Today I happened to be following a small child and her mother as they came out of a supermarket and was close enough to hear their conversation. The girl was proudly carrying an important part of their dinner in each hand, or at least she was till she dropped one of them. Fortunately it wasn't an easily breakable item.
"Careful, love," her mother said, "that's our dinner."
The girl just giggled and squatted down to pick it up. Then she dropped the other one.
"Oh, come on," said her mother, collecting the second item and adding it to the shopping bag she was carrying.
"This packet is squishy," noted the girl, matter-of-factly. Getting no response from her mother she said it again.
After the third time her mum replied, "yes, but try not to squash it completely."
Instead the girl reached out her arm with the packet and ran it along the wall as she walked.
"Don't do that, love," said her mother, now sounding a little exasperated.
"Why?"
"Because, that's our dinner, and if you make a hole in the packet our dinner will come out and be ruined, and we don't want that do we?"
The girl said nothing, but skipped away happily, probably to find some other way of playing with/destroying the dinner. I find that children that age are exceptionally obedient. If an adult tells them not to do something, they don't do it, they just find something else, equally disastrous, to do instead. What happiness!
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