Aim

It's not an entirely risk-free business, being fed bread by the Boy Wonder: he's got quite a powerful throw now, with either arm, and his aim is improving by the week. Today R and I watched him select particular ducks from a little fleet on the canal, and lob pieces of bread towards each of them individually, with pretty impressive results. On the other hand, when they're on the path he's inclined to hurtle towards them, yelling "Here you go, ducks!" while hurling great lumps at them, which tends to cause alarm, and a rapid retreat onto the water.

The Boy absorbs knowledge like a sponge, and has the memory of an elephant (because, of course, he is A Genius). We pointed out a moorhen to him early on in today's walk, and afterwards - even though he hadn't appeared at the time to be especially interested - he was careful to include every moorhen he saw, by name, in the feeding. He would also stop every now and then, and crumble some pieces of bread on the path "for the pijins" - which surprised me because I wasn't aware that he even knew what a pigeon was. R, who was closer to him than I was during all of this (because I was taking photos, while R hovered within grabbing distance to make sure B didn't end up in the canal), tells me that sometimes it was pijins who were getting the crumbs, and sometimes it was chickins - but still.... I don't think you can expect ornithological infallibility from a two and a half year old.

On the subject of the Boy's age, the only real disagreement we had with him today was when he decided that he was going home from the park by himself. "No!" he said, after spinning round to check that we weren't following him, and discovering that we were. "You can't come!" - pointing at R's feet, in just the way you do with a dog when instructing it to sit; "And you can't come eiver!" - pointing the imperious finger at me. "You have to go away now. Go away back to your house! I am going over here, by myself." In the end he got so cross about it, and so disinclined to be reasoned with, that I resorted to tracking him ostentatiously through the park, making a great performance of hiding behind every tree and peeping round the trunk at him. He was torn between laughter at the game I was playing and outrage at my disobedience, but I kept it going until finally he got bored, gave up, and graciously allowed R to carry him the rest of the way home.

Blimey, I thought, in the midst of all the kerfuffle. Talk about shades of his mother!  His mother, though, did at least wait till she was four before announcing that she was old enough to look after herself. The Force, it seems, is even stronger in this one.