The age of reason

What’s the reciprocal relationship to “friend of the family”? It seems that I’m officially a friend of the extended ecogrrl-decogrrl family, and it sort of bothers me that I don’t have an easy expression for this. “Family of friends” doesn’t seem quite right.

In any event, I was recently visiting a branch of this family that I am friends with, and this particular branch includes two small children; for the sake of anonymity, I shall refer to them as Girl and Boy, respectively. Girl recently turned 6, Boy was just about to turn 4, and both (after an initial bout of shyness, perfectly understandable since (a) it’s been nearly a year since I saw them, and kids forget people after that long I guess, (b) I’m sort of a scary-looking dude sometimes) quickly incorporated me into the play structure. I think this was sort of handy for the parents, since there were all manner of preparations to be made for Boy’s immanent birthday party, and my distracting the children gave them a little space to work.

Anyhow, so it’s late Sunday morning, and I’ve been up for a few hours, and most of those hours have been spent playing with the children. I had engineered a game that involved them tossing little balloons at me and my batting them back to them, all with me sitting in a very comfortable chair. (That’s the part that required engineering.) After a little while of this, it seems that the kids caught on to my ulterior motives, and got me to go chasing after a baloon that had gone astray… at which point, they took possession of the chair. (Comfy Lounge Rules in effect already. Someone should start teaching them to play cards.) After making some mock-indignant noises about this, I took possession of the oversized ottoman sitting nearby.

This sparked a brief consultation between the kids, with Boy quickly coming over to try and annex the ottoman into their territory. Girl had a different idea: “How about,” she says, addressing me, “you lie down on the couch and we can jump on you.”

Now maybe I was just really tired, but it seemed so very logical, the way that she stated it: here is a plan that benefits everyone, was the clear subtext. I appreciate logical thought, even when it’s as twisted and misleading as this, so I tried to come up with a logical counter: there’s all kinds of toys on the sofa right now, I can’t lie down on it.

Immediately, the pair of them go and pile stuff from the sofa on to the coffee table. “There,” Girl says, “now you can lie down.”

So I did. And they started jumping on me, as promised. That’s about when their mother came in and scolded them lightly for jumping on the guest. I guess the Fresh Prince was right: parents just don’t understand.

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