Inspirations from cheese in a can. joey, kelly, danny, and charlie

I was awake at 4:30. My attempts to go back to sleep failed. Sometimes the sleep doesn’t go so well. Anyway, I eventually gave up and picked up the book I’m reading now. That reminded me, for the 300th time (today), that my beautiful life is screaming by, largely undocumented. I always assume that at some point I’ll get around to a systematic method of recording a fraction of it, at least with broad strokes, with a few details here and there. In absence of this mythical systematic method, however, I’ll just throw a few things together so maybe I can sleep (Could that be what’s keeping me awake? Hormones have become my go-to cause for any given behavior or ailment, but who knows).

Our son Danny is three. Everywhere he goes, he’s on the lookout for new friends. Today at the park, where he was already playing with two ladyfriends from his playgroup, a family arrived with young boys. He stood on the sidewalk and waited for them to get out of their vehicle, and then, as they made their way to the playground, he just fell in step with them, as if he were part of their family. Speaking of hormones, I am beginning to believe that even in very small children, they are present and working. Case in point: he flirts with, fights with, and teases his ladyfriends. His tousles with, wrestles with, and pals around with his male friends. And the difference is magnified if both ladyfriends and male friends are present. I guess this is just obvious to some, but it’s surprising to me.

Enough about hormones, though, because if you’re like me, if you think about them long enough, it inevitably becomes gross. What’s funnier is what happened the other day when Joey took him to a guitar store, where there was a large and prominent portrait of Jerry Garcia. Danny looked at it and said to his father, “That guy has a samwich on his face.” I don’t know if maybe there is a clue here somewhere as to why my child refuses to eat a sandwich, but I like the way he thinks. Which just reminded me, someone described my own thinking as “warped” when I was very young. I’m not saying it was my mother, but it could have been my mother. And I’m not saying she was right, but she could have been right. Now one day will Danny be telling the world about how his mother said his thinking was “warped”? For the record: I DID NOT SAY THAT.

My son, he of Toddler-Strength Opinions™, will be appearing with a long and urgent list of demands at any moment, so I’ll need to wrap this up. I’ll leave you with something with a low warp factor (and a high parenthetical factor): Yesterday on our way to a Superbowl party (where we broke my all-time personal record for lateness: two hours), we passed a sign advertising a kids’ movie featuring rodents (Why are rodents so popular with children and the grown people who make movies for children?) and he said, “Wook, I see Chickmups!” Maybe we were so late because I demanded that Joey pull the van over so I could consume my oldest child. (He was delicious, but he needs to take it easy on the giant garlicky hot dogs.)