The Green Eyed Monster

Patrick ran in from playing at a friend’s house yesterday saying;

 “I wish we had a TV where we eat, that we can watch at dinner time. My friend is way luckier than us! He has sweets when he comes home from school and his own computer!”

I wasn’t rising to it, except to quietly point out my reasons for doing things differently, but Ben leapt to our defence.

“But Patrick,” he said “Does he have a tree house?”

“No”

“And does he have his own room?”

“Yes”

“But does he sleep in a big bed like yours?”

(Patrick sleeps in a double bed, purely on the basis that he can be kicked out of it to share with Ben, when we have guests.)

“No” agreed Patrick and nothing more was said about it.

Patrick does seem to covet other people’s stuff. He loves another friend’s Dad’s ‘way cool’ car and he asked me recently,

“When we finished saving up for Disney Land, can we start saving up for a Porsche?”

He doesn’t hold his under-privileged upbringing against us though and forgets very quickly. Not only can he not remember what he did yesterday, he can’t actually remember the word for ‘yesterday’ either.

He had to ask me, accompanied by lots of illustrative hand gestures;

 “What do you call the back day? – the day, one day back?”