'I've never hit Finje. Not once.........Well, once. If you can call it a hit. She was really annoying me and I flicked the end of her nose. She found that hilarious and flicked my ear. I tried and failed to remain austere and a reciprocal ear/nose flicking game ensued. That'll be positive parenting for you.
We do our best as parents to raise Finje in a peace-loving and non-violent environment. We even took her on a peaceful demonstration against nuclear power stations. Asking Finje about that now, you'll hear about balloons, ice cream and skeletons but I'm hoping that somewhere in her subconscious we have laid the seeds of pacifism.
So you'll empathise with my horror as Finje entered the kitchen from the garden with two twigs in the form of a cross. For a horrible moment I thought she'd turned religious on me but no.
"What have you got there darling?"
"It's my pistol. BANG! I am going to find a fox and shoot it. When it's dead I'll put it in a basket and feed it milk and gummi bears until it's alive again."
I wasn't sure where to start if I'm honest. Almost five years of pacifistic brain washing and she has turned into a sharp shooting fox hunter. Now that has to be Mumfail of the year. I'm guessing she has adopted the gun thing from the boys in kindergarten. It can't be from anything she has seen on television because we don't have a television. So it must be the boys right?
The whole experience was made all the more horrific by the fact that the only words she managed to say in English in the whole statement were "dead", "basket" and "shoot it". It sounded quite unnerving in an old WW2 film kind of way.
I took a deep breath and launched into the "guns are very, very bad" speech. She seemed to be listening. What I mean by that is, she wasn't talking, but one can never really be sure. Then she gave me her very best "Mum-I-love-you-but-you-are-a-bit-of-a-loser" look.
"But I'm only going to kill it for a few minutes then I'm going to make it better with gummi bears. I told you that!"
Good. Well that's alright then.