Morning Dialogue

We leave the house to walk to the school at 8.55am every day.  To my daily horror, there is a spider which lives in the gap between the shrubs in the front of our house.  It's about the size of a Fiat Panda (I'm not joking) and even though I know that the unusually harsh winter this year has killed it off, I still RUN (thankfully, I'm steering the pushchair or it would be an arms-flailing girly-squealing extravaganza) past said shrubs lest one morning it finds itself come back to life and decides to jump out into my face, or worse, crawl stealthily onto my shoulder and nest in my hair or ear or something.

What unearthly creature from the depths of Hades wove this web of terror, I ask you?  A FIAT PANDA SIZED ONE, dude.

SHUDDER.

Anyway -- the other morning we were on our way to school and, presumably for comedic effect (he knows about how the spider gives me the willies) Ben wove zig zag style through the shrubbery, as I navigated the pushchair out of the front door and locked the house up behind us.

"That spider'll get you," I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact when really I was trying not to puke in my mouth a little bit at the thought of it really happening.  He just laughed, brazen.

Two minutes later, I thought I'd freak-out-fake-out him, and pointed at his back screaming, "IT'S ON YOU! IT'S ON YOU!" and he began to gesticulate wildly, trying to see behind himself like a dog chasing its tail.  Of course (loving mother that I am) I burst out in a fit of giggles and he soon knew that I was pulling his leg.

He walloped me with his packed lunch bag.  "Mammy!  That was NOT funny!"

"Oh, Benny... it was just a little joke.  I thought it was HILARIOUS," I chuckled.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"It means when something is really, really, extra super funny." I told him.

He gave a bit of a shiver, shaking off the last remnants of the memory of the phantom spider that so nearly crawled up his neck and down his collar.  "Well, DON'T DO IT AGAIN!" he said, telling me off with a lilt to his voice that was spookily similar to my own when he is three seconds away from a session on the 'naughty step'.

"THOSE kinds of jokes," he chastised, his little brow furrowed crossly, "are not funny.  They are not FALARIOUS at all."