petite anglaise

The progress Tadpole is making with the English language never ceases to astonish me.

Lately I have witnessed the sudden addition of the past tense to her delightful little sentences, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Sadly, while her grammar may be correct, the information she volunteers is at times a little sketchy, or, in some cases, just plain untrue.

For example, Tadpole arrives home from her weekend away with Mamie and Papy on Monday evening, and the first thing to cross the threshold of my apartment is a proudly brandished hand bearing a rather ragged, grubby-looking pink plaster. Just in case I have failed to notice, she exclaims “Look mummy! Look at my hand! I’ve got a plaster on!”

“Have you got a bobo? How did you get that?” I enquire. Not in an ohmygodyou’vehurt yourselfhowcoulddaddyletthathappenonhiswatch sort of way, you understand. I am simply curious to see whether she is able to explain how it happened.

“Yes. It was red and wet,” she elaborates, helpfully.

“Oh, I see, it was bleeding, was it?”

“Yes, my finger was bleeding.”

“How did you hurt it?”

“I did it on the floor,” she replies, vaguely.

Clearly I’m not going to get the specifics without putting words into her mouth, so I resign myself to just not knowing. As it happens, Mr Frog is none the wiser, as no-one actually saw how this mysterious (and so tiny it is barely visible to the human eye) bobo was inflicted.

For an illustration of how good my daughter is at lying in the past tense, I only have to ask her what she had for lunch at the childminder’s house on any given day of the week.

“I ate some Chocolate!”

“Chocolate? For lunch.”

“Yes!”

“Nothing else?”

“No, I had just chocolate.”

I doubt it, somehow.

So comfortable with the past tense is my Tadpole, that she is now using it masterfully as ammunition to get her own way. Again, with somewhat sparing use of truth.

“Right, I’m making pasta for dinner,” I say firmly, making sure that it sounds like a statement, and not at all like a question that could possibly be answered with the dreaded “no” word.

“I can’t have pasta. I had that yesterday,” comes the (total factually incorrect) reply.

This tactic can be used in a variety of situations, and I have now seen most of the possible permutations: “I wore/ate/did that/read that book/went there/saw daddy/went to see tata yesterday.

Grr.

But the thing that strikes fear into my heart this morning, as I leave the childminder’s house, is hearing Tadpole’s voice piping up behind her closed front door.

“Maman, elle a dit que…” At which point her voice fades away altogether as they move from the hallway into another room, and try as I might, ear shamelessly pressed to door, I can hear no more.

Given her apparent ability to fabricate monstrous lies with alarming ease, I dare not imagine what followed.