Cillion

This is one of the kids in the house I'm WWOOFing in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW-ts0mj158

Funny video, right? Funny enough to have seventeen thousand views?... Apparently.

Cillion is 10, I think. The video was made a few years ago, but he still looks like that -- he's little, and weedy, and looks intense, and smiles a lot. At dinner last night, we were discussing his youtube video, and the fact that the web site offered him a cut of the advertising funds because of the amount of hits he's gotten.

"I think it's only funny because you fall off the chair midway through," I said.

"I did it on purpose," he insisted.

"Riiight, Cill," his sister, who was working the camera, said, rolling her eyes. "You totally didn't."

"I did!" he insisted.

"You realize it's way less funny if you fell on purpose, you know," Nadia said primly.

I don't believe him because toppling cheerfully off a rolling chair is exactly the sort of thing he would do. This kid constantly overestimates his own physical capabilities -- whether rolling a go-cart onto its side while going thirty miles an hour down the hill in the churchyard or inhaling the noxious chemicals he's combining for his science experiment, Cillion pushes the limits.

He lives way out in the country, so he doesn't have many friends close to home -- he's too old to babysit, but too young to drive. As a result, he's left to his own devices a lot of the time. This has resulted in him watching a lot of Mythbusters on the Discovery channel, then attempting to apply the principles of the show to everyday life, and disregarding common sense in the process.

Today, we were stoking a bonfire I'd made from spare brush and an old armchair; I was attempting to nurse the flames into eating a twenty-foot stack of brambles. I was sweating, snapping twigs, throwing gasoline-soaked children's socks onto the fire. Cillion was standing on a discarded footstool, wearing a 'highly flammable' (as he told me) jacket, poking it with a stick and sporadically saying, "Hey! Watch this!"

"I wonder what happens when you throw ice in it," he said gleefully, trotting over to some trash in the corner of the yard.

"Hm, gee," I said idly as I dragged a mile-long half of a tree onto the weak flames. "I wonder."

He stopped. "Actually, MythBusters did an episode on the act of putting ice in a very hot fire, and it turns out it explodes." With that, he threw the sheet of ice he'd picked out of the bucket into the coals, and stood closely by watching it. "You might want to get out of the way, just in case. I'll stay here."

I admired his protective ten-year-old manliness, but really wished it would extend to throwing giant branches on the fire instead of just trying to make it as dangerous as possible. If he had, perhaps our fire would have exploded that ice instead of merely melting it, causing Cillion to wilt in a disappointed manner, his stick drooping.