Kids come out with some really funny stuff, you hear them say things and they say what they think, they don't see any harm in it, they just say it, it's funny when you hear some of the things, however when it's one of your own sometimes it makes you cringe. I remember once many many years ago, I was barely an adult myself, one of our family friends we'll call her Mary, knew this woman, we'll call her Pam, now they spoke to each other but were not exactly best mates, she was rather bitchy at times, or, as Mary called her, 'catty'. Well one day we were all chatting outside our house, my mother, me and Mary, when along comes Pam and joins in the conversation, as usual she's seizing every opportunity to throw in a caustic comment, " I see you've got a new dress Mary, mind you, it looks a bit tight for my liking" that type of thing, anyway suddenly Mary's young daughter comes running up, "Pam Pam, can I come to your house please?" she begs excitedly, Pam looks at the kid, "of course darling why?" she asks, the little kid looks up at her all smiles and replies, "well I wanted a kitten and daddy said I can't have one, but mummy's always saying you are a verry catty person, so perhaps I could play with yours". I never saw anything so funny in all my life, my mum trying not to laugh, Mary wishing the ground would open up and as for Pam, well her face was a picture. Over here in the UK, we tend to follow a lot of what happens in America, not always for the best, but hey ho, that's life. Well they started doing this thing in schools, 'who is my parent and what do they do' , it works something like this, the kids (usually around 6 or 7 years old) stand in front of the class and talk about one of their parents, "my dad's name is Steve and he works in a factory making cars" or "my mum's name is Jane and she's a nurse in the hospital" , anyway you get the idea. well they are doing this at my granddaughters school and she can't wait until it's her turn, she's one of those kids, older than her years and says it how she sees it. Well, she stands up in frong of the class, "now I'm not going to talk about my mummy or daddy, mummy doesn't work and daddy drives a van, I'm going to tell you about my grandad, he's a very important man" she tells the class proudly. "Oh yes, please tell us, and what does your grandad do?" asks the teacher, Mia looks all around the class carefully and then, to her teachers horror replies, "well miss,as I said, Grandad is really important, he goes out at night and catches bad people, then he takes them to the farm and shoots them!". There are gasps from her classmates, some who she doesn't get on with look at each other, they are clearly worried, and the teacher, well she's just speechless! At the end of the day my daughter in law is collecting Mia from school and gets called in, the teacher wants a word, it's all sounding ominous at this point. Somewhat nervously, which is quite understandable really when you have a child in your class who is quite obviously related to the mafia, she re-tells the earlier story and asks what it is all about, naturally, she doesn't want to pry (yeah right) but she's curious. My DIL explains it's all been a missunderstanding on a huge scale, Mia's grandad is a dog handler, so is often out at night, catching as she calls them 'bad people', he also has a friend who owns a farm and often goes there to shoot vermin. What had happened was this, she'd been visiting our house and I had just come back from the farm after an afternoon shooting, I placed my gun on the table ( I never leave it in my truck) whilst I removed my jacket, at this point Mia had been asking grandma about grandads job, because she wanted to talk about him at school, she'd seen the gun and asked what it was for, so grandma had just said that "grandad goes to the farm and shoots things" (you don't really want to tell little kids about shooting rats and stuff) anyway, somehow everything had got jumbled up in her mind and she became convinced that grandad went around catching bad people and shooting them, they had a laugh about it later but one advantage of the story was that ever since then she's never been bullied at school, lol. She came home one day they were learning about the Titanic and she wanted me to tell her some stuff about it, so around she came, I told her lots of things she didn't know, including how one of the people off it is buried in a cemetary nearby, she looked at her grandma, she was all smiling and proud, "I love taking to grandad, he knows such a lot" she said proudly, my wife smiled, "I suppose it's because he's really clever isn't it?" my wife replied, "oh no, it isn'that" Mia replied, then added, "it's because he's very old". OLD, OLD, I was only 53, lol
