Life With Two Eight-Year-Olds

Sean & Erin's parents return in a few hours, but we're plotting to keep them indefinitely. Last night, when Kate was stuck at work, I went to put Zoë down and then when I returned to Molly & Jacob's room, the big twins had put them in their pajamas, given them their bottles, put on Molly's boots and bar, and were reading stories. The only downside to two 8-year-olds appears to be the grocery bill for waffles and maple syrup.

We had a blast in Collingwood (referred to by Erin as Hollywood) on Wednesday, at a splash pad / swimming pool (which was indoor-outdoor, so we were able to swim outside, while watching the snowboarders descend Blue Mountain).

I have a pretty good handle on the mind of the toddler, but I'm way out of touch with grade two kids. So here are my three favourite conversations giving insight into life at 8.

1. Tonight, we're talking about Molly & Jacob's day at school. Erin & Sean admit that they always reply "nothing" when asked what happened during their school day. Kate asked why and they said it was because too much happens and it would take forever to explain. We requested examples and Erin said, "Well, just this year we've had two kids at our school get their tongues stuck on the fence. We couldn't tell our parents that". We were informed that to remove the tongues from a frozen fence, a teacher has to pour on warm water, but one of the kids "just ripped his tongue off". If you were the parent of an 8 year-old, wouldn't it kill you to find out that this is a sample of the stories you're missing out on.

2. At the coffee shop on Monday, while the little twins were in school. Erin notices a painting on the wall of a nude woman, drawn from behind. "That's inappropriate" she declares. Which leads into a discussion of art, censorship and what makes something "appropriate". Which leads to Sean & Erin disclosing that some of the boys in their class say inappropriate words, and then look those words up in the dictionary in class, and then giggle about the definitions. So, the teacher has torn all of those pages out of the dictionaries!!! Seriously!! How am I supposed to win an argument that we should send our children to public school, in the face of this prudishness / Orwellianness / smallmindedness / patheticness. And they have a "good" teacher this year.

3. Damn, there was a 3rd one, but it's slipped my mind.

And just to prove that it's still winter up here, here are the kids in the "snow fort" they built this afternoon.