Dust bubby

I asked Justababy what she was doing in the dirt here:

"Bath"

.....
Meanwhile, on a planet far, far away (just out of camera shot), Boy wants to find a way to fly.

Must dash, parachutes to build.

How far from the tree do the apples fall?

Boy often complains about his dinner. Tonight it was "disgusting".

He demands something else. And if I don't jump right to it, he declares "I'll just get something for myself!"

He's started sneaking food at dinner time. Tonight Daddy confiscated an apple before we managed to get him to sit down and eat his dinner.

Boy: Why do I need to stop sneaking food?
Me: Because we give you good food for dinner and you need to eat it before you can have other food.
Boy: But apples are healthy.
Me: Yes, they are, but you still need to eat your dinner first.
Boy: Well you should just give me apples for dinner.

Fire power

Boy: I'm much better at hunting scary animals than those kids in that book!

Me: Which book?

Boy: The Bear Hunt book.

Me: And you're better?

Boy: Yeah! Because I have proper guns!

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.