Ambitions

“Mum, do I have to work when I’m an adult,” enquired Master Five the other day. 

“Um, you don’t have to but you should.”

“Well I’m not then.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how to get a job.”

Golly, the things bugging them at the ripe old age of five. And I thought it was bad enough Master Eight asking what was for dinner before he went to school that morning and then fretting all day when I told him it was one of his loathes - chicken.

“You don’t need to worry about how to get a job yet,” I told Master Five. “That’s why you go to school. You learn things and, by the time you’re an adult, you might have an idea of what you want to be and then you can go to a special school to learn to be it. Or you might decide to be a builder and then after you leave school you learn to build.”

“I can already build,” he said, perking up. “I can build block houses.”

Right. Actually, it’s true. The three of them have converted the whole downstairs room into a block house city and after watching The Lego Movie, they also created a Lego city which is so elaborate to the point I cannot hoover down there anymore.

There are farm yards, intricate stairs leading up to hotels, people dining at restaurants, garages with cars in them, a supermarket with shelves brimming with the miniature New World toy food – they’ve thought of everything. Bar the occasional fight which comes from someone stealing a block or, god forbid, accidentally knocking a creation down, it’s good imaginative play which keeps them occupied for hours.

While Master Eight still maintains he wants to become a police officer when he grows up (so he can taser and arrest people), Miss Five’s ambitions include having a baby out of wedlock.

“Oh but then you won’t get to wear a pretty dress and mummy won’t get to come to your wedding and you’re my only daughter,” I cajole.

“I’m not getting married!” she declares, almost in tears at the thought of being ridiculed by her brothers about having a boyfriend. “But I can still have a baby – I just get a seed.”

I’m not sure where she’s getting her information from there – it could have something to do with the memory of her older brother some years earlier asking how the daddy sheep puts the seed in the mummy sheep when sheep don’t have hands.

But I needn’t worry about the ambitions of my children - after-all, when I was a child I proclaimed to my mother, for a number of years, that I was going to be a postie when I grew up.
Riding round on a bike all day looked like fun.