Monday, November 28, 2011

Pedantic...

The Missus has many fine qualities but patience and empathy are not two things she's blessed with. Fortunately, she more than makes up for the absence of these things with a pedantic streak that is a mile wide and twice as long.

This streak, however, has come back to bite her on the arse (not literally) in recent years because the Boy has also inherited it and when the two of them discuss anything she'll invariably say something slightly inaccurate and he'll jump on it like a hungry wolfpack devouring an injured deer.

Last weekend we visited my Guide Son and his parents and stayed over or the weekend. My Guide Son is essentially my God Son but his parents are card-carrying atheists so using the name of a deity they don't believe in seems redundant, hence Guide Son.

He's an utterly wonderful four-year-old and he now has a little sister, and with me and the Missus staying over at his parent's flat there was a bit of bed juggling so we ended up in their bedroom.

At 4.30am the Guide son climbs into bed with us and once he realised it was us rather than his parents he decided to stick around and curl up and go to sleep. This involved telling us about his nightmare and regaling us with tales from school then giving us a rendition of the Muppet Show theme tune. This went:
'It's time to play the music,
It's time to light the lights,
It's time to get things started,
On the Puppet Show tonight...'

At this point the pedant in the Missus woke up and corrected a four-year-old at 5am in the morning.
'It's "the Muppet Show tonight..."' she advised.

We're exhausted, it's 5am and we need sleep and she still can't turn the pedantry tap off.

A few days later, however, I was telling the Guide Son's father, who is also Young Brother of the Missus, this story and he laughed.
'I used to make the exact same mistake when singing the song,' he said. 'And she used to correct me, too.'
'At 5am?' I asked.
'Probably...'

I have not the words...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.