Confusion

Sometimes you’ve got to wonder what goes through kids’ minds. You think they understand something we’ve taken for granted but, in actual fact, they have a completely different concept.

Miss Four: “I like your hair clips.”

“Me: “Thank you.”

Miss Four, still eyeing up my hair clips. “So will one day they get smaller?”

“Er, what do you mean?”

“I mean, will they fit me one day?”

I see.

“Ah, no, you will grow into them and, yes, you can one day have them, just like everything else I own that you’ve had your eye on.”

The next day:

“So when I turn five will I grow bigger?” 

“You don’t suddenly have a big growth spurt, you’re growing all the time – especially when you eat your vegetables,” I added in.

Of course this notion has derived form being told that ‘big kids’ go to school so a four-year-old must assume they suddenly get big upon starting school.

But I’m sure, had I not explained, Master Seven would’ve soon put his siblings in their place. He’s already made it abundantly clear they are not to play with him or his friends in the playground.

Somewhere along the line, between the ages of five and seven, the cuteness that was present on the first day of school, has gone and it’s now all about being cool in front of his friends. And younger siblings – especially, it seems, when they come simultaneously - are definitely not cool.

Except when one of them comes home from staying at their nana’s sporting the latest McDonalds toy which you were after for part of your collection. Then it’s straight off down the hall where, behind closed doors, secret wheeling and dealing is conducted until both emerge – one looking rather triumphant, the other unaware they’ve just been shafted.

But I guess there’s got to be some perks to being the oldest child and a little bit of bullying often comes with the territory.

Besides, they might as well milk it while they can because, one day, a younger sibling really might have that growth spurt and actually be bigger than them.

Baby Talk

For selfish reasons, I’m guilty of sometimes not correcting my children when they pronounce a word wrong. 
You see, it’s just one of those last vestiges of their baby days that I want to hold on to. For example, the twins still say “a-cause”, instead of “because” and I like that. 

When Mister then-three sung his little heart out to Beyonce’s I’m a single lady, I didn’t correct him either. Not because it sounded so ridiculous hearing a three-year-old boy proclaim to be a solitary woman, but because his muddled version was so hilariously funny: “I wear sing-a-lets, I wear sing-a-lets,” he belted out. 

When it comes to the alphabet, I’ve been teaching the twins, with the help of an alphabet chart, in preparation for school, and they’re coming along in leaps and bounds until they get to the standard “elemenop”. This throws them because after a p they know comes a q but, with me pointing a pen at the chart, teacher-style, we’re still stuck on the ‘l’ and they know an ‘m’ because it looks like the “Old MacDonald’s” golden arches. 
Speaking of the golden arches, gees it’s hard work paying so many visits there when your sons keep getting player of the day! 
Did that just sound like a proud (boastful) mummy moment? 
Actually Master Four scored his first ever try last Saturday, resulting in player of the day and so the subsequent trip to Macca’s with the received voucher was in order. Not that I got to have that proud mummy moment because I missed it. I couldn’t even pretend to have seen it and clap and cheer as I wasn’t even onsite, running five minutes late that day. 
To use a (rather ridiculous) saying which Master Seven has brought home from school – “My bad”. 
On the dinner front, it’s still not going well with Miss Four last week declaring: “Mum, I think I’m “electric” to all of your dinners.” 
Sigh. 
What do you think? Should I correct her on that one?

Broken Records

The whinging had reached a peak. 
“Oh you sound like a broken record!” I heard myself mutter and then pondered its meaning through the childrens’ eyes. 
Indeed as a child I imagine I considered it meant breaking a Guinness Book of Records record and that was in the day when John Lennon vinyls religiously rotated the turntable as part of mum’s Monday morning housework ritual. 
Today’s kids, no doubt, have zero idea what a record is, nor the subsequent tape for that matter. Perhaps someone should’ve coined the phrase “You sound like a skipped disc” for the generation that followed. But that would still be no good for today’s kids who’ve grown up with the ipod as the norm. 
Speaking of “old-fashioned” entertainment devices, I stumbled upon a stack of my old favourite childhood videos the other day. Keen to show the kids the movie Labyrinth, I popped it in the machine, only to be met with the startling sight of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch belting out their rendition of Good Vibrations. This was followed by the brightly-hued Salt and Pepper girl band raunching around the stage to Push it. An ad break revealed a very young Jason Gunn, Simon Barnett and Robbie Rakete which I found strangely disconcerting, before switching it off. 
Clearly, in my following teenage years, I had decided recording RTR Countdown rated over Labyrinth. 
I popped in Annie. 

“The Sun’ll come out, tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun,” belted out the little carrot top. 
Hurray! Miss Four’s face lit up as her Annie book came to life and she was particularly delighted the main character had orange hair like her. The boys, despite themselves, sat transfixed throughout the movie until Daddy Warbucks and Miss Farell had a pash at the end, at which time, they both took leave in feigned disgust. 
“Mum, are they having a marry party (wedding)?” Miss Four asked, still enthralled by the movie and clapping her hands with glee. 
“No, they’re just celebrating because they got to keep Annie,” I explained. “They get married after.” 
“But when do they get married? How do you know they get married?” 
“They get married later. It just doesn’t show it in the movie.” 
“But how do you know?” 

“I just know ok?” 
“But how do you know?” 
Oh, you sound like a broken record …

Charades

Sometimes all it takes is a good old-fashioned pastime from yesteryear to drive home the reminder that today’s kids don’t need modern technology as entertainment.

Whether it be knuckle bones, marbles, elastics or hop scotch, there’s nothing quite like the pleasant surprise in seeing your children take delight when grasping the concept of one of your childhood favourites.

This week it came in the form of charades. 

We were aiming to head out the door to dinner and the kids were chaffing at the bit. I wasn’t quite ready so, to stall them, I asked their brother to teach them the game I’d taught him earlier that week. At school this term they are studying film-making and part of his homework assignment was to choose a movie and act it out.

Although the twins were a little too young to understand it fully, they were all over it.

One would come and whisper to me their idea for a topic behind closed doors while the other two had their ears pressed firmly against it on the other side, before fleeing, giggling, back to their seats as the door opened.

Soon, they’d exhausted their collective, mental library of movies (one can only shake their butts like Gloria the hippo in Madagascar so many times) and we moved onto books.

Master Seven went into his sibling’s room to peer at their bookshelf, with them hot on his tail.

When he emerged we took our seats (I had now succumbed to the game).

He thought for a moment and then we watched perplexed as he threw himself on the floor, rolled onto his back, opened his legs for a nanosecond and squeaked out the word “Pop”, before continuing to roll over and stand up.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Do you give up? The book was “The New Baby”.

“Is that how you think you came into this world?!” I spluttered with laughter.

By now his siblings had cottoned onto the fact that he was onto a good thing and were keen to get in on the action. Silliness descended and they all began throwing themselves on the floor and popping out babies.

Game over.

Dreams

Why do people feel the need to share their dreams in every minute detail? The kids take great delight in sharing their nocturnal fictional adventures come sunup. 
“Mummy, I had a dream,” began Master Seven as he crawled into bed with me one morning. “I was driving along in my rocket car and those little yellow men off Despicable Me had turned into baddies and were shooting at me …” 
He was interrupted by a shriek from Miss Four upstairs in the kitchen. 
“Mum, Jai’s spilt the milk!” 
I never did find out if the baddies caught up with him and that was the end of my holiday lie-in as I went to deal with the carnage. 
But sharing one’s dream certainly isn’t just a childish indulgence – adults do too. 
It’s bad enough getting caught up by “a talker” when you’re in a rush - you know, the kind of people who just love holding the floor while they regale you with all the intimate details of another person’s life of which you have no interest. 
But at least that’s real life. Why would anybody have the time to listen to a great elaborate story that someone’s brain has conjured up during its REM phase while it, as one theory proposes, de-clutters their mind? (At least in print you have the option of turning the page.) 
I found myself on the receiving end of such a situation the other evening as I was recited with a fictional story of the after-math following the handbrake being let off in a car on a steep hill. 
Off they went while I faded out and came to, faded out and came to. Jaded from my busy day, I could all but blink mutely as the drawn-out tale continued. 
Perhaps I’m just envious. After-all, I can’t remember the last time I reached the stage of sleep where I could dream. 
So with that in mind I took myself off last week to a much-anticipated appointment at the sleep clinic. At $240 an hour, I was after some serious zzz’s. 
If I was expecting a magical cure I was wrong. Not only did I come away $240 poorer, but I had my work cut out. Basically, it’s all about re-training yourself, much like teaching an infant to sleep through the night (and I don’t mean ‘crying it out’). 
So far I haven’t began the sleep program as the thought of getting up in the cold every 15 minutes does not appeal but I’m determined to get my money’s worth (and some sleep) so will kick-start it one night soon. 
So I’ll see you out the other side of that one and, who knows, maybe I will be able to bore you to tears with my own dreams of Despicable Me goodies and baddies and runaway cars.