London: Culture, History and Trains That Never Come

I went to see my Dad today. Obviously you can see from that sentence that my parents don't live together - in fact, they never have aside from a couple months when I was a kid, and that was more convenience than anything. They're not divorced, they just never married. Truth is, they were never even together as a couple, not properly - they were close friends, similar to how I am with a couple of my male friends, and I came along as an accident when my mother was three days shy of her 40th birthday. Big surprise, since she had her other two children when she was 21 and 22, and my Dad had figured that he wouldn't have kids at all. (He later had two more daughters, but not with my mother, and anyway that's another story.)

After they had me, I'm pretty sure they were never together again, at least not "together" in the biblical sense. He asked her to marry him, she said no - a fact that I used to curse when I was a kid, but now I believe was the best decision she ever made; a lot of the time I look at the differences between my Mom and my Dad and wonder, what the heck were they THINKING??? - and a couple of years later he married someone else. They had two daughters, the first when I was 7, the second when I was 10, and when I was about 15 they divorced and he moved in with his current (and I imagine last - they seem to be soulmates) partner. Who happened to be my sisters' nanny*, but that's not relevant.

Actually, none of this stuff is relevant. It's just background.

So from his marriage I got two younger half-sisters, and from his current partner I got two older stepsisters, and the eldest now has her own child, so I have a nephew. Or step-nephew. And it was my Dad, my stepmother and my nephew who I went to see today.

My nephew is three and a half, and in my unbiased (hah) opinion is the cutest, smartest, funniest, best looking child in the whole world. I'm aware that all mothers / grandmothers / aunties probably think this about their kids, but J. really is an astonishing child. At three, he can identify every colour in a pack of 16 crayons, including the difference between pink and red, or blue and turquoise, while most three-year-olds would be doing well to name and identify six or seven colours. He knows his alphabet and his numbers up to 20, he can write his name, and his colouring skills are more like a seven-year-old's. My stepmother - his grandmother - is even teaching him some basic Spanish phrases, since they spend most summers out there.

And the amazing thing is that I get no sense that they're over-stretching him. He just loves learning. My stepmother is actually trained as a nanny (as mentioned), a kindergarten teacher and a child therapist, so she has a great deal of patience when it comes to kids, and she knows not to push them too hard when it comes to learning. But J. seems to thrive on learning new things. He bubbles over with joy when he learns a new Spanish phrase or how to write a new word. It's incredible to watch.

While he was eating dinner this evening, he was doing the bubbly friendly thing, and making everyone laugh, so I told him he was a real little comedian. And he said he wasn't, and I said sure he was, so he crossed his arms and stuck out his lip and pouted at me and said, "I am NOT a comedian, I don't go around changing colour."

It was just priceless. I laughed so hard I had tears coming out of my eyes. Although at the same time I was thoroughly impressed that a three-year-old knew and remembered what a chameleon is, even though he got the word wrong (probably due to my accent being different to my family's). I surely didn't know that kind of thing at three, and I was ridiculously smart as a kid. (Didn't transfer all that well to adulthood, hehe.)

In some ways he's so grown-up it's a bit spooky. When you do something that annoys him, instead of yelling or getting grouchy like most toddlers do, he'll calmly say, "Please don't do that, I don't like it". I know several adults who don't act that maturely.

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29th Jan 2010 - Holy shit, AFF somehow deleted the rest of this post without me realising. I wonder how long it's been gone for?