I woke up a sleepy male this morning with a nuzzle, a hug and a kiss and told him I loved him. He replied by saying, “Me too. Can I watch the iPad after I come back from school today?”
Be still my beating heart! Such emotion will sweep me away…
A picture from the days of yore when I didn’t have to wrestle him down to kiss him silly!
I swear you can’t make up the kind of stuff that resides in a child’s imagination!
Most of my talks with my kid start with him telling me something he’s heard or read or seen. The stuff he’s read and seen is more reliable given the way his mind processes information. The stuff he’s heard tends to often have a lot of comic relief because his mind was at warp speed while his ears were trying hard to catch up.
So today’s backseat session began with him telling me about the story of The Happy Prince. After getting to the near finale he told me about the God who asked his elves to go down to earth and collect the Happy Prince’s heart and the swallow (or something along those lines).
Hearing me go, “What the…” he says ” Yeah…the God..I think his name was Zeus and he had elves”. Now Oscar Wilde with his cheeky humor is laughing somewhere but even then he might find the idea of Zeus with elves as incongruous. So I asked the offspring again, “Zeus had elves? Like Santa?” And after a few moments of pondering comes the reply, ” No, not elves but those fat-baby flying thingies.”
Oh Lord…angels preserve us. Or the fat baby-flying thingies at the very least. Amen.
Imagine this…you’re driving on a crowded market road; pedestrians jostling with vendors, buses bearing down on you and the inevitable morons who insist on driving with the high beam on; blinding you for what seems like eternity.
To add to the fun, imagine shielding a plastic bag full of fish for the aquarium; on the passenger seat all the while telling your kid to sit down and stop complaining about the bumpy road.
In the midst of all this, when you’re close to being home free, still seeing spots in front of your eyes and hoping that the fishes haven’t had their brains turned upside down; comes the most unexpected thing…a tap on the shoulder and an inquisitive voice asking, “Hey…do you know who the President of India is?”.
And saddest part is that even after you tell you kid off for choosing the worst moments to ask trivia questions, flip off the biker who cut across your path without the turn signal…you still can’t remember the new guy in Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Oh nuts! The things that make you miss your husband!!
I’d overslept this morning and headed out to the gym midday, MLM in tow. Boy! That should have tipped me off exactly what would ensue while driving those measly 4 kms. But by all means, let me wax on and wax off Daniel-San!
Sorry, couldn’t help the last bit. Watched the original movie after ages and have been saying Wax-on, Wax-off in my head. Damn you Pat Morita!
Anyhow, among the less than pleasant traits that the offspring has inherited from moi is his urge to listen to the same song till he tires of it. Never mind others are already stuffing their ears with whatever they can to stop the earworm from advancing, but MLM and I remain oblivious to our surroundings and keeping blaring the songs.
After a few weeks of Fugly- Fugly ruling the roost in the car, I was finally given an opportunity to play something I wanted to listen to. A random selection brought up Vault and Hysteria came on. The little man instantly liked it (YAY!) and asked me who was singing. I often think about filtering my words before speaking to him but I was navigating through midday traffic and thoughtlessly said, “Def Leppard”. And we were OFF!
From laughing his hieney off about leopards being deaf to talking about big cats; I heard it all. I heard about animals marking their territory albeit in the uncensored version aka the leopard does “susu” on the tree and then kicks some sand on the tree with his feet backwards et al”.
Note: Anyone who doesn’t know how kids talk might think it was a very special kind of leopard or it was a mutated one, but “with his feet backwards just means with his back feet.
On we go…once he started talking about the big cats, I had to hear about each animal marking it’s territory, one by one. After the leopards came the tigers, lions, cheetahs, the jaguars, the ocelots, the panthers, the pumas and the snow leopards as well.
Just as he was running out of breath and I was pulling into the parking another thought meteorite hit him with a bang! “But why don’t they poop when they pee?” is the question he wanted answered.
As I herded him out of the car and up the steps I thought to myself, this kid is either going to be a naturalist a la Attenborough or he’s going to be a zookeeper! In any case ‘deaf leopards’ is a moment etched firmly in the annals of mother-son time.
The brat is keeping us massively entertained with the things he’s been learning in school. And while he no longer has the problem with his hearing that he did before, he is still prone to quite a bit of distractibility. That coupled with things that are repeated while he is in a group, like the school assembly, and the things he ends up hearing and then repeating at home are genuinely worth LOL-ing over.
Sometime in the past week he came home and started assuming poses of being in attention and at ease and had me follow suit. He told me to be in “tension” and then in “sanities”. I could barely muffle the snort of laughter that came out of my mouth and was immediately told off by a rather disgruntled little boy!
Yesterday there was a parent-teacher meeting in MLM’s school and among the many things discussed were his need to learn more patience. Yeah…not gonna happen in my lifetime! His homeroom teacher said she led the kids in meditation everyday for a few minutes and recommended that we try the same at home for more impact.
This morning Red decided to do an impromptu meditation session for the three of us just after we got up. The way Red instructed us did NOT resonate with the offspring so he usurped the role of leading us. These were his instructions:
“Ok…first you IN HELL. Then you EXIT.Good. IN HELL again and EXIT!”
Have you ever tried inhaling and exhaling when your entire body was shaking like a mini earthquake?
I was feeling like Santa viz belly shakes like a bowl of jelly. And sadly with the lard am carrying, it won’t take me too long to get their either.
All in all, it was the most novel way I’ve ever started any of my Sunday…In HELL and Exiting..
Oh lord…I love being this kid’s mother. Life is a lot of things but seldom boring. Even when he’s hopping around singing this song.
