WALKING home from school, our little granddaughter looked up and moaned: “Daddy, I’ve hurt my using finger.”

“Which one’s your using finger, honey?” her Daddy asked, prompting six-year-old Chloe to put on her best drama queen face before holding up the index finger on her right hand.

Naturally, Daddy checked it out, gave her a reassuring cuddle, and assured her it would be OK, before asking the pertinent next question: “So, why do you call it your using finger?”

“Because I use it for lots of things – like pointing,” she replied, giving a little demonstration, and quickly forgetting that her finger was hurting.

“And I suppose you use it for picking your nose too?” Daddy added, knowingly.

Appalled at this latest line of questioning, Chloe stopped dead in her tracks. “No, Daddy, I do not!” she insisted, before adding: “I use my little finger for that!”

Let’s face it, nose-picking is a phase all children go through, and Chloe’s episode with her using finger reminded me of a story from the Dad At Large archives 25 years ago…

A colleague was telling me how she was battling to get her son, Daniel, out of his nose-picking habit but it had taken a turn for the worse. She’d been reading him a bedtime story one night and he’d started picking his nose.

“If you don’t stop picking your nose, I’m not going to finish reading you the story,” she told him, firmly.

Daniel stopped picking, so his Mum carried on reading the story, only for the boy’s finger to venture back up his nostril a couple of pages later.

“I told you, Daniel – if you don’t stop picking your nose, I’m not going to finish reading you the story,” she insisted in a raised voice.

The little boy looked at his mum, with pure innocence in his eyes, and whispered: “But, Mum, I wasn’t picking – I was just putting it back!”

THE THINGS THEY SAY

BIG thanks to former colleague and Northern Echo stalwart, Andy White, for this little gem…

Andy’s five-year-old granddaughter, Lily, was having a nice chat with her Granny, Frances:

“Granny, guess what? Mummy got me a lovely treat from the restaurant," Lily declared, excitedly.

“Ooh, that's nice, which restaurant was it?" enquired Frances.

Lily turned to Frances’ daughter, Becky, and asked: “Mummy, what's the name of that lovely restaurant again?"

"Greggs,” replied Becky, sheepishly.

CHARLIE Brown, on Twitter, is facing the horns of a dilemma: “This morning we realised our three-year-old was excited about starting school because she will be getting her own school unicorn,” she wrote. “When do we break it to her that she has misheard ‘uniform’”?

FINALLY, our granddaughter, Chloe, was talking to her Daddy about her day at school.

“The teacher asked us who our favourite author was, and do you know who I said?” she told him.

“Mmm, was it JK Rowling?” he suggested, knowing how much she loves Harry Potter.

“No – I said it was Grandad,” she replied.

And then she buried her face in her hands and groaned: “Damn it! I could have said JK Rowling!”