“Knees and toes!” Tadpole pleads. Meaning that I’m supposed to sing ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’, her current favourite song. I comply, a little out of breath from pushing her buggy, laden with my shopping, uphill.

“Knees and toes!” Tadpole pleads. Meaning that I’m supposed to sing ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’, her current favourite song. I comply, a little out of breath from pushing her buggy, laden with my shopping, uphill. I don’t really care who can hear me, because this exchange takes place inside the little bubble where only Tadpole and I exist, and I see no further than the sparkle in her grey-blue eyes. But I doubt any of the passers by understood the words in any case. Except maybe when I stopped the pushchair and did the actions.

“Encore un! Encore un!” she begs.

I sing it one more time, and then cast around for some other means of entertainment. Deflecting her attention seems to be the only way to get around her stubborn streak and love of repetition. It’s the only solution I’ve found anyhow. I stopped reading books about child rearing the day Tadpole was born and my brand of parenting can best be described as the “instinctive hit and miss technique”. Whatever works, goes.

“I know, let’s do some counting, ” I suggest.  Tadpole can count in both languages, but has shown a preference for counting in French lately, so I am working on the English numbers especially hard at the moment.

“One,” I begin, pointing at a parked car, as we have now exited the park and are on the pavement approaching the town hall.

“Toe, free, quacre….” continues Tadpole, pointing downwards, I’m not entirely sure at what.

“Four,” I correct.  “In English, mummy says four.”  Tadpole pronounces all “tr” sounds in French as “cr”.  In the case of the word “troittoir”, I find her pronunciation strangely fitting.

“Four,” she repeats, “five, six, sefen…” She pauses, as though she’s run out of things to count.

There is no shortage of parked cars, so I decide that maybe she’s got stuck, and I prompt: “Eight..”

“Et, nine, ten!” she finishes, triumphantly. I stop the pushchair so I can clap my hands and show my appreciation of her counting prowess. Her finger is still pointing downwards, at something on the floor.

It dawns on me that it was not the cars that she was counting, but the dog poos I was swerving to miss along the way.

The joys of city living.

Petite Anglaise

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