Clever Dicks

Big Family Little income shoes -1

Our kids are all different. All seven. The two boys are the most similar, primarily based on their love of Pokemon and us having to spend the first six years of their lives repeatedly asking them to get their hand off it.

Miss6 loves Shopkins and Barbies, whereas Miss4 can’t wait until she gets her own dragon. Miss12 lives for Geek Girl books, Master11’s a Harry Potter fan and Miss9 announced she was starting Pride & Prejudice a couple of weeks ago, while Miss21 prefers to wait for the films and, near as I can tell, Master24, with his two degrees, has reverted to comic books.

Some like tight tops, some like skirts, one prefers no top (thankfully the boy). Some love chicken while chicken causes nausea in others. One can’t stand the taste of butter while another one likes a bit of toast on their slice of breakfast butter.

They couldn’t be more dissimilar. I’m assuming it’s because I parented them all so very differently as babies. Read as, I dropped each of them from different heights.

Only last weekend, straight after she apparently struggled to understand the sentence ‘don’t start until I put something on the table to protect it’, I overheard a conversation on the balcony where Miss6, using shoes they were each colouring in with coloured pens, explain to her siblings the difference between antonyms and synonyms.

She picked up one of her pair and one of her sister’s.

“These shoes are antonyms,” she said. “They’re different colours and patterns. They’re the opposite. If they were the same they’d be synonyms,” she continued, picking up both of her own similarly coloured shoes. “Like my two.”

It’s conversations like these which blow my mind. I still can’t tell you what an adverb or adjective are, and sentence structure in an intellectual sense is beyond me, so I know they’re not getting this stuff from me.

Today an afternoon snack of toast turned into a math’s lesson – for the record, and in spite of my confessions in the previous sentence, never my strongest subject.

“Thank you for my isosceles,” said Miss9.

“Don’t be stupid,” I told her. “It’s just butter.”

“They’re isosceles triangles,” she explained.

“Oh that,” I stammered. “Yeah, I knew that.”

After I Googled.

Meanwhile, Miss12 recently came home from school upset because she and her cousin got into trouble after some friends invited them to join a writing club. The problem was the club’s initiation ritual.

“All we had to do was write the name of the club on our hands,” she told us. “But the teacher didn’t like it.”

I guess that’s something she can bring up at the next club meeting with the other members of Pen15.

Big Family Little income shoes -2

“Raising a family on little more than laughs”

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