Is that a young innocent brain I can mess with?

I was over at the household of four-boys-aged-five-and-under the other night during jungle hour. I always enjoy jungle hour in their house, it's really entertaining to join the food chain and the bath chain (and I always get to leave at the end of it). At one point three of the four were destroying the bathroom while their mother and I slowly cleared some of the debris from the toy box(which had appeared to have exploded) in the room they had just been chased from.

'Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmm! Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmm!' Was being bellowed from the bath.

Mother-of-four looks at me, rolls her eyes, and says quietly, 'Oh shut up ya bunch of neanderthals.' I just love how she views her children. I don't think I would even be able to coax a 'delightful neanderthals' out of her mouth, either. There are no pedestals for her children to sit on in that household, only stools. Which is a good thing, because if they were put on pedestals, it would be guaranteed they'd fall off and break their sweet little neanderthal necks.

A period of time later, as the other three were in various stages of being tucked up and read stories to, I was downstairs with the five-year-old helping him build a paper dart. I tend to skite a bit about my paper dart skills, (six weeks in hospital flat on my back, total bed rest, what else is a girl going to do, but learn how to turn her menus into finely tuned flying machines.)

However we were following some instructions to make this particular dart, they were written in English and Chinese. One instruction said, 'Fold corners to corners, ' (there were also little diagrams, so I didn't have to be completely psychic).

'Look at the Chinese.' Said the five-year-old.

'Fo-ole cor-nar to cor-nar.' I announced in my finest Chinese accent.

'Wow, do you know Chinese?' Asked the five-year-old.

'Uh-huh.' I said and continued to say out loud all the other instructions in what is, in fact, a truly awful Chinese accent.

The five-year-old thought I was terribly flash, informed his parents of my fabulous Chinese language skills, and I then took my smug bilingual self off home.

The next morning the phone rang, it was the five-year-old's mother. Apparently he had just been telling his younger brother about how I had been teaching him Chinese, and he wanted to demonstrate his skills to me.

'Cor-nar'.

'Oh wow Five-Year-Old! That's fantastic! Next time I come round I will teach you Indian.'

'Can you tell me some Indian, now?'

'Of course, goodmorninggoodmorninggoodmorning.' (You have to understand that I was woggling my head at the same time.)

'Now, say it back to me.'

'Good morning good morning good morning.'

I have to admit, it was quite a good pronunciation. 'Fantastic work! I will teach you more soon.'

'Okay, bye Katelastname.'

I chuckled away and put down the phone.

About five minutes later the phone rang again - it was the five-year-old's mother and she couldn't stop laughing, 'Five-Year-Old has just said that each day they have to say good morning in class, and that they are allowed to say it in a different language if they want. He had decided this morning he was going to say it Indian.'

'Oh fuck. We can't actively make him look like an imbecile.'

'No', she giggled, 'I have put him right on this one.'

As I put the phone down I remembered that this was the same brain who I told last year, that if he wanted something from his mother, he just needed to work on his delivery. If he wanted chips saying, 'Mum, you hot thing, can I have some chippies please?', was going to work much more in his favour than whining away 'Mum, I want some chips.'

I know that morsel of information managed to sink in because about a week later his mother rang me in complete stitches after she'd heard him just say to his father, 'Dad, you hot thing, can I have a ride on the digger?'

Very soon this child is going figure out that ninety-nine percent of what comes out of my mouth is complete rubbish, however until such time I shall exploit his young innocent brain to the best of my ability.

I reckon I've got about another month left.