It’s time to write about the conversations – the everyday conversations that are also anything but everyday. Because they are part of those fleeting moments of connection with your child.
They are usual, for us at least, because there are Questions To Be Asked, every day. As the child grows, so does the complexity of the questions.
(I am reminded as I write this that there were complex questions back in the day too, coming home for lunch after nursery: Can we go to the park? Who is the Holy Spirit? Can I have some more yoghurt? See if you can spot the complex question in the flow there.)
I thought about it recently. You live your life, you read stuff, watch some TV, maybe. And whether you know it or not, you are in training – training to answer the wild and wonderful questions that kids devise.
How do you train for it? Living, for starters. Listening to your other half, for elements of life that you might not know so much about. Reading up on the Guinness Book of World Records might help too, if your child likes Interesting Facts as much as you do.
But however you train, you realise that it is a very specialist form of training. You need to offer some level of accuracy and relevance to the question – or at least be honest in your
‘I don’t know – why don’t we find out?’
Furthermore, you need to be able to answer those questions on the spot – and may never be asked again. That is the hard part. You may have spent your whole life working up to it, hoping to be asked that key question – and then it’s done.
Or it may never even come. It all depends on your child, their interests, the world around them, whatever they’ve found out about at school. After years of piano lessons, orchestra, choir, and so on, it would be nice to be asked, just a little, about music, for example.
But in the meantime, school has instilled what forte and piano mean – as well as the nice chewy -issimos for each. So you smile and say yes, and get in your tuppenceworth that you can say piano in Italian to ask someone to be quiet. (Because there’s a certain fun of building on other people’s facts, even if you don’t get to do the main delivery.)
The thing is, I do like Useful Facts. I enjoy being asked possible and maybe partly impossible questions, and trying to answer. I particularly enjoy the fact that I am still being asked, as is Dan. That for now, we are a good enough source of answers, enough to keep coming back to.
These questions are the key found items of my days, most days. Sometimes they are things I have asked myself. Sometimes they are things I have never thought to question, and find myself working out in the attempt to answer.
So in the spirit of imparting found items to my readers too, I shall leave you with a few of the choice questions of the last little while – or at least some that I can rememeber.
“Mummy…why does the light go out off on the bus after we’ve stopped?” (Noticing that the ‘stopping’ sign on the bus isn’t always illuminated.)
“Mummy…what are clouds made of?” (Daddy stepped in on that one.)
“Mummy…why do dogs sniff each other’s bottoms?”
I rest my case.