No I not!

No, I haven't made a serious grammatical error in the title of this blog post, before you ask. This is my two year old daughter's  current phrase of choice. In the beginning a couple of months ago, it seemed quite sweet and somewhat endearing but now I'm rather fed up with it. Anything I want her to do and her response? "No, I not!"

In fact when I was thinking about it this morning, there does seem to be an issue with communication in my house at the moment. The teenager? Well he's a teenager and they don't communicate do they? He generally grunts at me and any answers to questions are monosyllabic with much shoulder shrugging. It would actually be easier to text him. He is quite chatty by text!

The eight year old is quite chatty generally and I love the fact that you can talk to him about 'stuff' and he is quite mature, so we have a laugh too. Unless the topic of conversation relates to something he doesn't want to discuss and then he goes into 'shut down'. When he was in Reception, he was really unhappy at school and this seemed to trigger the 'shut down'. Maybe it was his coping mechanism, I'm not sure, but that year he was very quiet and didn't discuss anything. Luckily three years later, he is thriving in a different school and so the 'shut down' only happens every now and then. The current no-go topic is practising for his piano exam. He has his Grade 1 in two weeks and I suspect nerves have kicked in, despite constant reassurance that it doesn't matter if he passes or not. We will be chatting and I only have to try and sidle the word piano into the conversation and he either walks off or sings. Very strange and mildly frustrating.

Then there is L, my six year old. He is sport obsessed. And I mean obsessed. Just before Christmas we subscribed to the sports channels on Sky as we were fed up of watching football and rugby from years gone by on ESPN. When we told him, he cried. Cried with sheer happiness. He told me he loved me and that he didn't want anything else for Christmas. So the thing with talking to him is it has to be about sport. He can tell you the scores and upcoming fixtures of most football and rugby teams, both national and international. He will talk happily to you about a rugby match he watched, but ask him what he did at school and he is not interested, unless he played rugby or football at lunchtime of course!

So that leaves A who in spite being only two and a bit, can talk really well but often chooses not to use her wide vocabulary. She prefers "no", "no I not!", "I don't want to" or simply a blood curdling scream. Usually over the simple things too, like walking back from the car, choosing what she wants for lunch or putting on her shoes.

So there you have it, the communication of the younger generation in our house. Maybe I should give them a dose of their own medicine, talk to them by grunting and shrugging, refusing to talk about the things they are desperate to chat about and singing at them instead, talking obsessively about blogging (actually I may already do that!) or just randomly say "no" to every request, however mundane. It would be quite funny to see how frustrated they got, maybe I shouldgive it a go ...