I got JJ out of his bath last night and as he landed on the bathmat he yelled out ‘Itahyan’.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Itahyan’.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’ve been learning Italian at school.’
I knew that Italian was on the curriculum but I didn’t know at what age they started teaching the kids. Obviously they’re getting when they’re young which is the best time for a new language.
He’s never mentioned it to me before, so I asked him if he could tell me anything in Italian.
‘Bonjour’, he said.
‘Oh, you mean Bonjourno. That’s excellent. Do you know any other words?’
‘No.’
It’s funny when these little snippets come out of his mouth. I’ll ask him till I’m blue in the face about what happened at school and he might divulge something but of course I never hear absolutely everything that happened.
I just have to use my detective skills like noticing that he’s started to leave the toilet seat up. He’s predominantly been a sitter so the seat hasn’t needed to be up but at school they use the urinal. This was one of the things I was freaking out unnecessarily about before he started – him and toilet visits.
When I was in grade one a boy frantically put up his hand and asked to go the toilet and the mean teacher wouldn’t let him so he wet his pants. I had visions of this happening to JJ because he was too scared to go to the toilet by himself or too busy playing at break times to bother going but he’s obviously been managing quite well and perhaps practising some Itahyan while doing a wee.
