Since I am woefully behind in my posting, I will just throw out a few random vignettes of our lives from the last few weeks.
1. My dear friend Ray was visiting last weekend. A tale-spinner, a phrase-turner, a word-coiner, a musician, a polymath, he also happens, by day and for pay, to be a historian, the author of a book about police in post-war Germany. So his gift to Henry was a perfect choice, coming from him: a toy police car. Ray was laboring under the misapprehension that Henry's passion for garbage trucks & mailmen reflects a prejudice in favor of civic officialdom, and that he would therefore rather have a police car than a Caterpillar truck. Henry in fact has an equal passion for
all noisemaking motorized vehicles. In any case, he is completely smitten with the car, and takes it to bed with him at night. He speculated aloud about who might be driving it. "Maybe it's a police man," he said. And then, gladdening my feminist heart, he added, "Or maybe it's a police woman." Further thought. "Or maybe it's a police boy."
If I were a police department, I would definitely look into that. Sort of like candy-stripers.
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| In the poppin' hole. |
2. One day at naptime, Henry was in his room building himself a poppin' hole, his term for a nestlike construct of blankets & pillows. The pillows were refractory, and he called out for me to come help him stack them up to his orders. I said I thought that was a job he should handle himself, and that he could do whatever he needed to with the pillows. "No, mama," he said. "I'm a little tiny boy, so I don't can do it."
3. One evening he & I were looking out his bedroom window noticing how pink the sky looked as the sun was setting. Henry listened, properly unconvinced, to my vague speculations about the trajectory of the sun and clouds and the Earth's atmosphere, then he proposed his theory: "Maybe a digger came by and made it pink."
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| On the move |
4. James! He's on the move! Just in the last week, he has started crawling, sitting up on his own, pulling himself to standing, and occasionally taking naps. Henry now spends a lot of his time rushing around officiously snatching away anything he thinks James might possibly be about to crawl to/touch/put in his mouth, saying "No, James," in an ultra-bossy tone. He likes to educate James, holding up objects and repeating their names loudly and with unnatural clarity, as if he were a missionary amongst the savages. Example: one day, we were in the bathroom changing diapers, and Henry turned his backside to James, pointing at himself and enunciating over and over, "Butt, James. Butt."
5. And finally, on one of our near-daily trips to the Banneker Community Center and its huge playroom filled with toys, a 7-year-old boy I'd seen there several times before seemed finally to get up the nerve to ask me a question that had been bugging him for a while now: "How come your hair's so gray?"
