Me: But I could just buy you a vanilla milk from the grocery
store.
Kate: No, one like my daddy bought me.

That night, we didn't make it to the "cathay" so the next day I get a phone call at work from Alfred's mom asking me what this vanilla milk is that Katelyn wants from Starbucks. At the time, I wasn't quite sure how it was made so I told her I would have Alfred call her to give her instructions. Apparently, Grandma was ready to have their Uncle Archie (Alfred's brother) throw all the kids into the car and bring them to Starbucks because Katelyn REALLY wanted this drink!

When I got to the house later that afternoon, it turned out that they didn't get a chance to go to Starbucks so Katelyn started begging me to please, please take her! She fell asleep on the drive to Starbucks and I contemplated just going straight home but knew that the next day she would torture the people around her if she didn't get her vanilla-milk-with-whip fix (she IS, after all, her mother's child) so I went to Starbucks and picked up two of the fancy shmancy vanilla milk so that all the kids would be content. Oh man. I think we've created a monster.