It must be great to be a child. I can't even imagine how wonderful it would be to live in a world where everything is not only plausible, but actually happens--regardless of what all evidence to the contrary would suggest. Every day, Gabe creates some sort of strange event or story that he tells me that is SO out there that I can't even follow the basic storylines--and he tells them as if they are simple recountings of easily verified events. Of course, he can't really tell me a coherent story about easily verified events, so I suppose it's not surprise that fantasy and reality would so easily intertwine in his mind.
Just yesterday, Gabe got into BIG trouble. He pulled out this little rug he got for his birthday that has a series of roads printed on it so kids can drive cars all around. He wanted to unfold it in the dining room and play with it. So he dropped it on the floor, which is usually the extent of preparation that he's interested in putting forth. He went to gather a few cars while he sang out, "Daddy, come fix my rug for me!"
"You can do it yourself, hon. You know how." This, not surprisingly, is a pretty standard response to most of what he would prefer that I do for him these days. I tend to give it two or three times before admitting that my options are to keep repeating myself for the next half hour or do what he wants me to. This time, I guess I should have done it the first time he asked.
He turned back to his rug and Norah was standing on it. "No baby!" he said, and before I could even think enough to respond, he bent over, grabbed the rub, and yanked it out from under her. She spun and smacked head first into the hardwood floor.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth followed, from both of them, because Gabe got an earful.
After things had settled down, I sat Gabe down on my lap and tried to work through what, exactly, he had done that was wrong so that he could, hopefully, learn from the experience (so far, these little teaching moments haven't been paying off much, but I figure they have to eventually, just because he'll want me to quit bothering him all the time).
"Why did you get in trouble?" I asked.
Between sobs he said, "Norah was standing on my rug." So far, so good.
"And then what happened?" I encouraged.
"It's not Norah's rug. It's MY rug."
"Right. But you know that everything you play with that she can reach is BOTH of yours. That's why you play with your toys on the table or upstairs if you don't want her to mess with it. But what did you do to make Norah cry?"
He looked at my like I was speaking Esperanto. I repeated the question. Eventually, he said, "Norah was standing on my rug," again, and that was all I was able to get out of him. I reminded him that he had pulled the rug out from under her, but he insisted that all he remembered was that Norah was on his rug. In other words, it was her fault. The kid's got a bright future in politics.
But that's pretty typical. He can remember the most obscure things from months ago (last night, while we were in the car, he quoted a line from Monsters Inc., a movie we haven't seen in at least two months, completely out of the blue--we had no idea where it was from until he said it was something Mike said, then we put the pieces together), but he often can't remember what he was doing two minutes earlier.
So today, I picked him up from pre-school and asked him what he did today. I talked to his teachers as I was waiting for Gabe to come over from the playground equipment. They said he was cracking them up this morning because, for some reason, he kept sticking everything up his nose. Anything that would fit, went up his nose. I'm glad they were cracked up by it instead of being disgusted. Both of our kids, probably because the whole family has been fighting a cold for the past week, have been spending an inordinate amount of time plumbing the depths of their nostrils. I try to discourage it, of course, but what can you do?
Anyway, so we were back in the car and I asked him what he did today. "I road a dinosaur with a crook," he informed me.
"You road a dinosaur with a crook?" I asked, assuming I had misunderstood him, which I often do.
"No," he said like I was a fool. "I road a crook with a dinosaur."
"Er, what? You road a crook? What do you mean, 'crook'?"
"Crook!" he insisted, but he offered no explanation.
"Do you know what a crook is?"
"Crook!" And that was all he was saying on the subject. The rest of the way home I probed for further details, but was able to gain little further information. He did say SOMETHING that I think was in explanation, but I couldn't make out half of it. I'm pretty sure I heard the words "robot," "fire truck," and "helicopter," but I have no idea how any of it linked together.
Man, it must be fun to be a kid and live in a world where all of that kind of stuff makes some kind of sense.
Oh, and I couldn't get him to admit anything about sticking stuff up his nose, either. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even remember doing it.
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