By Aleney de Winter
Devilboy awoke at 5am this morning. This in itself is, unfortunately, not an unusual occurrence.
Devilboy’s mummy chugged back the best part of a bottle of red wine last night. These days this is, also unfortunately, a very unusual occurrence.
Ergo, Devilboy’s mummy was in no fit state to;
a) Attempt to soothe him back to sleep, or
b) Get up and help him plot the downfall of whichever of his Little People have earned his ire today.
Desperate for another hour or two of sleep - and bad mummy hat firmly in place - Devilboy was promptly tossed into our bed and we all snuggled happily back to sleep until I was woken by a raspy and quite sinister voice chanting, “tiiiickkkllle”. Weighted down, I realised that a freakishly small demon was slowly attempting to strangle me. I momentarily feared for my life but as consciousness returned to my wine saturated brain, I realised that my attacker wasn’t a hound from hell, just a fluey Devilboy prising open my eyes, so I’d join his pre-dawn party. Shouting “Tickle mammy” at the top of his enviable lungs he vigorously attacked me with his scratchy little fingers, giggling himself silly.
My hangover was almost entirely obliterated in that joyous instant.
Tickle is another new word for Devilboy. Smiling, I was rewarded with a deluge of proud ‘tickle, tickle, tickles.’ Wave after wave of love (and alcohol induced nausea) washed over me for my clever little man.
“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” So said Sigmund Freud, someone I’d mostly thought of as a sad mummy’s boy but who, it would seem, occasionally belted out some wise words.
Devilboy’s capacity for learning really is a thing of shiny, sparkling wonder. At 15 months, it appears his vocabulary is already superior to that of many fully-grown footy players. Over the last week some kind of brain explosion has occurred and he spurts out new words and sounds every time he opens his mouth, which is often... so very, very often. He is an adorable blue-eyed sponge sucking up everything around him and then spitting it out in an excited flurry of non-stop noise.
Devilboy’s non-verbal skills also continue to develop at warp speed. Engineer, artist, historian, musician, athlete, raconteur… he’s a veritable Renaissance boy.
His creative engineering skills are easily observed as he constructs beautiful towers from exotic combinations of wooden blocks, sippy-cups and a plastic walrus. As an artist he can recreate the entire back catalogue of Jackson Pollock using only breakfast cereal. He cleverly combines his skills as a historian with his artistic talents, which extend to interior decorating, to turn a tidy room into a scale model of Hiroshima in seconds. Musically, I am unable to convince him that the Wiggles are where it’s at for hip and happening 15 month olds, but I delight as he bops to Bob Marley, head bangs to Hendrix and pogos to Placebo. He plays along on a drum kit of his own design, generally consisting of a plastic tambourine, an upside down box and the cat. The cat is also key in the development of his athleticism as he ‘pats’ him in a style best utilised by professional boxers.
At the sudden sound of inhuman screeching I look up from writing this missive on his great genius and observe my delightful devil throwing his lunch across the room and demonstrating all the intellectual capacities of a socially inept gibbon. As he grows bored of throwing his sandwich and instead attempts to grind it in to the cat, I feel it’s time to break from boasting about his ‘alleged’ intellect and attend to my little primate before he starts flinging his own poo...
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