The other day on the way home from school, Henry was animatedly telling me…well, something. The fact is that I’m a little deaf and with all the cars and traffic on the walk home, plus the fact that Henry’s head is three feet lower than mine, I can’t really hear a word he’s saying. And if I make the effort to really hear him, I end up bending over and Zuzu is falling out of the sling and somehow I’m just kind of waving my butt at all the traffic and still not hearing him. Anyway, so he was talking on and on, and I was honestly just pretending to listen, and then we got home, and he announced, “So, that’s what I’m going to do!” and I had no idea what it was going to be, but nodded heartily and said, “Great!” I could have been agreeing to his plan to dump out five pounds of sugar for all I knew (though I think he got that out of his system at three-and-a-half) (ohhhhhh, three-and-a-half, you still give me night terrors, you do).
But he ran inside and grabbed his crayons and drew a monkey. Then he spent a great deal of time cutting the monkey out. Then he punched a hole in the top of the monkey, cut a rubber band, and threaded that through the hole. Then he handed it to me and said, “Ok, I’m ready for you to get on the ladder and put this in the tree!” I managed to talk him out of the ladder part, but I dutifully tied the monkey to the tree. Henry is a kid with his own agenda. I have no idea what that agenda is, however. I’m glad to have a kid who’s thinking for himself, at least.
This made me laugh out loud, and of course I can relate. I can’t tell you the number of things I’ve agreed to only because I couldn’t adequately hear what was being proposed and was too lazy/distracted/tired-of-asking-for-repeats to clarify. And lucky for you he’s so self-sufficient. What if you’d gotten home and he’d said, “Okay mom, I’m ready.” “Um, remind me what you’re ready for, honey…what was it you were saying two seconds ago?”
This tale reminds me of you and the car. When you were little somehow being in the moving car triggered a “talking” response from you. You would go on and on and on and of course I would totally tune out. And then one day you asked me a question during your diatribe and I was so tuned out I didn’t even realize. “I knew you never listened to me” was your response.
You are hard of hearing???
I love the monkey by the way.
My girls aren’t to the “planning” point yet. Lillian, in particular, is very fond of saying she’s going to “do somefing”…And then we just have to wait to see what it is. it could be piling everything she can into the toy stroller, or it could be interpretive dance…But i will have to agree, it’s always “somefing”.
And please tell Henry that that is the coolest tree monkey i have ever sen.
OK – I just laughed completely out loud in a very quiet office.
I love the tree monkey. That’s positively Zoom-worthy. (Do they still have Zoom? I used to want to be on that show sooooooo badly….)
I don’t know if they still have Zoom. I don’t think so. There is a whole “70s Nostalgia” Zoom section on PBSkids.org, which includes a bit on Bernadette’s arm thing, which is by far my most vivid Zoom memory: http://pbskids.org/zoom/grownups/nostalgia/arm_thing.html