A father's ponderings on twins and their devious ways
Hannah to Nicola: “Mummy, do the numbers 33, 34, 35 and 36 occur to you?”
Nicola: “Occur to me? What do you mean?”
Hannah: Y’know, do they ring a bell?”
Hannah is standing half in her wardrobe. She is “getting ready for bed“.
Nicola: “No, not particularly.”
Hannah (producing theatre ticket stubs with a flourish from within the wardrobe): “High School Musical seat numbers!”
Nicola (slapping forehead): “Of course…”
The girls continue to hone their joke-telling skills, using me as their unfortunate foil. This morning’s selection came once again from Lauren.
Joke 1
Q. How do you make anti-freeze?
A. Lock her in the fridge.
[Aside: One of my earliest memories is wondering why this joke got such a big laugh when I didn't even understand it. The reason, it turned out, was because I was asking "How do you make granny freeze?". I was just wondering where Lauren got such a well-polished joke from when out tumbled another one.]
Joke 2
Q. Why did the prawn go out with the fig?
A. Because he couldn’t get a date.
I loved that one, especially the nicely random prawn touch.
It was at this point that Hannah came running in, clutching the Puffin’s Brilliantly Big Bumper Joke Book, and shouted, “No, Lauren, it’s prune!”
I can’t believe it’s been so long since I last shared the girls’ jokes with you (over a year now!). Time to make amends with an absolute belter from Lauren this morning.
Lauren: Daddy, do you want to hear a really bad joke?
Me: OK.
Lauren: OK, so… what’s the difference about a witch…
Me: Between, Lauren. What’s the difference between.
Lauren: Oh yeah, OK, right… what’s the difference between a witch and…
Hannah: A biscuit!
Lauren: Hannah!
Me: Hannah, don’t interrupt, let Lauren tell her joke. Go on Lauren.
Lauren: OK, so, right, what’s the difference about a witch…
Me: Between.
Hannah: Stop interrupting Lauren, Daddy.
Me: Shush, Hannah.
Lauren: …between a witch and… erm…
Hannah: A biscuit!
Lauren/Me: HANNAH!!
Lauren: Hang on, it’s on my joke book… [fetches joke book]… Oh yeah, right: what’s the difference between a wizard and the letters K, A, S, M and E?
Me: I don’t know.
Lauren: One makes spells and the other spells MAKES!
It’s all in the timing.
This is just one of the terrifying questions I’m anticipating now that the girls have discovered the institution of girlhood that is Grease. Actually, “discovered” is a coy understatement: they’ve recorded it and have taken to watching it several times a day. I’d never seen it before and I had no idea just how adult the dialogue is, not to mention the pelvic gestures.
Nicola, on the other hand, is taking it all in her stride, assuring me that she went to see it at the age of 6 with her grandmother and it all goes over your head at that age.
I suspect I’m just “being a dad” on this one. Do any readers have any Grease-related personal stories they can share which might calm my troubled mind?
We found ourselves at the back of a very long queue at the ice cream kiosk today, so the girls started running a relay to the front to report back on the flavours available. The full list they assembled was as follows:
This caused no small amount of excitement in our section of the queue. What scrumptious Wonka-like invention was this “double-lick vanilla”? Was double-lick technology also available on other flavours? We began to scrutinise passing ice creams for a clue as to what double-licking might entail.
Sadly, when we reached the front we realised that what was actually on offer was diabetic vanilla. After that our ice creams tasted strangely disappointing.
The other day I showed Hannah and Lauren the beautiful dimples they both have right at the bottom of their backs, one each side of the spine. They had great fun tickling each other’s dimples until, as usual, it all spiralled out of control and the police had to be called.
This morning Hannah appeared in our bed in her heatwave-friendly birthday suit and stretched out on her tummy. Her hand went wandering over her back until she found her dimples but at this point she suffered a sudden vocabulary malfunction.
“Mummy,” she said, “did Daddy tell you we’ve got bottom nostrils?”
Hannah and Lauren went on a school trip last week (a day out at Lyme Park). Here is the list of things to take that Hannah brought home from school. (Click it for a bigger version.)
List for the trip
“The best in the whole wide wierd” by bitrot
Hannah wrote this questionnaire this morning and got me and Nicola to write in our answers. I suspect we were biased.
The answers to the obvious questions were:
1. “Oh yeah, it’s meant to say ‘world’.”
2. (Regarding the cactus-shaped object) “Er… it’s a bogey!”
Hannah and Lauren’s reading is really coming on these days, and they’re bringing more and more advanced reading books home from school. Yesterday Lauren was doing a lovely job of reading Sleeping Beauty. I wonder if you can spot the one word she stumbled on?
“Can I try it?” said the princess.
“Of course,” replied the old woman. The princess reached over, but the moment her finger touched the spinach she fell into a deep sleep.
At the age of five and a half, Hannah and Lauren’s grasp of “square words” is still not quite there. A conversation from earlier today:
Hannah: “Daddy, Lauren just said ‘pupils’!”
Lauren (in protest): Hannah started it!!
A classic from Lauren yesterday:
“Daddy, I know what a weirdo is.”
“Oh yes? What is it?”
[Seriously] “Well, it’s a lady whose husband has died.”
A conversation I overheard yesterday from the next room:
Hannah: Mummy? Do you know what porcupines are?
Nicola: Yes.
Hannah: What are they then?
Nicola: Well, they’re animals with lots of spikes, a bit like hedgehogs.
[Confused pause.]
Hannah: So why do people say “Don’t tell porcu-pines”?
Nicola: No, sweetheart, that’s porky pies. It means lies: don’t tell lies.
Hannah [penny dropping]: Ohhh!
Aside: Friends and family will know that porcupines (or one porcupine in particular) will have a special significance for Hannah one day. She just doesn’t know that yet. 
Hannah and Lauren have each got a pair of plastic high-heeled shoes for dressing up. Despite our best efforts, Hannah insists on calling them her “hee highls”, conjuring up the image of some kind of regimental Nazi footwear. The effect is particularly vivid when combined with Hannah’s unique style of staccato shouting, such as, earlier this evening: “LAUREN! DON’T! GO! UPSTAIRS! WITH! YOUR! HEE-HIGHLS! ON!”
Getting dressed for school this morning, Lauren suddenly piped up excitedly: “Daddy! Guess what my…” before being caught short by a sudden attack of memory loss. She turned to Nicola.
“Mummy, what are those round things called?”
“What round things?” asked Nicola, perplexed.
“You know, the ones that begin with C?” Another blank look from Nicola. I could see Lauren was beginning to get frustrated.
“Oh Mummy, you know! The things we had for breakfast!”
The penny dropped. “Oh, you mean Cheerios?”
“Yes!” Lauren spun back round with a big grin. “Daddy! Guess what my burp just tasted of? Cheerios and toothpaste!”
The girls and I were heading out to the chip shop the other day. There was some amount of hilarity going on in the back seat at the prospect of their fish and chips making them burp. (“I’m going to do a big burp!” – “I’m going to do a huge burp!” – that kind of thing.) So, understanding that the quickest way to a four-year-old’s heart is via the use of slightly rude words, I interrupted with the stern command: “Girls. You can have fish and chips as long as you promise… that you won’t burp… and won’t boff.”
There was a stony silence for a second or two, then Hannah gasped, “Ahhhh, you said a square-word!”
“Yes,” seconded Lauren, “Mummy said it’s very naughty to say square-words!”
“Like what?” I asked.
“We can’t say them!” came the reply.
“What, like boff?”
“Ahhhhhh!!”
“And burp?”
“No, burp’s not a square-word.”
“And bum?”
“Ahhhhhh!!”
This got us all the way to the chip shop: me trying out rude-ish words and seeing what reaction they got. By the time we arrived, we’d ascertained that boff, bum and winky were square-words, whilst burp, poo-poo and wee-wee were socially acceptable.
I still haven’t had the courage to ask Nicola what really prompted her to tell the girls about “square-words” – maybe because, somewhere deep down, I suspect I’m probably to blame.