in the last 5 minutes. . . . .
We always tell Kiyoshi that he doesn’t stand a chance between the bad humour and sarcasm he gets every day from his parents.
Like yesterday, we’re giving him a hard time about brushing his teeth properly. Your teeth will fall out and then you’ll be so sad! He says no I won’t. So we tell him those ones don’t grow back if they fall out because you didn’t brush your teeth. He said no he won’t because the Tooth Fairy will bring me money. I said uh, no. And then I had to correct myself. Okay. Well, .. yes the Tooth Fairy will bring you money for your baby teeth that fall out. If your teeth fall out because you didn’t take care of them, she’ll call that an inside job and you get nothing.
He didn’t say anything back. Maybe because it wasn’t funny. Maybe because he was looking inside his mouth wondering what an inside job is. And months down the road from now he’ll bring it up again after he’s asked Safari what it is.
And then on a different day, he was debating with us about ordinal numbers. For the record I had to Google for the word “ordinal”. He was convinced that you don’t say “First” you say “Firth”. He said First doesn’t sound right. “st” and “th” and “wtfth”. It was quite a lengthy conversation, hard to imagine right? Until you take into account he was putting off brushing his teeth so it was a worthwhile delay.
I have to say there’s some method to his thinking because even though it was just after his Fourth birthday, we spent some time in Scotland visiting Tara’s home near the Firth of Forth. So even at four and having seen pictures and hearing us talk about it over time maybe some of this sthuck.
We ended the conversation with him so positively convinced that “First” didn’t sound right so for sure it was “Firth”. So I told him to go brush his “Teest”.
He got halfway down the Threest eps and stopped and gave us a funny scrunched up face look. I said “well does that sound right?”. And he stuck his tongue out and went on his way to brush Forth e end of his night.
