So we were cleaning up after Christmas, all chipping in to put away the decorations. I was at work on the tree, removing the ornaments and separating them into fragile and non-fragile bins. Wendy was working on the general house decorations, and Kiernan was working on keeping his DoodlePro up to date.
At some point in the game Kiernan decided to start helping me get the ornaments off the tree. I wasn't exactly excited to get this offer of help from him, as I knew it would mean the job would probably take longer, but I wasn't about to refuse his offer of help either.
So we worked together, taking the ornaments off the tree and sorting them. Every time Kiernan would take an ornament off the tree he would ask me, "Daddy, is this one fragile?" This was a great thing for him to do, but also the key reason why my task was going to take much longer to accomplish. Oh well. No biggie.
At one point I left the tree to attend to something in the kitchen. Getting dinner ready. Opening a bottle of wine. Whatever.
From the other room, Kiernan asked, "Daddy, is this one fragile?"
As I walked back to Kiernan I replied, "If you dropped it on the floor, would it break?"
Now, two things occurred to me at almost the same instant as I said this. One was that this was a logical question to ask. A logical way to get a toddler to understand the concept of 'fragile'. The other thing that occurred to me was that I was an idiot.
No sooner had the words left my mouth than I saw Kiernan, from across the room, drop the ornament he was asking about onto the floor.
He did this without malice. Without any emotion whatsoever. He wasn't trying to be cute or sarcastic. He was simply responding to my question in the most logical way his mind told him to. "If you dropped it on the floor, would it break?" Well, there's a pretty easy way to figure that one out, isn't there?
Fantastic. It's laughs like the one that followed that I will remember.
Oh...and the ornament didn't break
