Praise from the Modern Day Child

It’s sunday and the end of daylight savings. So in the confusion of the added 25 hours to the day, or so it seems, I ended up back in bed at lunchtime. Seriously, how can one teeny hour cause such havoc?

Anyway as I lay there fantasising about how many minutes I could lie there for until someone decided Mum’s bed is a really fun place to play iPad (but only when she’s in it.. asleep), I felt a little person crawl in next to me.

Now if you have small kids, you know the drill from here …

You lie there and play dead.

Like you’re in a coma. Even if your nose itches so bad you want to scream. DO NOT MOVE.

The longer you lie there pretending you’re asleep/dead, the longer you have until the endless questioning starts. Now I love my boys but by the last one you kind of lose all humanly patience for the endless questions they ask.

THEN the most amazing thing happened.

“Siri, what is the biggest cake in the world?”

“Why does leeches suck blood out of people?”

“How much blood can leeches suck out of people?”

WTF? My nearly five year old is talking to Siri on his iPad. Good Lord I had been slack in answering his questions. How bad does it have to get for your baby to talk to Siri instead of asking you?

“Siri, what is the biggest shark in the world”.

Now I remembered why the questioning gets so insufferable. Nine times out of ten boys questions always relate to size and involve answers I don’t have, nor do I have any curiosity about.

“Is infinity more than a zillion?”

“What do funnel webs eat, Siri?”

This was where I ‘woke up’. “Jude how do you know about Siri?”

“I just do”.

Jesus. What a completely crap parent I am.

Anyway because Jude is four and his vocabulary still skips out entire syllables or whole words, Siri gets confused.

She (actually Siri is an English ‘he’ on Jude’s iPad) couldn’t really understand what Jude meant when he said “funnel web” because he calls them “funnoooooool wrebs” and he didn’t say it was a spider.

So after Siri told Jude he was having connection troubles I said “funnel webs eat cockroaches, small insects and beetles”.

“Mum you are even smarter than Siri”.

Parental confidence returned.

I’m pretty sure as a parent that is a compliment of the highest order. After all, Siri is the current world’s equivalent of Einstein according to my children.

 

*blog photo credit: Kidspot