Numbers

I like it when little children guess my age, they are usually quite frank and the numbers they come up with can be pretty humorous. When I was fifteen, they usually guessed that I was twenty. Now that I've reached that ripe old age, they're back to thinking I'm closer to fifteen.

It always especially amuses me when my youngest siblings ask me how old I am. I live with them everyday, but somehow they never consider how many birthdays I've actually had.

Today, Elijah (age 5) asked me how old I was.
"Guess," I answered him.
"Umm... are you... 81?"
"Yeah," I replied dryly, "I'm 81. I'm older than my father."
"Oh, nooo..." he smiled, pondering some more. "Maybe...41?"

I'll just have to say that it is not very encouraging to have a child think you twenty years older than you actually are. On the bright side, Elijah might just be confusing 41 and 14. He asked me how old Ethan was, and then remembered that he was fourteen. Elijah then wrote down the number, mixing up the one and the four: 41.

I think I could live with having my five year old brother thinking I'm fourteen.