The four year olds idea of a joke

Joel finds it highly entertaining to hide things, it amuses him to no end. In the last week he’s hidden my mobile phone at the bottom of the tissue box, the silver knob that operates the dimmer switch for the dining room lights and his dad’s cash card in an undisclosed location.

Thankfully my phone was switched on and I was able to place it by calling it from the house phone. Had it have been switched off this could have been a very different story. It’s hiding place so obscure that I would doubtless have reported it as lost and replaced it within a few days, costing me money and causing me a good deal of inconvenience, only to find it the following week when the tissues came to an end.

The husband learnt of his missing cash card when he went to pay for something at the local shop. When he returned home (minus the things he went for) he sat Joel down and asked him if he’d seen the card. Joel told his dad to wait there whilst he went to ferret around in his bedroom, returning with the cash card in his hand. He has a random selection of secret hiding places for the adults in his life’s stuff. I was once hurriedly getting ready to go to work and realised that half of my make-up was missing. I later found it in a box under Joel’s bed, I was furious!

Several weeks ago we were at Supergran’s house having Sunday lunch with her and uncle Billy (my brother). Uncle Billy put his house and car keys down on the table upstairs and when he came to leave they were no where to be seen. We’d already gone home and when I received a phone call from Supergran asking if I could shed any light on the missing keys the first thing I did was ask Joel. I explained that he wasn’t in any trouble, they just needed to find the keys pronto, but he denied having any knowledge. As his usual style is to confess and return items, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Despite Supergran and Uncle Billy turning her large house upside down they never did find the keys. As you can imagine this caused a lot of trouble and has been both time consuming and frustrating. The site of Uncle Billy’s keys has remained a mystery for over three weeks. Then finally this morning when I was joking with Joel about what a cheeky little so and so he is to secrete people’s things he revealed the hiding place of the missing keys, behind the big book case in Supergran’s sitting room. No wonder they couldn’t find them.

Obviously now if anything goes missing he is going to be in the frame straight away and his protestations of innocence will not be believed. I just don’t know what to make of this strange behaviour.