An Eggcellent Result

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Turns out you can learn so much about people from how they handle the cooking of eggs. Take tonight for example.

“I wanna boy yelled egged, Daddy.”

“I’ll make you one for dinner, if you like,” I said. Then, because I’m a good dad, I went on. “Do you want soldiers as well?”

She’d never asked for a boiled egg before, so you might wonder how I managed to decipher that. Three words: keen observation skills. She was holding an egg cup.

“Kay,” she said, racing off.

Problem solved, I turned back to what I was doing, because although I’m a good dad, I’m also an easily distracted dad. Which is my way of trying to sound like a slightly better parent than I am by not mentioning the words you and tube.

I confess I’m totally addicted to watching John Oliver and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips at the moment, and it’s starting to continuing to effect my parenting.

In less time than it takes to boil an egg, she was back. With an egg in the egg cup.

“Put that down,” I stammered, worried she’d drop it on the carpet. It could only be a raw egg in that hopefully hard little shell because no one had offered me soldiers in the last five minutes or so. I must have sounded as freaked out as I was, because she balked and looked like she was going to drop it right there from shock. In a blur of action exactly unlike what my legs had been doing in the last few minutes, my hands shot out to steady her.  At this point my sentences took a much more succinct direction. “In the kitchen. Where you found it. Put it back. Carefully. I’ll be in there soon.”

“Kay,” she said, racing off again…

…and was back before I’d had a chance to position the curser to skip back to where I’d left off.

“I said…!” I started, but whatever I was going to say to encourage her to give me another minute evaporated in my mouth, which was suddenly very dry and inhospitable to things like words.

I quickly stood up and physically urged Miss4 out into the kitchen where I made her a boiled egg and soldiers.

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I explained the whole thing to Tracey ten minutes later when I retold the story lying next to her in bed. Again, I left out the words you and tube and focussed more on the bit where I didn’t sound like a lazy sod.

“And then,” I said, just about coming to the bit where I finally cooked my daughter some dinner, “she came into the room again, only this time she had-” I paused for effect.

“Two eggs?” Tracey finished for me.

“That’s right!” I exclaimed. “Two eggs! But it’s worse than that. She was taping them together,” I added while I did a superb taping-two-eggs-together mime which Marcel Marceau himself would have pretended to applaud. “Can you imagine if they’d banged them hard enough to crack them over the carpet?” I mean, Miss4 is not generally known for he delicate touch. Just the idea of cleaning up runny yolk had me shaking my head again. Until another really good question occurred to me. “How do you know that?”

“What?”

“That she had two eggs.”

Turns out I wasn’t the only slack-ass parent in the house tonight. Miss4 had been trying to convince her mother to cook her eggs for dinner but Tracey was farming in bed and didn’t want to get up, so she was telling our daughter to seek out and approach me. Then to approach me with an egg. Then with two.

“But I didn’t tell her to tap them together,” Tracey assured me.

I did wonder what the next step in her plan was going to be though. “Three eggs?”

“Actually, you’re lucky you finally took the hint,” admitted Tracey. “If she came back I was going to tell her to yell ‘catch’ and toss one at you.”

At which point it occurred to me maybe Tracey wasn’t as freaked out about the idea of egg in the carpet as what I thought she’d be, and, pleasingly, she is soooo addicted to that stupid Hay Day game.

Which means she can’t pick on me so much for getting caught up watching stupid stuff on the you and tube.

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