Saiga's Notes

Five hours in a row, I watched six-year-old Archie’s getting ever more exhausted and headstrong. He half-lay on the park bench twice with eyes closed just to bounce up hearing the dad’s soft voice asking if he wanted to sleep. I could remember the other day last year when he got stuck in песочнице until he peed twice in his pants, desperately chilled but kept playing on and on.  I tried reasoning that tomorrow we’d come again, that other kids were gone and he got bored. Proposals of cartoons, drinks, food were sharply set aside. Did he want to pee? “No” again. I didn’t feel like taking him home by force. My wife and I had put so much efforts in coping with his reluctance to go outdoors. It’s for the first time after the winter that he took his bicycle with him and immediately got so crazy about that. And now me going back? No way! The fifth hour was coming to an end when finally I could make it right. “Archie, will you tell mom how your time out was?” He shook his head: “It wasn't ...

My kei car fools everybody about the size of its cargo compartment. Once the three of us, my wife, son and I, picked up a TV set from friends, quite a fair-sized 21'' device in a box. The son inspected the box and remarked: “It must be put on the roof bars.” He was somewhere else when I was loading the TV set - not onto the bars but into the luggage section. Time to leave, he comes in and sees that there's nothing on the roof. “Uh-oh, we forgot the thing!” “Dad'd put it in the luggage compartment,” mom explains. “Nuh-uh, it's big, it won't never fit inside.” “Yes it's big but the car's bigger so it did.” He puts up with the fact, gets into the car, clicks the belt buckle and draws the line below: “The TV set is not on the roof, it's inside the car. The car’s GROWN BIGGER.”