Not laughing at. Laughing with.

Monkey can take half an hour to do a wee, if I let him. First there's the increased running around, inability to stand still, generally jiggyness; I ask a few times if he needs to go. Eventually he runs over and - dancing on the spot - in tones of one making an amazing discovery for the very first time, says "Mummy, you were right. I do have to do a wee."

Whereupon I have to usher him to the bathroom and stand in the doorway as he jumps up and down and tries to undo and pull down his shorts at the same time. (If I don't go with him, he'll just run around in circles all over the house until I do.) He lifts the seat and lid together and aims and fires all in one fluid (ha!) motion.

At this point I can leave, so I make my escape. And wait for his reappearance. Which can take a long time. Eventually, after ten minutes or so without so much as the sound of a tap running, I lose my patience and go to see what's taking so long. He's invariably hunkered down, communing in some unspecified way with his parts. "But Mummy," he said to me the other day, "I'm very attracted to my penis." (He may have meant "attached to," since we gave him leeway on something one day because he was overtired and he was very "attached to" the item in question. But in that case it was a sippy cup.)

I make the requisite little speech about this not being the time to get intimate with his intimates, and eventually the pants come up and the handwashing begins. If I go away again he can take another 20 minutes investigating exactly how the plug-on-a-stick mechanism works (and probably breaking it in the process), how hard he can make the water gush if he pulls the tap all the way on, and just how far he can fill the basin before it overflows. (My little engineer.)

Finally the towel is all bunched up but back on its rail, the light is left on, and he emerges, damp of hands in spite of it, ready for the next challenge of the day.