Sales pitch

Getting your child to eat new foods. A lesson.
It's all in the marketing.
Quinoa = completely unknown, certainly yucky food.
"Special grain from Africa"* = oh yum, I love that!**



*Yes, I know, but Africa is COOL. That's where Naughty Tiger is from. He doesn't eat it, though. He prefers chicken.
** He didn't actually eat it, but never mind. We did avoid the screaming meltdown about how awful it was.

New day job

Boy has a dream.
He wants to write his own Great, Big Animal Book*. He started the other day drawing a comparative diagram of a grasshopper's lungs and a shark's gills.

And then, this morning....

I'm drawing the lungs of a praying mantis tiger lion. Giant ones. And it has lots of bacteria around it to help it. Then the lungs die out and the bacteria help them back to life again by growing new skin around them.

Boy says he's going to teach me all about arthropods and stuff like that.


*the biology textbook that is a frequent feature of bedtime reading

Learn something new...

Boy [from the toilet]: There's an arthropod in here.
Daddy: Oh, so there is. Can you tell me if that's a crustacean or an insect?
Boy: Uuummmmm, I think it's a crustacean.
Daddy: Yes, that's right. It's a wood lice.

Time Out of the box.

For those parents that don't 'do' punishments, ever wondered what happens when your imaginative four year old goes to school and encounters The Naughty Corner and Time Out....?

Well, the other kids get to go in The Naughty Corner. But I don't. But that's ok, because I just stop wherever I am and just think about having a naughty corner in my head. And it's ok, because it's more interesting* in there.

* "istering" in fact.

Power nap

[YAAAAWWWWN] Oh I had such a long sleep! Now I've lost all my exciting parts.

Rude is the new polite

Boy: [to Daddy] Where's my hoe? It's in your shed! LET'S GET MY HOE!!!

Daddy: Are you going to ask nicely?

Boy: [mumbling] I was asking nicely - just a sort of polite grumpy.

Boys and the bees

The other day Boy asked where babies come from. Or rather, how exactly mummies and daddies made babies.
I searched my brain for an adequate response....
Well, an egg from mummy and a sperm from daddy mix together inside mummy and make a baby that grows inside mummy.
This was apparently an acceptable answer.

It turns out that Daddy and Boy had covered this recently during their bedtime reading. Boy's favourite book is a biology textbook known as The Great Big Animal Book.

Then, the next morning I overhead this...

Daddy, why haven't I seen you and Mummy making babies?
Errrr, huh? [stalling for time]
I mean.... how long does it take to make a baby?
Oh. A long time [phew!]