Dinner table tales

The family that eats together, well, eats together.
And in the shambles that is our little corner of the Baghdad end of Hampton, it can be an eyeopener every night.

For little Miss S, its all about The Food.
Glorious food.
The girl loves it.
And not just the mushed up rice stuff and apple either, we're talking real world nosh.

Yes, the girl has decided that this baby food caper is somewhat beneath her, and that it's about time she was given full voting rights at the evening dinner table.

Case in point...
The family sat down to a slap up feed of home made pizzas (ham off the bone, pineapple, capsicum, mushrooms, tomato paste and mozzarella on a pita bread base) while little Miss S was given mush of the day (rice meal, apple, quinoa - which is actually pronounced "keen-wa"; you learn something new every day).

She ate a bit.

She watched a bit.

She decided that the family homemade pizza looked like more fun than a nappy full of marbles, so demanded in.

She stopped accepting the mush (granted, after downing her bodyweight in the stuff; the girl certainly knows how to put it away), and grizzled towards the pizza.

Dad offered her a crust.

She grabbed the crust.

She gnawed on the crust (as much as you can with no teeth).

She loved the crust.

So much so that when she dropped it, as you do when your motor skills are in their infancy, she let the table (and anyone with aural abilities withing a 50 m radius) well and truly know about it.

Ok, sure, giving a kiddie wheat-product at this early stage is not exactly in any of the kid wrangling books, but, well, she didn't keel over. At least not in anaphylactic shock - just with delight at being one of the family eating what mum and dad and big bro at the dinner table.

She's now gone on to sample the delights of beef casserole (pronounced "cassowary" by her big brother - we're noting this here so we have written proof in the event of an FNQ parks ranger overhearing the boy talking; no officer - we've managed to avoid eating endangered birds in this household thus far), shop bought pizza, chicken, the family staple (pasta) and even corn on the cob (yes... somewhat cruel when you don't have any teeth; still it gave her many minutes of gumming pleasure).

All this eating has, somewhat inevitably, lead to a great deal of growing.

And all that growing means we now have a little girl bending like a banana in her car baby capsule and hence... about to join the ranks of the vehicularly upright. If she's anything like her brother, the first trip will be in a daze as the world rushes by at incredible speed. (Dad still recalls reading the wonderful nineteenth century "scientific research" which stated humans could not live at over 60 mph.)
Either that or, (granted the far cheaper option) she becomes a banana.

While all this has been going on, the boy has decided that he also wants to step up a notch or two, and if at all possible, make his parents redundant.

There, again, was the family sitting round the dinner table, with the lad's lazy good-fer-nuthin parents doing useless things like EATING ("What a pointless activity that is..." thinks the photosynthesis-only boy - though granted his appetite has been a bit better since we started him on tissue salts) when all he wanted his folks to do was read him his new Henry (from Thomas the Tank Engine) book because, as he said, 'he didn't know the words'.

("I think he's trying to rote learn all his books" said mum, "No, seriously, its a bit scary really...")

Dad asked him if, rather than evolve into a parrot boy, he wanted to learn how to read instead. The boy responded; "Yes."

Hence he's been trying to learn his letters and, granted, doing quite well at it too. And much to his credit, its largely self taught too - he can whip "Maisy's ABC" into the video recorder faster than you can spell dyslexia.

That said, he is at the crawling stage of learning to read, and hence tends to get a teensy bit frustrated at times. His way round this? Well he simply demands that a word means what he says it means, and not the other way round. (Possibly handy if writing a dictionary.)

Case in point:
"Mucks Sleepover" said the boy, pointing at the words on the cover of a book with Muck (from Bob the Builder) on the cover.
"Yes," replied mum, "That word says Muck, but that word is just the letters 'BBC'."
"NO! Muck..."said the boy correctly pointing at the word Muck... "Sleepover" pointing at the letters BBC.
This went on for some time.
A true battle of wills.
"Cant win, don't try" opined dad from the peanut gallery, borrowing from his favourite Homer Simpson quote.

That said, the lad is making better progress with his numbers.

He's certainly got zero to nine down pat, and now moving on to numbers 11 through 99, which can make walking down the street somewhat slow as he stops to read every letterbox.

This has all come about because, enigma-like, he's cracked the adult code for numbers. Or so he thinks.

Any dual digit number is "{number}-tee {second number}".
Which is all fine and dandy for 42, 95, 61, 79 etc., etc.
But 33 is "three-tee three", 18 is "one-tee eight" (though of late he has learnt that that isn't quite right, so sometimes its become "eight-tee one", which at least sounds right, if still wrong), and 26 is two-tee six.

Ten out of ten for effort and application though.
Or rather one-tee zero.

But back to the dinner table.

There we were once again, and once again the conversation was getting a bit dull for Master M, so he took it upon himself to entertain the family with a story.
"It was a beautiful summers day on Sodor..." he started.
...which sounded vaguely familiar.
He kept going... and going...
"...'Burst My Boilers!' Thomas said"
and going...
"...was to fix the Lords summer house..."
and going.

Now to anyone without a two to four year old, this may have sounded like the ramblings of a mad child, however mum and dad stopped eating and sat, agasp, in awe.

In all, the lad recited approximately the first five minutes of the "Hero of the Rails" Thomas the Tank engine movie... line for line, with changes in tone and inflection for about half a dozen different characters.
Seriously.
Five Minutes.

Finally he stopped.
"Well..." said dad, "Bugger me."
The boy smiled.
The family applauded (...the boy, not dad's indiscretion).

You wouldn't be without a dinner table for quids.



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