My eldest son Henry, 3, continues to amaze me.
His mum’s been in hospital on and off (mostly on) over the past two weeks, sometimes both his parents vanishing in the night, he awakes to find his grandmother in charge.
He’s taking it all remarkably well, even if he does come out with some startling things when he’s playing. The other day he was playing with his toy bus and said matter-of-factly “my mum’s dead” – now even I realised this was a slightly worrying remark that needed putting right, so I stopped watching Channel 4 News or preventing his baby brother eating E45 Cream or whatever I was doing and had a good chat with him to make sure he understood his mum wasn’t dead, just not very well.
Tonight I tried to get him to settle down for a story, but he was making up his own story so elaborate and exciting there wasn’t much on our bookshelves to compete. He has a transparent plastic case that he pretended was an aeroplane, he told me where he and all his friends and family were sitting, that we were all going to the seaside on it, everyone gets off except Henry who gets left on board, and it takes off again, Henry parachuting back down to the seaside where daddy says “brave boy, Henry” – the plane then crashes, all the passengers get off alive, but Henry is a cruel author as he killed off the pilots, or the “driver mans” as he calls them. “Driver mans dead. Ambulances and fire engines come. Police knock baddies over”.
Eat lead, Miffy.