My boys and other animals…

By the end of last week, this quote from Plato seemed particularly apt:

It didn’t spring to mind because they were rampaging like wild beasts through the house, nor because they were constantly hunting down food – it was because my sweet, little one-year-old, The Cute One, had learned to screech like a pterodactyl. (So much so, that I was began to wonder if it was time to rethink his moniker. He really wasn’t living up to his name.) If he didn’t get what he wanted, when he wanted, some atavistic reflex would take over and he would pierce the air with his indignant squawking. My ears were bleeding.

And when The Cute One wasn’t being a prehistoric horror, he was being a parrot: firstly, because he has just discovered that he can mimic sounds, so I was hearing lots of laughably adorable attempts to say “trousers” or “glasses”; secondly, because one of those new words was “cracker” (or “ka-ka” in Cute-speak). So, while his big brothers foraged in the kitchen for a never-ending supply of snacks, he would point at cupboards and yell “KA-KA! KA-KA!” until his needs were met. (And if they weren’t met, then the Jurassic language of the pterodactyl would come loudly into play.)

This primitive behaviour from The Cute One set me thinking about what other animal-like behaviour I witnessed on a daily basis, living among boys like Jane Goodall among a whoop of gorillas. Here are my anthropological thoughts:

But despite the kinship my boys share with much of the animal kingdom, ultimately I refute the Plato quote. Boys aren’t that unmanageable, are they? There are means and ways to manage them. But then again, Plato was writing in an era before the invention of tranquilliser darts and iPads. Either one of which will control the most bestial of boys in my household.