Every once in a while I look at Isaac with fresh eyes. Last summer there was a moment in which we first met our new neighbors. Isaac was wearing DVD headphones from the minivan and stalking down the driveway with his pink cap gun when he encountered them. At that moment, I thought to myself: "I wonder if Isaac is a little bit eccentric?" The other day I had such a moment. Isaac was dressed head to toe as a tiny businessman. He was wearing khakis and a little blue blazer, a Brooks Brothers shirt and a child-sized clip-on tie. He was also taking the temperature of pizza with an instant-read thermometer. (110 degrees F.)
The businessman phase was adorable, a great compliment to Ben, kind of pain for me to coordinate, and blessedly short-lived. Isaac opened his eyes on Monday morning two weeks ago and his first words were, "I need a tie." I have no idea why this sudden need to dress formally for school. We didn't have one! He was forced to wear his business clothes with an open collar for a day or two until we managed to scare up a couple. The businessman phase also created shoe issues at school. There they have indoor shoes that stay at school and outdoor shoes. Makes a lot of sense, especially because in Montessori the floor is an important workspace. But for Isaac this was a problem– he needed his brown leather indoor shoes all the time, because they completed his look. This problem became fully apparent one day mid-week, when on the way home he admitted that he had smuggled his shoes out of school in his lunchbox! "But how else could I get them home without Miss Beki seeing?!" he demanded. "How else?? How else??" I tried to sort through the ethical problems of deception, and also address the practical matter of needing the brown shoes with him always. I e-mailed his teacher and she took the whole thing in stride. She said he could have the shoes with her blessing. "I know better than to try to rationalize with a (compact) captain of industry," she said.
He's really gotten into grooming also. He was home sick for a couple days last week (asthma, cough, ear infection), but not too diminished. At one point we went out on a Target run. I said he could get a little something in the toy department, and ultimately he settled on a little toy shaving kit with foamy soap, a comb and a little mirror. He proceeded to spend an hour in the shower shaving repeatedly. Then shaved another four or five times throughout the day. The minute Daddy came home– shaving time! (Daddy was very kind about it, and stood patiently by offering pointers.) He begged that I invite his little friend from school over for a sublime playdate: "We'll shave, and then we'll watch Scooby-Doo!"
Overall while he was home sick he wasn't really sick enough to be in any way placid. Indeed, he was driving me crazy, and combined with Little Crazy (AKA ELias) I was about to lose my mind entirely. Finally I gave him the directive to "watch Scooby-Doo until your eyes bleed." Which of course he loved! Here was a project he could sink his teeth into. He watched a good three hours or so without flagging. (We have the new series "What's New Scooby-Doo" on DVD. I didn't realize it wasn't the original when I bought it– and I find it quite jarring for Scooby and the gang to be talking on cell phones, using laptops, and relying on GPS in the Mystery Machine.) I came in to check on him, "Are your eyes bleeding yet?" I asked.
"Nope!" he said from his blissed-out horizontal posture.
"Has your brain completely rotted on its stem?" I asked. "Can you do simple math? What's two plus two?"
"Four!" he cried. But eventually I decided he really was going to rot his mind with too much Scooby-Doo, if such a thing was possible. "I think we'll have to limit your TV time," I said. "Even when you're sick."
"Okay," he agreed. How rational of him! I thought. Then he added, "How 'bout 20 hours a day?"
He LOVES being an invalid. Just give him a heating pad, plump pillows, a laptop, and breakfast on a tray– he'll be happy for hours. He would make Proust proud. I think Proust, at age five, was probably about like this. You should see how delighted he is with his two bottles of medication (cortisone because his asthma medication isn't controlling his cough well enough, and antibiotics because of his ear infection) and his two inhalers. He shows them to anyone who comes in the house. Even if they're just dropping something off or here to do some work. This reminds me of a conversation a few months ago, when he had a simple cold. He said, "Mom, can I have one of those beds with wheels on it?"
I said, "You mean a gurney? You just have a cold, Isaac. You don't need a gurney."
He said, "Well, how 'bout a wheelchair then?"
I said, "Isaac! That's crazy. It's just a cold! You don't need a wheelchair."
He said, "Crutches? Could I AT LEAST have CRUTCHES??"
Aak.
This love of being sick makes it sort of tricky to determine when he actually IS sick. Last week I took him to school on Monday and Tuesday despite his protests that he was SICK. It wasn't until Wednesday morning, when he coughed the entire 20-minute drive to school, that I realized he actually was telling the truth. I took him to the doctor later that day and from her sober expression I could see that he actually was SICK. I wonder now if he has been truly sick on some level for more than a month. We went out on the Bath Salamander Walk in early April… we had a wonderful time, out there in the woods at night with our flashlights. (It's a study of the salamander migration, run by a wonderful biologist from Akron.) They lent Isaac a headlamp and gave him a whole bucket of salamanders to release. It couldn't have been more fun– but we froze our butts off and Isaac came up sick a few days later. On some level, I think he's been mildly sick ever since. Anyway, he seems totally fine most of the time and I'm sure that now a round of antibiotics will kill anything that's still hanging around him.
A tiny businessman who loves to be sick– Hm. … perhaps he'll be the next Howard Hughes…