Crying

Now that I let the kids play upstairs unsupervised while I make dinner or perform endless cleanup tasks, I've become an expert on interpreting different types of crying. This is an important skill to hone because otherwise I would waste a lot of time climbing the stairs to investigate which cries were serious and which merely crying wolf.
In the beginning I had to stand at the bottom of the stairs straining to listen to the intensity of the cry and trying to gauge how long it would last, that is to say, would they still be crying by the time I got to the top of the stairs or would they have stopped, only to start again when they saw their audience had doubled.
The most common cry is the "he's not sharing with me," cry which, if executed by my older son is often followed by the "he just grabbed what I was playing with away from me," cry coming from his younger brother.
Then there's H's, "I've crawled under my crib and forgotten how to back out," cry and C's "I've been tormenting him for the past 10-minutes but I can't believe he just hit me," cry. Often followed by the lyrical, "you're stupid!"
There's the "he's got me by the arm, leg, chest, and won't let go," cry, and the always popular, sometimes in tandem: "I was jumping on the bed and slammed into the headboard," cry. That one sometimes even gets my attention.

song: Crying • artist: Roy Orbison