Defiance for dessert

Early evening, though it is already dark outside. My youngest daughter, all tousled hair and jutting lower lip, sits at the dinner table scowling at me. She is only three years old but somehow manages to emanate the kind of sullen resentment you would normally expect of a teenager who isn't allowed to get their ears pierced. I sit opposite her, hand on chin, staring bleakly at her while she pushes her meal around her bowl with her fork. Everyone else has finished their dinner, and long-since left, citing extreme boredom at the ongoing battle of wills. We have been sitting here so long now that my mind has started wandering, and I occasionally lose track of why I'm still there and start to get up to go and do something else, before noticing her frowning away at me.
"Come on," I say. "Just three more mouthfuls."
"No, thank you, Daddy" she says, having learnt quite early on that if she cunningly combines outright disobedience with extreme politeness it confuses her parents.
"Three more, please..." I insist.
"No, thank you very much."
"Why not?"
"I have already eaten all the good bits. Only the stuff that tastes like yuck is left."
I look at her bowl, the contents of which are now unrecognisable due her prolonged stirring and mashing. There is no doubt she is correct: what is left really does look like 'yuck', but frankly that's her own fault and in any case is entirely beside the point - I am the Daddy, and (in the absence of her mother) the senior authority figure at the table, and thus in charge.

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Nobody can touch the Duplo peacock...

I was particularly looking forward to Christmas this year.
Not, as most folk might think, because of all the traditional Christmas stuff: peace, goodwill, family visitations, gifts, feasting and the like - I'm sure that's all very nice for most normal, well-adjusted people, but I've never really considered myself to fall into that category. I'm pretty certain that at no point my life up until now have I ever been, nor in fact will I ever be, described as 'getting into the festive spirit'. I don't really do 'festive - I despise tinsel, for a start. I'm always the one at the Christmas dinner table who flatly refuses to put the paper hat on from out of the Christmas cracker ("No, you're wrong - actually it's not fun, and you all look like mental patients..."), and who supplies their own, deeply inappropriate punchlines when anyone starts reading a joke out: "What's worse that finding a worm in your apple, you ask? How about me finally cracking and killing you all with this fork...?"
However, this Christmas was always going to be special, because this was the year that Eldest reached an important and life changing milestone: this Christmas, she graduated from Duplo to proper Lego.
Now, your immediate reaction there might have been to think that this is not a big deal - but if so you would be incorrect, and should feel ashamed.
Let me be clear about my thoughts on this: Lego, as the Internet-savvy youth like to say, is both 'teh awesome' and 'made of win'. In fact, I would go further than that: I would say Lego exceeds both these descriptions, and is made of an exciting new alloy of both 'awesome' and 'win' (a material that I shall henceforth call 'Awswinium') - it's that great.

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