Oh no, not again

"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now."  -Douglas Adams, HGttG

Anyone remember this? 

Yes.  Well. 

It wasn't the the pansies this time, or at least not at first.  It was the nasturtiums. 

I should explain at this juncture that Isaiah and I have been having a lot of conflict recently.  Things just seem to be going wrong for him lately, and of course the main person who points out his errors in judgement is me.  Previously, he would simply get upset and cry, but now he appears to have a new method of conflict management:  don't get mad, get even.

Yesterday the kids and I were outside.  Isaiah wanted to help me weed, so I set him to the task of following me around and putting the weeds I dug up into the bucket.  He wasn't terribly focused, and ended up being put in timeout for some thing or other.  When I released him from timeout he wandered off out of sight and I enjoyed what should have been an ominously quiet fifteen minutes.  At the end of that time he approached me with a small plant in his hand, saying "Mommy, I just thought this was a weed...".  It was a nasturtium.  I suddenly realized that the place he'd disappeared to was the narrow bed on the front corner of our property where I had been babying a dozen or so struggling nasturtiums.  They had just started to bloom that week.  I ran around front and there they were, all the nasturtiums pulled up by the roots.  I said blankly "Isaiah, you just pulled up all my flowers."  Without a word he turned and ran to the timeout place, and put himself in timeout. 

He has insisted that he thought the flowers were weeds.  Aside from the fact that I had specifically told him not to pull up any weeds except grass, I find this extremely difficult to believe.  He may only be four, but he's been around me and my garden for a while.  The nasturtiums were alone in that bed, except for a bit of invading grass.  They had blooms on them.  It should have been obvious.

And then today, while trying ineffectually to help me herd Samuel back inside, he accidentally crushed one of my delphinium plants.  I yelped at him, and a few moments later I caught sight of him taking a running jump onto one of my pansy plants.  A. Running. Jump.  Which he then denied with the increasingly suspect line: "I thought it was a weed." 

I'm completely at a loss as to how to deal with this.  I know why he's doing what he's doing, but I'm so taken aback by it that I have no ready response.  I very much hope this is a phase, and not an indicator of things to come.  In the meantime, I'm going to have to keep a close eye on him while he's outside.