“What are we laughing at?”

I got an e-mail from a friend who has a four-year-old son. It reads:

“What are we laughing at?” he asked.

Yesterday afternoon he was naughty and I sat him down to have a serious tête-à-tête, speaking to him very sombrely about how important it is to be nice to mummies etc and how big boys don’t shout and scream etc.

At the end of this long monologue he’d sat through straight-faced, I asked him: “What have you got to say to me?”

He reached across and picked a small piece of lettuce leaf off my cheek that had apparently got stuck there and replied : “Mummy’s got a lettuce leaf on her face”.

Oh, great. So all he heard was blah-blah-blah for half an hour and all he saw was lettuce.

This struck me as so funny I literally fell off my chair (further ruining my serious talk) in a fit of giggles that he joined me in, only to ask five minutes in: “What are we laughing at?”