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Part 1: Top

The Boy has been a bit sick the last few days. Poor little shaver has been up in the middle of the night throwing up. This is usually preceded by a bout of coughing. During the day he doesn't seem so bad except that he has a runny nose and no appetite.

We were setting up to play a game of Monopoly Junior when he sniffed and wiped his nose with the length of his long sleeve ... elbow to wrist.

Me: Oh, man. Use a tissue, sweetheart.

Boy (inspects his sleeve): It's all right. There's no snot.

Part 2: Bottom

I'm up early every morning to get ready to go to work. My day runs from 7 am to 3 pm which means, as usual, it's just one side or the other of 6 in the morning when I'm coming out of the shower.

There's a Boy, awake too early, beaming up at me, sitting on the toilet having a poop.

Boy: Turn off the fan so it's as stinky as possible.

Lights, Action!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

The last month has been very busy on all front; work, home, you name it. We had a nice little break in the middle of November when we took four days and went to visit family in Newfoundland. I actually got out to see a movie. I went to see The Incredibles which was great. The original plan had been to see it weeks early, all of us, the whole family. But the movie is rated PG and my wife had concerns that it wouldn't be appropriate for a 5-year old Boy. So I went. And yeah, there was guns and shooting and explosions and implicit death. Action violence. But it was a great movie.

Yesterday Ann went back to work. Holiday over. The Boy and I went through all our Christmas lights, checked that they were all working, put the white strings up along the back deck, the white coil around the front pillar and the rest were strung in our cherry tree in the front yard. We were all done around quarter after three. I did a check on the computer and found the last showing of The Incredibles started in 5 minutes. But there would be commercials and trailers and ...

Me: Hey Boy. Want to go see the Incredibles?

Boy: Ummmmmm.... nah.

Me: Want to go and we won't tell Mommy?

Boy: O-KAY!

TV InterActive

This small place in cyberspace was reserved for stories I might forget. That was the idea. Witness the incident, write it down. Save and nurture it for present viewing among ... whomever ... and maybe when the Boy becomes the Man he'll get a kick out this.

There's one incident I'll never forget, but I'll write it down here as a precurser to something that happened this morning, if only to make the post longer.

It's three Easters ago and the Boy is still in diapers. He's started to speak. His vocabulary is small but growing. The parental challenge is to interpret the words that come badly formed out of his mouth but which he understands. The beginning of verbal communcation.

We are at my wife's sister's home, a lovely house over looking the water, a "grown-up" house, my wife and I would call it. Large, spacious, "adult". A two-car garage. They had recently annexed some of the garage to create an office for my sister in law, the psychologist. A locked door connected the office with the rest of its former self.

The Boy came trundling in from the office one morning and he was chattering. After a moment, I realized that there was a definite pattern and purpose to his chatter. He was saying the same word over and over again. "Ah-bree, ah-bree, ah-bree, ah-bree." I tried to make sense of what he was saying and couldn't. He was similarly frustrated that I wasn't getting whatever he was saying. I never did get it. My wife was the one to figure it out.

Mamma: He's saying "Abre".

Abre (Ah-bray) is spanish for "open". The Boy had found the locked door to the garage and wanted to go through. This he was communicating to us with "Abre!" that he was pronouncing "Ah-bree!". He (and Mamma) had learned this word from children's TV program Dora the Explorer. On the show there were recurring scenes with doors that only spoke spanish. Want to go through the door? You have to say "abre".

Great, I thought. It's tough enough figuring out what he's saying in English - which is a language I know.

Flash-forward a few years. This morning, the Boy (who is in french immersion and knows words in four languages), is busying himself with the Tinkertoy set, trying to build the stand-up bass from the picture on the front of the box. On TV is an epsiode of Dora the Explorer.

Dora: Te amo! In English, "Te amo" means I love you! Say "Te Amo! Say Te amo!"
Boy: I'm busy, Dora....

The Elusive Secret to Immortality.

Finally revealed:

Boy: If we don't get inside our bum, we're doomed!

(Now you know.)

Time Change

The days have turned bleak and cold and dark. The clocks fell back, the darkness comes quickly and the prospects of more golf likewise grow dim.

And with Halloween over and the treats expanding my waistline, I decide: it's time to get back to the gym.

I pick the Boy up from his after-school daycare and I broach the idea. He's for it. I've got my kit bag in the car, so we'll go directly.

Boy: Daddy, can we stay for three minutes?

The negotiations begin. How 'bout ninety? I ask. There's an hour-and-a-half maximum. He counters with 30. I say 60. He asks me what's between 30 and 60.

Me: Fifty.

We have a general discussion about exercise and how you have to exercise for over a half an hour for it to do any good.

Arriving at the mall, he immediately falls into the same routine that we left a couple of months ago. It's a race to the button (the automatic door opener), a race to the elevator button, a race for the main floor button, a race to the gym. He wins all the races. I marvel that he still is locked into this same routine after all these life changes he's had over the last two months. Going to school. New daycare. The rise of GOLF.

The gym staff "oohs" and "aws" over his Halloween hat, orange with a pumpkin face and jingling bells on the top. We go into the Toy Room and I sign him in, kiss him and say:

Me: See you in 60 minutes.

Boy: No!

(ah the negotiations start again...)

Boy (cont): An hour.