Richard Hearn’s Youngest makes a splash

Youngest™ loves water. In all its forms. In a previous life, he was no doubt some sort of diviner, wandering around with one of those rods. I would say he’d be good person to have in a desert, if his expertness in locating H2O wasn’t outweighed by the obvious fact that pushchairs are rubbish in sand.

I say water in all its forms as if I’m going to dedicate individual paragraphs purely to ice and steam. I’m not. Sorry to disappoint all the scientists. Instead my less than scientific ‘forms’ start with puddles, drink, and bath time.

“Our outside tap is like having a celebrity in the garden”

He has an unerring ability to not only step in every puddle on his route, but to make even shallow puddles give up their liquid treasure. He makes them appear deep. Trying to get him to not jump into puddles is like trying to turn back the tide. (A task that you also get very wet trying to achieve.)

For some reason, puddles didn’t figure until recently. I should have known they’d be an attraction though; our outside tap is like having a celebrity in the garden. The Boy and Youngest™ sometimes play some unfathomable game which involves collecting small amounts of water in random receptacles and transporting them to the end of the garden. One day I’ll go and check their work and discover they’ve turned Lower Hove into New Atlantis.

Inside, Youngest™ and The Boy argue over what they’re drinking out of.

Youngest™ will always be that little bit too ambitious – lidless one minute, breakable the next – peering enviously at The Boy and wanting what he’s got. I don’t think there’s ever been such an ongoing rivalry over cups since Sheffield Wednesday and Arsenal in 1993 (they met in both the League Cup and FA Cup finals. Once you know that fact, the joke becomes absolutely hilarious.)

Youngest™ doesn’t just use his own water for drinking, though. He randomly fills up other containers as he sees fit, plus pours it over his own food as if to dilute it (making weak gravy weaker, and breaded fish inedible). This isn’t a positive trait, although he seems to enjoy it.

Bath-time he likes too; much of his fun involves working out various methods to get the water out of the bathtub. A surreptitious starfish. The base of a blue whale. All are used to tip the liquid out, followed by him pointing, wide-eyed as if he had nothing to do with it.

What I’m leading up to this: when thinking of a day out that Youngest™ would enjoy I had a brainwave. Swimming. So I took him to the pool last week. He hated it.