These are the things my son does that I love:
- When I pick him up from preschool he sees me from across the room, lets out a happy yip, and crawls to me at top speed, arms and legs driving with furious speed like locomotive pistons.
- Some spectre wakes him in the dark hours and he sits up and wails for comfort. I come into his room, lean over the rail of his crib, and hug and kiss him, stroking his forehead and whispering for him to go back to sleep. As he lowers himself back to his pillow he lets out a long sigh—everything is safe again.
- He thrusts his shopping cart around the house like an old man, stumbling and ramming into walls and people without slowing or apologizing. His cart, as you’d expect to see in a man of advanced senility, is filled with random objects: a sippy cup, a book, an Elmo stuffie.
- He will, with surgical care and slowness, insert his finger up your nose and watch for a reaction.
- He sees bathtime as would an ancient Roman. He strides around the bathtub nude and dripping, making forceful arm gestures and dramatic oratory statements to the assembled rubber duckies.
- While most people’s appetites gently abate in the process of a meal, his increases in ferocity like a wildfire racing across a hillside. The end of a meal can find him with packed cheeks, unable to swallow even a drop of water while still gesturing for more food.
- His patience for his older sister’s Greco-Roman grappling matches is legendary, lying calm and quiet as she squeezes him like an anaconda or drags him by the feet across the floor.
- His interest in the cabinet of plastic storage tubs has graduated to an understanding of how the lids can fit in a slot above the silverware drawer, which he feeds like a token-swallowing vending machine (see below).
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Writer, architect, father, husband.
What an absolute joy!! And clever too:-)