you snooze, you lose

my boss is a little strange and about a month ago some of the teachers and i were joking about how he came into the classrooms to count the chairs. not to make sure that we had enough chairs for all the students, but to make sure that we each had an even number of red, yellow, and blue chairs.
when i started teaching in this classroom, way back last september, i had requested that i have little cushions for my kids to sit on. he just gave them to me last week.
despite his anal retentiveness regarding the chairs, he gave me 2 pink cushions, 1 blue cushions, and 9 yellow/green cushions (some are yellow, some a green but you can hardly tell the difference between the two colors). i was appriciative of the cushions, but anticipated some fights over cushion colors.
sure enough, the first time i told them to go get their cushions, yoshi starts throwing a fit cuz he wants the blue one. now, my students are all 2 years old and they don't get the concept of sharing and taking turns all the time. yoshi is pretty territorial over where he sits. before the cushions, we would just sit on the carpet, which has animals all over it. yoshi has decided that his animal is the chicken and if anyone else would sit on it, he'd start screaming "yoshi chicken! yoshi chicken!!" me and my assistant teacher were always pretty tolerant of this and we would encourage the other children to sit on a different animal, all the while snickering at yoshi, because let's face it....chicken is about the least cool animal there is on the carpet.
but i wasn't going to give in with the cushions. i looked at yoshi and told him "you snooze, you lose." this prompted laughter from my assistant, who is japanese and had never heard that phrase before. i continued to tell yoshi that tomorrow he has to try to be faster and get the blue cushion first.
fortunately, every day since then he has been super fast and has always gotten the blue cushion. and also luckily, none of the other kids seem to care what color cushion they get.