Mmmm... NUM! NUM!

These are the words I hear from my almost-two-years-of-age son who is in the back yard, with me, pottering about. I call it pottering about because, well… that’s what we do.

He, of course, got a million and one things that bleep and whizz for Christmas (click here for details of last year's Christmas toy shenanigans) and my mantra for a while was ‘it’s tractor time! We’re off to the fields! Beep beep’ I have now succeeded in convincing toddler-son to accompany me and indeed help whilst I do jobs around the house. He rather likes to:

help me weed the garden: 'more weed?'

try to find the cat: 'cat?... gone!'

yes darling, she’s hiding… from you

or water the garden: 'more can?'

The only problem now is that if I stop to do something else, he doesn’t like it much. Yesterday I found myself putty-ing up the wood on an old stool that I had already puttied to within an inch of its life because he kept on chanting ‘more putty!’

Son is very bossy.

But sometimes… yes, sometimes he manages to amuse himself without my intervention and there follows a period of silence while he fiddles with whatever he is most likely not meant to be doing, like trying to pull out a tree.

He does finally get sick of this and finishes by saying ‘heavy!’

So when we were pottering in the garden and I heard nothing from the little tacker for a few minutes I thought I should investigate. I found him quite calmly and happily, sitting on the deck next to the cat’s bowl, eating her crunchies and saying ‘mmmmm! Num num!’

No darling, yukky! We don’t eat cat food.

I take away the bowl and he decides to throw a tantrum. (but will, fingers crossed, thank me for this later in life)

Thing is: he won’t eat fruit but he will eat cat food.

I want him to grab a strawberry and say num num, not the fishy vita-bites.