Older and Wiser

A jolly morning of housework. I like our kitchen lino, it's got one of those usefully dirt-concealing patterns. The down side to this is that you don't realise how much it needs a clean as quickly as you ought. What, for example, is artistic swirl and what is the micron-thick remains of a raisin.

-

It was my birthday yesterday.

"Do you know what today is?" V asked F, in the appropriate tones of hushed awe my nativity commands.

Blank look, shaken head.

"It's daddy's birthday! It's daddy's birthday today," V said.

F took this on board and nodded slowly and wisely. "Feya ha berday too," she said. And then claimed the present V suggested she give to me as her own. A tantrum was averted by tactical iPad deloyment.

F wanted burgers for dinner on Sunday. "Where are we going to get those from?" I asked her. She pointed to the cupboards.

"Pappa cook," she said. Right.

A month ago, she would say please when asking for things with only a tiny prompt. Now we just get a big cheeky grin and a very emphatic single nod.

"What do you say?"

"Pappa, get more cumcumber, put here."

"You can have more cucumber, but you have to say please!"

"Yes." Nod nod.

"Can you say please, then?"

Nod.

"Well, you can have more cucumber when you've said it then."

Tantrum.

Which isn't to say it's all tantrums. By no means - F is currently about as angelic at going to bed as I can imagine she ever will be. If you tell her it's bedtime in ten minutes time, ten minutes later she takes you to help brush her teeth and then goes to her room of her own accord. Something tells me we've got about twenty minutes before she starts deciding on her own deadlines for this, though.

-

I'm taking my monday evening drama group.

"But how old are you, though, really?" asks E, a bossy thirteen-year-old. This has somehow become the moment's teaching point, my age.

"How old do you think I am?" I ask, a foolish Scorpio to the last.

"Fifty?" suggests A.

"Fifty three?" thinks G.

Oh how I hate you all, you glossy teenage bullies.

I go home and get a doughnut with a candle in it from my lovely wife, and watch an extremely entertaining rubbish film (Hercules - The Legend Begins, a lot better than you'd expect, because the inverse would be impossible).