Four Year Old House Guests
We are looking after a little man for a friend this weekend. He arrived in a blizzard of bags, clothes, sticky-up hair, and jumbled converstion yesterday morning. After a night sharing a (huge) bed with our younger daughters, and waking at 7am, they are now upstairs “getting dressed”. They have been up there for an hour.
I heard them wake up, and thought “ah crap” – and vague memories of the requirements of looking after a four year old kicked in (our youngest is ten years old now). I slid out of bed, and stumbled down-stairs, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and flatting hair to my head as I passed the hallway mirror. The kids were lined up watching cartoons in the living room.
“Can we have pancakes for breakfast?”
“I guess”
I wandered into the kitchen and began clearing up the detritus from the night before. The remains of a night watching the Eurovision Song Contest, and providing our own entertainment via a Facebook post with a thousand comments. A conversation accompanied by a bottle of fizzy wine, two bottles of cider, and a supporting cast of 20 hilariously awful bands from the various corners of Europe. Another post perhaps.
So. Pancakes. I can do pancakes. I'm good at pancakes.
After crashing and banging around in the kitchen for ten minutes I burst into the lounge like a hassled chef, carrying the first pancake.
“I don't like pancakes”
Oh, the humor of 4 year olds. He meant it too. Ten minutes before, he had been the biggest fan of pancakes since hearing the word a few seconds before from our daughter (the girl that really wanted them, and had no doubt been working on him since they woke to get him to ask).
The girls ate his pancake. It was like a scene from a wildlife documentary where wolves sense an opportunity. The poor old pancake was defenceless.
I'm now sitting on my own downstairs, waiting for the rest of the day to happen to me. Weekends tend to be like that.