One of the great things about my kids is that they will talk to me about anything.

Literally anything.

And as an educational professional I know how important it is to have an open dialogue with your children.

So it’s lovely that we’ve got that kind of relationship and long may it continue.

Although if I were to offer one tiny caveat, it’s that I have absolutely no idea what they are going on about most of the time.

Mini Proclaims has, this very week, come up to me and said the following sentence:

“If a house was made of jelly, it would wibble wobble.”

I can’t find fault with her argument. I’m quite certain if a house was made of jelly it would indeed, as she puts it, “wibble wobble.”

But, I mean…

Why?

Why would anyone build a house out of jelly?

I suppose perhaps if you were a little pig and wanted a house that could withstand a wolf’s huffing and puffing.

A house that naturally wibbles and wobbles would withstand a fair gust.

But I’m pretty sure a resourceful wolf would find other ways of getting through the jelly walls.

So it’s still flawed as a concept.

Unfortunately, Mini Proclaims hasn’t offered much context beyond stating what I would again acknowledge are fairly indisputable facts.

And so onto Little Proclaims.

Who has a great deal more to say than her sister and says it often. A conversation with Little Proclaims can be a little one-sided. She doesn’t often pause for air.

She just talks about anything and everything with a freedom and energy that I know I didn’t possess at the same age.

When I was eight I pretty much always had my head in a book. I was reading the book. I wasn’t making a novel fashion statement.

I would consume children’s literature like it was going out of fashion. Which in the 1980s it quite possibly was.

But I would read a book, and then move on to another book and never would it occur to me that anyone might be interested in what I’d just read.

Little Proclaims is already a better reader than I was at the same age, but, while she clearly enjoys a good book, she only reads because we base her access to other activities involving screens on her ability to demonstrate she has done some reading. Little Proclaims reads like it has already gone out of fashion because it clearly has. But she does read.

And when she finishes reading she will recount the whole story to you, whether you want to hear it or not. And when she’s done that she’ll tell you twenty facts you definitely didn’t know about the anatomy of a donkey and twelve more facts about space and then a hundred facts you definitely didn’t want to know about Roblox.

But she’ll also, if you listen, tell you all about her life and her peers and it’s good that she shares this stuff because it’s her way of letting us know about all the difficulties she’s coping with in school and how she’s coping and, as someone who remembers vividly how difficult it can be to be eight years old, it’s reassuring to hear that, while sometimes it’s difficult and kids are mean, Little Proclaims is doing ok.

I know this won’t continue forever – my actual job is working with teenagers and I can already foresee the days when my daughter is more of a closed book, and it’s something I need to delay for as long as possible.

Even if that means pretending to be interested in Roblox.

Which takes some effort on my part.

The other day we were in the car together, Little Proclaims and I, on our way to our martial arts class, when she started talking all about the different kids in her class who are ‘dating each other’.

It’s like a mini soap opera only with less plausible storylines.

And then she started talking about her boyfriend.

My eight-year-old daughter has a boyfriend!

Now there will be a day when I’ll be an overprotective father. And when it comes to boyfriends, I’ll have a lot of questions.

For now the only question I really had about Little Proclaims’ beau was “is he also eight?”

And he is.

So I’m cool with it.

But Little Proclaims wanted to share more.

It turns out her main interest in the boy is that he’s good at maths!

He is genuinely good at maths too. He picked up the maths prize in the recent awards evening.

Little Proclaims got the music prize.

Which is pretty amazing given neither of her parents have any demonstrable musical aptitude.

But I digress.

If Little Proclaims likes a boy because he’s good at maths, then I really don’t have much to worry about.

I was curious about the courting rituals of eight-year-olds so I enquired further. How did the relationship come about?

“Well we like spending time with each other,” she replied, “so I told him he was my boyfriend.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she answered, “he didn’t really say anything.”

“And you took that to mean he agreed?”

“Yeah, normally the boys are mean, and pretend to be sick when they don’t want to be your boyfriend,” she said.

Polite and good at maths?

He sounds like a keeper.