Paint Me the Picture

Sitting in the car on the way home from a lovely weekend on the coast with my kid. We are stopping at Bodega Bay Oyster Company to bring home some oysters and extend our weekend a bit. I’m saying I need a snack to make it home to dinner (in a good mood).

In the oyster shack, my kid sees three kinds of snacks and shows me. I say ‘great, take one each’.

He asks ‘which one do you want?’

I reply ‘take one each’

But I didn’t add ‘one of each kind’.

He looks at me ‘ what do you mean?’

I say ‘just grab 3 and we can snack in the car’

He lights up ‘ahhh, I thought you meant we can have one each, as in one per person’

Ahhh, jeez I’m thinking this is what I do, and I still didn’t paint him the picture. It was so obvious and clear in my head what I meant.

Luckily we are talking about $15 worth of snack and not 1000s, 100,000s or millions of dollars before he made the decision of what to grab.

More importantly, he asked! He wasn’t sure what I meant and since there is no face to lose in our relationship, he asked the crucial clarification question and set us both up for success.