Commentary

Kids say, (and do) the darnedest things

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, I asked my three-year-old son Timothy if he was ready to return to school following the break. He looked at me incredulously and quite frankly said "No, I am on holiday." I suggested to him that the holidays were over and school resumed on Thursday. After ingesting that piece of information, he basically scoffed and insisted that school was not an option Thursday.

Needless to say, he lost that battle but sometimes you can't help but be amused by the innocence of children and the things they say and do.

Ashley, my precocious six-year-old niece, has always been good for several quality sound bytes during the course of any given day. So, just recently when my sister Allison, Ashley's aunt, called me about another Ashley episode I wasn't really surprised. Still, the news evoked gales of laughter even though it really shouldn't have since it was a rather expensive gaffe on her part.

My other sister, Opal, Ashley's mom, recently took a new job. One of the tools she got to do that job was a notebook (a laptop computer). Well, my niece, being the good daughter she is, noticed that the screen of the notebook was a bit dusty and, I guess, decided to surprise her mom by cleaning it. Up to that point, it had not occurred to her that water and electronics don't mix all that well. In fact, their union can be downright catastrophic. However, when she was being questioned about why she used water to clean the notebook, Ashley quite matter-of-factly stated she didn't know and added that had somebody bothered to tell her that she couldn't use water to clean a notebook then she wouldn't have. She was then told that the notebook cost $94,000 to which she responded: "That doesn't sound like a lot of money to me."

My three-year-old equivalent of Osama Bin Laden recently took the same approach to his mother's cable box.

Flood things

Timothy, like most kids, likes to observe, and he mimics the things he sees, with the purest of intentions I assure you. When he is at my home, for example, the minute I pick up a broom to sweep something out, he is never far behind with another broom, and while asking "Are you sweeping?" begins to sweep away, usually in the direction opposite to where I am sweeping. This usually defeats the intended purpose, but what are you going to do?

So, being the 'good' boy that he is, while his mom was cleaning recently, he mimicked but took it a step further, flooding her cable box with water, citing that he was helping her clean. It took the intervention of a neighbour to rescue the drowned piece of equipment.

It seems though that he has a tendency to flood things. His mother reports that whenever he doesn't particularly like the fare being served up for dinner, he pours his drink into it and then complains that it is no longer palatable. He makes a good point though, as we all know rice swimming in fruit juice does not go down well.

As I am sure is the case with most parents, there are too many such tales to share but I could not close without sharing this gem that occurred over the past weekend, which I believe demonstrates just how precocious my niece really is.

On Saturday morning, she did a photo shoot for an ad campaign. Hours later, we were all in the country supporting an event that my brother hosted. During the event, her mom bought her some juice and then jokingly said to Ashley, "You owe me sixty dollars," (the cost of the juice). My niece, who was sitting next to her dad on a flight of stairs, turns to him and mutters. "I owe her sixty dollars; she hasn't even paid me for the photo shoot yet." It was during the howls of laughter that the Art Linkletter phrase popped into my mind. Kids do say and do the darnedest things.