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We were shuffling through a lazy night of low-IQ tv with the kids and landed on E! during an episode of The Girls Next Door. Because it was too mature for the children, we kept oggling for a while, long enough to pique Ford’s interest. About ten minutes into the show, Ford ultimately broke down and asked us, in response to the selective digital pixellation,
“So, are we having satellite problems or something?”
Mom places Ford’s lunch before him: several boiled shrimp, some fried rice, and a crimson red crawfish, and Ford looks at his plate with proud disbelief and surprise.
“Is this a crawfish?”
“Yep.”
He sits there, peering into the crawfish’s tiny boiled black eyes, examining it like some Edwardian curiosity.
“It’s so cute!”
“Want to touch it, mommy?”
“Is this his thorax?”
“Yep, it’s in there. I think his abdomen is in there, too. Well, part of it. Anyway, you eat the tail.”
“Like a shrimp?”
“Yep, like a shrimp.”
“Can I eat it?”
“Sure can. Here (I break open the tail, pull out meat, God this looks disgusting, and hand it to Ford)
“Mmm! I like it!”, grinning. “Can I have some more crawfish?”
I look up at my mother with a faint look of “WTF?” and then we both laugh at how cute this really is.
She tells him, “Ford, I’m so impressed with your adventurous palate!”
“I know,” he tells her into his plate quietly.
And while she and I eat and chat and wrestle Chas through the rest of lunch, Ford continued to eat crawfish. Periodically, however, he obliged the technicolor carcasses to duels sur le table, narrating as he went along.
He’s becoming a very interesting narrator.
Like today, when we were reading the book I Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak, there was a page in the book tenderly illustrating a boy standing on a quaint little hill overlooking a small town, with birds flying overhead and trees in the valley…the words go:
I love the sun
I love a house
I love a river
and a hill where I watch
and a song I heard
and a dream I made
I asked Ford, without reading this charming passage, to narrate this picture himself. Just to compare. Here’s Ford’s rendition:
There was this boy,
on a hill,
and somebody PUSHED him over the hill,
and he crashed onto the town
and shattered in a million pieces
and broke his eyeballs all over the place.
That’s it. That’s what happened. (grinning)
Trust me, he wasn’t thirsty; he’s just discriminating.
Which reminds me: Today at lunch, when mom placed a plate of lentils in front of Ford, he shot me doe eyes from the table and fawned, “Aren’t we having wine with this?” We laughed at what he might be asking for during snacktime at school a few hours later. Mint-infused sippy mojitos? Icy Kool-Aid cosmopolitans?
School. It has been a very good thing. We start the day with breakfast and either go somewhere for the morning or have fun at home when he’s fresh. Then we lunch, read and rest until 3pm, when off we walk to the schoolhouse. When we arrive, he lurches out of the jogger onto the playground, dismissing the teachers and plunging into play. I chit chat with faculty, and leave to run errands with Chas. All the while, Chas is either asleep or restful, engaged and content; it’s a lot of fun having the one-on-one time with him. Three hours pass, we return down to the school, and Ford pours bubbly bucketfuls of enthusiasm in my ears. I give him a juice box, we walk home, eat dinner, clean up and read Harry Potter. It really has been that perfect. The best of both worlds: having him home when I’m at my best, having a break when I’m more tired in the afternoon–he benefits from having playpals and square footage when he’s his most physically atomic, and time with me when he’s most quietly engaged. Way cool.
Mom and Dad arrived this evening with a truckful of potted plants from their home in Houston, and with the refrigerated rain they are all perky and ready for me to spend time with them, rearranging them in the garden while Chas chases balls into the street and Ford runs around the yard in the buff. But seriously, when I do get a moment, I’ll enjoy putzing around the garden, rearranging them. To distract me even more, the Wildflower Center is having their Fall plant sale tomorrow morning.
I’m beginning to get more excited about the land again. This weekend we will scatter and stomp wildflower seeds around the grounds, tuck a few perennials here and there. Add a totem or two. It’s time.
This just in–new phrases from Chas: “All done” (sounds more like “ah-duh” followed by a flinching refusal to eat another bite of food), and “Woof!” He is also less afraid of dogs, but at the same time Clingy with a capital WTF on me. Annoying, but with so many lovely chunks to hold, how can I really complain?
It was eleven this morning, and we had eaten breakfast, cleaned up, brushed teeth, read a book, and the next sequence (even though out of sequence) was “wash face and get dressed” for Ford. He balked, meanwhile charming his way to watching I Robot,eventually turning the movie on outright, and I started losing it, irrationally complaining that I have no control over my kids. I was so ruffled over trying to get the kids out the door by noon, for chrissakes that I was starting to jerk my weight around and complain about not having enough control all the while. Damon walked into the room and pulled my horses to a screeching halt with his lucid analysis. He told me to rephrase “I have no control over the kids” (a self-centered, gun-in-the-foot approach) to “What does Ford need right now? What needs to happen?” (goal-oriented approach). It was an amazing moment of silence in my raging brain. All the birds swooped down to the tree branches, the monkeys stopped throwing papayas at me and the “to do” list tickertape died. It’s one of the things I love most about Damon, his ability to help me regain control over my temper (which translates to forgetting about regaining control over the kids), because hostility and irrational moments are part of my makeup as much as moments of clarity and calm. So thank you, again. I needed that, so did Ford.
