For many years now I say to Maxime, when I happen to have salad tongs, or the like, in my hands: "Put your finger in here for a second."
Now, I have not done it to Gabriel, as I didn't think he would get the joke (Natalya: "You call that a joke?").
But today, Gabriel picked up this little dinosaur clamper thingamajig, (that I remember having as a kid, too, but I always played nice with it, I swear, and I never thought of going after anybody with it, least of all my younger sister), and he comes up to me and says, in perfect English, in a phrase he never uttered before in his life:
"Put your finger in here for a second."
Maxime was there, too, and we looked at each other, and then roared with laughter.
Gabriel comes up with these complete English phrases out of the blue from time to time.
It is like a bomb, with a delay-action fuse. As if he practices an unabridged English phrase upstairs in his room, when everyone is asleep and completely oblivious, and then, when he has mastered it, perhaps after many trying nights of effort, he springs it -- complete and flawless -- on an unsuspecting family. With, needless to say, his requisite elfish grin, which he has actually expressed interest in trademarking a couple of times now.
I will try to catch this grin someday on camera, but it is fleeting and elusive.
Stay tuned.....