We spent the afternoon ‘playing pretend’ with our lovely adopted Sudanese family – making millions of dollars out of white A4 paper, stuffing it into our ‘wallets’ (folded envelopes) and driving our car (two kitchen chairs) down to the local shop (the little coffee table in the lounge room). All this was happening while a normally hyper-active two year old downed a can of lemonade and turned into a ultra extreme hyper-active two year old, throwing shoes, jumping off the dining table and getting kicks out of mooning us all. Kids!
Anyhow, in the midst of playing in our pretend world, we used our paper mobile phones to call 000 – a great opportunity to explain the police, ambulance and fire service to the kids in case of an emergency. We all practiced on our paper phones before we asked the kids if they had ever called 000 in the past. To which we got the very excited response – ‘Oh yes! We had to call the police one day because a big strange animal and its baby was in our lounge room and we didn’t want it to eat us.’ After much prompting and some fantastic investigative skills on our behalf, we finally figured out that the ‘big strange animal’ was actually a friendly neighbourhood possum who managed to sneak inside one afternoon. And if a possum and its offspring is out to eat you, who else to call in that situation but the police! Hehe. Ahhh, at least we know the kids are 000-saavy!
laura swanson 