Cheery

"No dragonflies for Grandma today," I said to the Boy Wonder at Forest Farm this morning. "Poor me!"

It wasn't entirely true, though the season there is proving to be quite strange. By rights, on a warm, bright morning after a period of bad weather, the place should have been teeming with dragons - darters, at the very least, and probably hawkers as well by this point in the season - but the one solitary dragon I spotted during our entire visit was a Golden-ring. Big and gorgeous, and exactly what I wanted to see, of course, but very close to me in the reeds, and moving fast and erratically because it was hunting, so I had no hope of capturing it on camera. All I could do was stand and admire the flying display taking place no more than a metre in front of me, so that's what I duly did. 

After a minute or so the Golden-ring zoomed away along the canal, with me in hot pursuit, but I failed to catch up with it, and in the end I had to admit defeat for yet another week. By the time I made my jokingly pathetic statement to the Boy, he and I were walking back along the path towards the exit (R having been sent ahead of us to hide). As sometimes happens when he likes the sound of something you say, he echoed it back at me in exactly the same tone of voice, which made me laugh, and as soon as we found R (who to be fair hadn't put very much effort into hiding), he sang out a cheery "No dragonflies for Grandma today, Granddad!"

By this time the Boy was tiring, so R picked him up, only to find that he was carrying a ravenous wild animal. "I'm eating you all up," said the Boy. "I'm eating your hands. And your shoes. Nom, nom. I've eaten all of you now. You're aaaall gone." And then to me, "Granddad's gone, Grandma. I've eaten him all up." "Oh no!" I said. "What shall I do without Granddad?" "You will have to get another Granddad," replied B cheerfully. Which wasn't a solution I'd expected him to propose, I have to say. Wherever do they pick up these ideas from?

This afternoon at the park, the Boy asked for an ice lolly, and chose a striped, five-flavoured one. He was sitting on a bench to eat it, and R, sitting next to him, asked which of the stripes was his favourite colour. "This one," said B, indicating the purple stripe at the top. "And this one. And this one, and this one, and this one." Needless to say, by the time he'd eaten the lolly he was as high as a kite on the sugar, and on our way back home afterwards, sitting on R's shoulders, he kept up a constant stream of bizarre but entertaining chatter, while beating out an intricate jazz rhythm on the top of R's head. 

It's lucky that we're not minded to try to keep secrets from B's parents, because we'd never have got away with this one. This evening L sent us a recording of the Boy singing a little bedtime song to himself: "Ice lolly," it went. "Ice lolly ice lolly ice lolly ice lolly..."