The art and competition of conversation

The other night after I put the boys to bed, they started to chit-chat as they often do. I started listening about halfway through the conversation. It was mostly one way as Sam recounted a fun day at school last year – with a smidge of ‘in your face’ attitude.

It went a little something like this:

“...And last year when you weren’t in my class, Jack, um, this one day we got to make these little sailboats. And we cut triangles out of blue paper and we folded the paper. And then, um, we took these little straws – little tiny straws - and we glued them to the paper and we folded more paper and glued them to the stick to make the sail. And we put a little flag on the boat and they were really cool sailboats. And we got to fold paper and use glue and little sticks and it was really, really fun – super fun – and my sailboat was so cool and it was just paper but it looked like a real sailboat and it was the best day ever at school. And Jack, your class didn’t even get to do that. We did. But you didn’t.”

A brief pause, then Jack played his verbal trump card, “We had ice cream that day.”