Being the middle-class parents that we are, Wife and I are very enthusiastic about encouraging certain things (watching National Geographic TV, rather than a drip-feed of Cartoon Network; saying “Please” and “Thank You”, rather than, say, “Fucking Hell”, which was Eldest Son’s latest, entirely innocent offering: as evidenced by his unsettling request: “Could I fucking hell have some Ribena, please Dada?”). One of the things that we ARE keen on is the children learning more about animals, and basically communicating with each other in a way that is more reliant on words than it is on hair-pulling and kicking.
One incarnation of this is a guessing game that Wife invented, called “I am hairy and I am scary…” This title immediately won the two boys over, and it forms the opening phrase for construcing clues around an animals identity. Thus: “I am hairy and I am scary, I am black and I am a kind of monkey and I live in the jungle and I can kill people.” would be “Gorilla”. having played the game relentlessly for, oh I don’t know: 137 years, I would guess, we have broadened the parameters to allow for variations such as “Hairy but NOT scary” (puppy), “Not hairy, but scary” (shark) and even, “Not hairy and not scary” (Cinderella – a favourite clue from Daughter).
And it is Daughter’s two clues that she gave us as we walked to school today that I am going to record in a fit of shameless “Aaaaah!”
“I am lovely, and I am beautiful, and I have a dress.”
“I am lovely, and I am tall, and I go to work.”
The answers were: Mummy, and Daddy.
