Private Thoughts Made Public

“Can I play with this toy car?”
“Yes you can, but the batteries are flat. You’ll still be able to roll it up and down the floor though”
“Does the remote control work?”
“No, I just told you. The batteries are flat”
“But I thought batteries were round….”
My son’s capacity for imagination never ceases to amaze me. While playing around one day he put his finger in my mouth and said “blow me up, Daddy”. Not quite knowing what he meant by this, I started to huff and puff as though I was blowing up a balloon. He then quickly pulled his finger away and ran round and round the room blowing a raspberry, until he ran out of breath and collapsed on the floor.
At the weekend he was sitting in the back of the car, playing with a slinky. Of course you know what a slinky is, and if you don’t, then google for it. I’m not going to do all your work for you. Anyway, he’d got one with him in the car and all I could hear was him saying “squirt squirt squirt”. A few seconds of silence, then “squirt squirt squirt”. A few more seconds of silence then “squirt squirt squirt” once again. Curious, I dipped the rear view mirror so I could see what he was doing. He had the slinky held to his face at one end, and he was moving the other end from between his feet to over his head, saying “squirt squirt squirt” when it was over his head. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “I’m an elephant”, he replied. Squirt, squirt, squirt.
My niece then got the slinky and said “I know what we can do with this. We can fix one end to here and fix the other end to there and put something in the middle so it’s a proper tube, and then a hamster can run up and down it!” (she’s a strange girl, sometimes…) “Yes”, replied my son, “but first we’ll need to get a hamster!” Nothing gets past him, nothing at all.