Gender trouble

Henry fell asleep before 7 last night (an exciting development!) and woke up this morning at the usual time just bubbling over with piss and vinegar.
"I had an imagination, Mama," he said, "that we went in a limousine to a restaurant and upstairs was Go, Dog, Go, and downstairs was a kitchen and men made the food and you served it to us. Men make food, you know. Some men do, and some women do."
"Yes," I cautiously agreed.
"I like men," he said. "If they have round heads and short hair."
"Ah," I said.
"I don't like most women," he said. "I just want to be next to you." A pause. "I like Karen (whose office at the Banneker Center was full of toys and sympathy) But Karen moved to a different city."
"Do you like women if they have round heads and short hair?"
"No, I like women's hair to hang down." He gestured to his shoulders.
I remember very well the physical aversion I felt toward my friends' fathers when I was small child, I suppose because I was in love with my own. Some of them even had -- shudder-- moustaches. And it was just the day before yesterday that Henry told me he was married to me. So I suppose we are going through a stage.
Still, I was curious about his views: were they purely Oedipal, or was there something else? "Do women tell you what to do too much?" I asked.
"Oh no," he said, surprised I was asking. "Women don't talk to people. They just talk to grown-ups."

Henry reports on the weekend

Some things we did:

Jump!
Eat chocolate!
Eating breakfast. Go to friends' houses. Digging.
James worked with drawers with me. I drilled. I sanded them. Tumbling.
Drank a tremendous bump of milk.
I'll do some sawing now, then I'll talk.

Oma & Opa's visit, part 2

Oma and Opa's visit, part 1

Stealing Oma & Opa's berries=JOY! 

Cri de coeur

Pillow talk tonight.

Henry: What would a mouse say if another mouse cut down a tree and it fell on him and he was dead?
Peter: He wouldn't say anything. He'd be dead.
Henry: I know; I'm just pretending.
Peter: OK, what?
Henry: He'd say "Darn it! What happened to me?"

Sleep Dog Sleep

All other things being equal, Go Dog Go, a formidably faithful adaptation for the stage of P.D. Eastman's 1961 early reader classic, would not--I admit it--be my first-choice play to see after going four-plus years without setting foot in a theater. But Oma and Opa are here visiting and we were looking for something to do with them in the evening, and Henry seemed as if he might be old enough to sit still for an hour, so there we were. And watching Henry being transported by the magic and wonder of it, laughing, leaning forward breathlessly in his seat, hiding his face in Peter's shoulder when it got just too good to bear (when the dogs used tools) was certainly worth the price of admission.

He tried to sneak out of the restaurant where we went for dinner afterwards to go back to Go Dog Go; he asked for Henry & Mudge, a book about a boy and his dog, before bed; and he fell asleep in a dog house of his own creation.

In the dog house.

House speaker

One of Henry's favorite conversational gambits for several months now is to ask, of any random thing, "what do you think X is saying?" ("What do you think that cat is saying? What do you think that truck is saying? What do you think the bed is saying?") We like to imagine that he is working on expanding his powers of empathy, although it often feels to me as if he is instead intent on forcing me to confront how utterly pedestrian my own imagination is. ("Meow. Here I come down the street. Get into me and close your eyes!")

Tonight at dinner we were running through a series of these questions. We got to "What do you think the rooms of our house are saying?"
"I don't know," I said. "What do YOU think they are saying?"
"Don't let any mosquitos come into me."
And next: "What do you think the sink is saying?"
"I don't know. What do you think?"
"Rub-a-dub-dub, what can I scrub?"