The answer is actually hilarious as you watch your nine-year-old try to function on a five-second deadline.
It only took her that long to turn meat into a vegetable.
Let me explain further.
After spending more than $100 on board games recently, we now spend every free moment playing.
The other day, we played Five Second Rule, a fast-paced game where you have to name three things in a race against time.
Sounds easy right? Well, it's not.
The pressure gets to you and when you have a noisy spiral timer counting down the seconds and other players starting at you, waiting for you to stumble, it all becomes too much.
It certainly did for Maya.
When she was asked to name three vegetables in five seconds, my flustered little Mini Me spluttered “lettuce … carrot …. meat!”
I’m not sure what they’re teaching kids in school these days, but maybe she got mixed up after I bought vegetarian ‘meat’ pies the other weekend.
My friend won a competition where you had to name a new vegetarian pie a local bakery had created.
I thought my attempt with ‘The Vince’ (Mince with a V for vegetarian if you don’t get it) was in with a good chance, but my mate blitzed it with Lentil as Anything.
Because she lived in Perth, she gifted me the prize, which was a family-sized vegetarian mince pie, which promised customers it tasted like real meat.
They obviously had never met my children.
Dishing it up for lunch one Sunday, the girls dived into their “meat pies”. But by the second or third bites, their faces changed.
“This doesn’t taste like meat,” my little carnivore Ayla exclaimed, with Maya's more direct "I don’t like it” deciding the issue.
They know their meat and will likely never become vegetarians or vegans. But that was fine because it meant more for me.
They weren’t too happy when I told them the pie was, in fact, vego (immediately severing the last skerrick of trust Ayla has in me).
Thankfully children have short memories and all was forgotten when I brought out Cluedo.
This was my favourite board game as a child, perhaps because I wanted to become a detective or private investigator when I grew up.
As such, I never lost a game. Not tooting my own horn or anything, but my detective skills were unparalleled.
But my 30-year winning streak ended abruptly when Ayla played her first game.
Turns out she inherited my fact-finding talents; watching, listening and questioning until she had all the clues she needed to discover the identity of the killer, what weapon they used and which room they committed the murder.
I’m pretty sure all those hours she spends watching horror movies came in handy.
And after my blessed little babes were asleep for the night, I immediately removed every candlestick, dagger, lead pipe, revolver, rope and wrench in the house (and slept with one eye open).
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