Small Talk.

I am always intrigued by the snippets of conversation that get passed on to me back home after a day at school.

My daughter is loving being at 'big school' & is thriving on her new found sense of 'grown up ness' despite the fact that her mean mummy won't let her have a mobile phone. She announced to me in the UK in the summer that she had seen a little girl, 'who was MUCH smaller than me, probably not even 5" who had a mobile phone & that she wanted one.

"What a REAL one?"

"Yes mummy, of course a real one." Sigh.

I said "What would you do with it?"
Silly question but I still felt it needed to be asked. Obviously not.

She said "Phone my friends of course"

I said "No you can't, you're only 5."

She said "Great, so I won't get one till I'm 200." Whilst rolling her eyes at me of course.

Where a pint-sized, thumb-sucking 5 yr old gets such teenaged head-tossing attitude I have no idea.

My husband has fits regularly about my mobile phone bill, & the VAST amounts he says it costs (about $40 a mth) This is average in Albania, I know, I did my own mini survey. AND it is our only phone, no landline. So I don't think he's ready for another mobile wielding female in the family. I haven't told him about his daughter's request, don't want him to lose any more hair...

She already spends large amounts of time speaking into her pink plastic Barbie one, so she is well practised already. Can't think where she gets this habit from.
She also arranges playdates, & invites her friends round without consulting me. I keep explaining it's 'For mummies to arrange playdates' but she still does it. Fortunately no stray 5yr olds have turned up on our door step as yet, demanding to be let in for their play dates. But just imagine if she had a phone, I wouldn't put it past her to call the mothers. She regularly called my son's headmaster in Sri Lanka (mainly because he was the first name on my phone, to be fair.)

I must say I thought living abroad in developing countries would spare us the whole brand obsessed/ipod,iphone,DS, X box, Wii 'keeping up with my friends' thing which I hate. Clearly not, their beady eyes are presumably busy all summer in the UK doing lightning assessments & monitoring trends & researching latest gadgets before embarking on negotiations once back here (where, fortunately, we can't buy most of these things anyway, certainly not at 'normal' prices) It never ceases to amaze me what they manage to know about with no TV, no magazines, few peers at school with the latest gadgets (being mainly comprised of NGO workers, missionaries, & locals). Just HOW do they know??

But back to the snippets of conversation. My daughter is not fortunately at that teenage stage of grunting & being monosyllabic when it comes to discussing her day. She holds forth about all sorts. However, I'm often not always that much the wiser after the chat.

At her last pre-school, the reported conversations became increasingly bizarre, in response to "Anything happen at school today?"

"Tim said he ate a cat's brain for tea." & then proceeded to tell me how his mother had managed to remove the brain without harming the cat.

"Ali said she wants to kill my dad" Ali had never met her dad,
So I've been quite relieved that, so far, conversations at her new school seem very staid & normal

"Anna dropped her bear to yellow today" in hushed tones. (Blue is good, yellow is bad, red is very, very bad, bear should stay on blue all day.)

"Kevin keeps saying he is the winner all the time, but he's so silly because he always plays by himself so of course he wins all his games."

" Arun kept pushing & kicking people" (poor kid speaks no English, & is probably immensely frustrated & confused.)

And so on.

Things have taken a romatic turn recently however. Her best friend, T, is a little boy who she has known now for 18mths. They are thick as thieves, are fiercely competitive with each other, & like a little old married couple, she bosses him around, they bicker, are very comfortable with each other & seem to know what the other is thinking.

Last week, my daughter came home announcing that; "T said he wants to kiss me" I must say I wasn't quite ready for this, (to my mind), teenager behaviour.

"Did he say why I enquire? "

"No, I don't know, but maybe he liked the way I'd done my bunchers (bunches) today"
A 5 yr old boy? Unlikely.
(Ok so maybe she doesn't always know what he's thinking....)

On Friday she said he said this to her again. I asked what she said to him.

"I told him he could kiss me if he gave me a big bar of chocolate."

My daughter has always had good negotiating skills....

However he sounds like an honourable little chap & has told his mum (we have, of course, discussed this, on our mobiles, with each other) that he has decided that if he kisses my daughter, he will definitely marry her as well.