A few weeks ago we went to visit Hope’s Aunties and her Grandmother in the south of England and we spent a happy evening playing on a wonderfully tall climbing frame with a very steep (to me not to Hope) slide. Hope grew and grew in confidence and quickly learned to climb a ladder unaided, before hurtling down the slide, and then scurrying round the side to the ladder shouting, “gain gen gen” (again) and gleefully clambering up to the top of the slide. Then she got over confident and tried to take two rungs at a time and managed to slip and bang her chin, nothing nasty, but a bit of a shock. Hope’s Aunty leant over and smacked the rung of the ladder she’d bashed her chin on, “naughty ladder”, she hit it a few times and repeated the naughty ladder mantra until Hope joined in.
Since then she has walked into a window frame while she was looking in the other direction, and tripped over when walking too fast. Both times she recovered herself and hit the offending frame or patch of floor and said, “naughty naughty”, and then pottered off pleased she’s given her adversary a stern talking to.
Yesterday, we drove up to visit friends in Santa Monica and walked along the pier there, home to many movie scenes, and a huge number of tourists. We decided to go down on to the sand instead as all the people made it hard to walk.
There was a group of buff (as Californians describe toned individuals) men on the beach playing vollyball. Hope got very excited, she wanted to go and join in or at least pick up the ball. We watched for a little while before her excitement got too much and we set off up the beach. “Stop Mummi stop”, she shouted at me, “see, see”, she stood still pointing back at the shirtless surfers bashing the ball over the net, “see Mummi, Hope see… naughty ball”.
I was a bit baffled until we saw one of the guys really whack the ball hard, Hope copied him with an invisible (to me) ball, and mimicked him hitting the ball, “naughty ball, naughty”.
Volleyball is dead to me now … long live naughty ball.
I love my small person so much.
