Conversations with 3-year-olds and other little ones

Last week I talked to my nephew Prince Hal, Snail Slayer, on the phone. Prince Hal will be 3 in a couple weeks. He's quite the conversationalist.

Me: "Hi Hal, how are you?"

Hal: "Good. What are you doing?"

Me: "Oh, I'm sitting in my apartment watching the snow outside. Did you know it's snowing here in Ohio?"

Hal: "I want to come play in the snow with you."

Me: "Ok, Hal, you can come visit me and play in the snow with me anytime!"

Hal reconsiders: "Yeah but it will be cold."

Yesterday after my Farsi lesson, I spent the day with a friend and her kids (the eldest of whom I teach violin). While my friend was dropping off / picking up older kids from preschool, I got to spend a little time one on one with her 3-year-old girl Ava in the mini-van. One of these times, the baby next to Ava started to cry, so Ava and I were trying to come up with ways that we could console the baby from our seats. We decided to try singing to her, and it seemed to work, since the crying stopped. We sang "You are my sunshine," which Ava knew until I started singing the verse "the other night dear..." She raised her eyebrows at me toward the end of the verse (right around the point of "I hung my head and I cried"), but then came right back in with a smile for the chorus. Then she exclaimed, "Now let's sing Twinkle Twinkle!" So we sang about the little star until her mom came back.

After preschool, my friend takes another little boy, also from our congregation, to his babysitter's house. While Ava and I were waiting in the car for her mom to get her older sister and this 5-year-old boy, Ava frowned and told me, "I don't like [that boy] anymore. He scares me." So I looked back at her and said, "You know what you need to do Ava?"

"What?"

"The next time he tries to scare you, you scare him right back. And you'll never be scared of him again."

Ava looked puzzled for a moment, thinking this over. Then she threw up her hands and with a grin on her face, she said, "I'll never be scared again. Never ever!"


The little boy in question is quite a character. He loves Star Wars and Harry Potter. Especially the villains, so it's no secret that he likes scary. But he's also a charmer, so I'm sure Ava will like him again. All the way to the babysitter's house he was trying to show us the pirate's map he had made in his class that day and talking about his Wii Lego Star Wars game. His babysitters happen to be the family of one of my seminary students. This student had not been to seminary yet this week, and so we asked the little boy if she was sick. He said yes. So when he was getting out of the van, I said, "Do you think you could give her a message for me?"

"Um, no. I would just forget it."


Classic honesty from the little ones.