Our neighbor kid has no one else to play with, so he has been coming over to our house this week in the afternoons. I like the arrangement, because the boys occupy themselves and it frees me up to get stuff done. However, since his daddy (also a stay at home dad) remains home with the other child, I supervise the boys by myself. (When I say supervise, I mean that in the sense that I situate myself somewhere in the house so that I can hear the cries when one of them brutalizes the other.) It does bring up an issue though, and that is what the heck do you do with someone else’s kid?
I know every bullet in Malcolm’s arsenal. I know the look in his eye when he is about to do something drastic. I know how he is going to react to various things when he is a) cranky, b) hungry and c) both. Our neighbor kid? I know nothing. He is like a little llama, I haven’t the faintest idea of what makes him tick. 
He chastises Malcolm for mistakes that Malkie made hours before. He alternates between being irritated by and obsessed with what Malcolm is doing. He says that our apple juice tastes like it has tomatoes in it. I have no idea how to arbitrate disputes between the two, as I don’t really understand what their arguments are about. I feel kinda useless.
For now, I treat Jack like he is a Japanese tourist who understands little english. I speak V-E-R-Y L-O-U-D-L-Y and V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y to him and mutter things under my breath when he turns away. I make up arbitrary rules and roll my eyes constantly. I say things like, "well that may be the custom in your country, but we do things differently here." I figure that at some point I will learn how to tame the llama, but for now, I struggle with my Japanese.
P.S. I believe that this was the first time in the history of the English language that the last sentence has been uttered before. Talk about originality!
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