Isaac began his birthday today at about 4:45 a.m. He woke up and called me to his room. I stumbled in and found him quite alert, sitting on his bed. “I wanna play my excavator!” he explained. I said no. I said… it’s not morning yet. It’s still night. The Earth has not turned to face the sun yet, and we are diurnal. We had a brief scuffle as I tried to insist that he return to bed and continue sleeping. But that’s the thing: you can make someone lie down. You can make someone be quiet. But you can’t make someone sleep. Especially a backhoe-obsessed three-year-old birthday boy who has a new digger.
We sort of forged a compromise. I would provide the basic services of carrying in his new digger and turning on the light. Then I would curl up in his bed. He would play while I walked the fine line between sleeping and supervising the construction project.
The new toy, “The Big Dig” it’s called, arrived yesterday in a boldly illustrated and impressive box. It offers the real benefits of a backhoe with none of the drawbacks. It’s basically a kid-sized office chair, with a long beautiful boom, a dipper arm, a bucket with teeth, and of course, LEVERS. The kid can sit upon it and do the levers, picking up things, rotating and then dumping. What more can you want or need from your digging equipment?
Last night Isaac wanted it IN his bath. It’s way too big for that. So we compromised. He could have it in the bathroom, next to his bath. Thus he could nakedly leap from the tub at will, and drive the thing and do the levers for a little while with his little wet bum sliding around on the plastic seat. Then, when chilly, could return to bathing. A perfectly splendid arrangement for all. However, his bath was cut short when he repeatedly splashed me with his rubber goldfish, Golda. I took Golda away and then he leapt from the tub, protesting vigorously that “she can’t breathe in the air! She needs to be in the water! She has gills!” etc. And then to punctuate his dismay, marched over and slugged me in the leg. So then I put him in his room in a timeout and calmly drained the bath. I didn’t intend the bath-draining as an additional punishment. I just figured he was clean and it was time for bed. But Isaac didn’t see it that way. His screaming went to the next level of intensity, along with fragmented mention of “my bath! not all done!” etc. By the time I realized how upset he was about it, the bath was already gone. Should I fill it up again? I wondered. But no… that made no sense. The bath was done and that’s all there was to it.
A few days ago he screamed himself into such a frenzy that he actually vomited (toy store incident…) so this option crossed my mind, too. I put lotion on him and diapers and jammies and held him close. I wondered whether the clean jammies would soon be vomit-soaked. We practiced deep breathing. After a while I convinced him to watch the planet show with me and while watching it he slipped off to sleep.
It occurred to me this morning that “we” are three. I am three years old at being his mother; Ben is three years old at being his father; he is three years old at being himself. We’re all young at it. But we’ve all learned a lot so far, too.
He’s really into astronomy these days. The other night we were on a nice walk to see the moon. As we walked down the street, a friendly young woman came by and asked about our dog. We chatted with her for a little while as we walked. Then Isaac and the woman pulled slightly ahead. He began to tell her, in great detail, with much drama, about the formation of the moon. “A big rock come from outer space and HIT the Earth! And they went around and around like this [demonstrating passionately with his hands] and then the moon just FLIED OFF! And there’s no sound in outer space!” The woman was clearly dazzled by all the emotion and hand gestures involved, but I’m not 100% sure that she could understand his accent.
“Well! Really?” she said, looking at me just slightly baffled.
“He’s describing the formation of the moon,” I explained as unobtrusively as possible.
“Oh!” she said. “I’m impressed!”
The other day we were in the library. Isaac is very bold and forthright in his dealings with the librarians, who have gotten to know him fairly well. Isaac marched up to the desk, which the top of his head barely surpasses, and said, “’Cuse me. … ‘cuse me!” The librarians were talking but one of them took up the challenge of discerning what he wanted.
“Yes?” she said.
“Why does a sword…. Sword … sword…” he struggled for the words, groping with his hands and looking up at her intently. “Why do swordfish kill whales?”
“You want a book about a swordfish and a killer whale?”
“Why do the swordfish KILL …WHALES?” He said this just as plain as he possibly could, but the problem was that his question was so unexpected and obscure that she couldn’t really get it. She looked at me.
“He wants to know why swordfish kill whales. We read in a book that they all gang up together and stab a whale until it’s dead, and this idea really upset him, and he wants a book that explains why they do that.”
“Oh!” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I’ll see what I can find.”
We entertained ourselves while she looked. Isaac likes to play the game that he’s doing his important work at the computer and then I ask to use it. Unfortunately, he’s forced to say no. I wait briefly and ask again, hopeful, and he restates the disappointing fact that his work is important and I will have to wait. After a while the librarian came back.
“Sorry,” she said. I can only find a book that shows a swordfish, and another book that shows a whale, but I can’t answer his question. I even looked around on the internet…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I can’t answer his questions either, half the time.”
A little while later Isaac approached another librarian, a man, who had witnessed the whole swordfish/whale exploration. “’Cuse me,” said Isaac.
“Yes, Isaac?” said the librarian– he’s the one who some months ago Isaac corrected about whether octopuses have “legs” or “tentacles.”
“Why do stars collapse?”
“What?”
“Why does a star burn out and collapse?”
“You want to know, why does a star burn out and collapse?”
“Yes. And a cartoon of it.”
The librarian looked at me. I said, “I think what he’s after here is some sort of computer animation showing how a star looks when it’s collapsing, along with an explanation as to why they collapse in the first place.”
He shook his head. “You’ll have to go upstairs to technology. MAYBE they can help with that. But we have nothing like that here in Children’s. And can I tell you that this kid is really scaring me?? I have much older kids who are not asking me questions this complex.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
Another library moment comes to mind, perhaps more age-appropriate. The other day our babysitter Sheila had Isaac at the library. For reasons perhaps best left unexplored, she wondered whether he had a poopy diaper. She touched the back of his pants to check. He responded in a nice loud clear scolding voice, “No Sheila… MY TESTACLES ARE VERY PRIVATE!”
Which leads me to a recent moment combining some of Isaac’s favorite things: nakedness, American flags, parades, and the musical stylings of John Phillip Sousa. The other day, just as my friend Martha dropped in, Isaac combined all these interests in a moment of supreme patriotism. He was already naked. He asked for “Stars and Stripes Forever” to be played. I put it on and he began parading around the house, marching, waving his American flag (left over from the Fourth of July) in time to the music. It was really quite a sight. Martha said, “WHY, WHY do you not have a video camera?”
Just then the phone rang. It was Ben. I said hello to him, and then a blood-curdling scream issued from the other room. I set the phone down and found Isaac flat on the floor in a state that really scared me for a moment. He was screaming to such a degree that his back was arched completely off the floor. His eyes were crossing and rolling up into his head. My first thought was that the flag had impaled his eye. My second thought was that it was a seizure. But soon I noticed the wound on his stomach. Isaac had in effect fallen on his sword. Somehow he had stumbled and the flag had poked him in the belly. It bruised and sort of broke the skin. I think it really hurt, and also was such a shock in the midst of the wonderful parade! As soon as the extent of the damage was clear to me, I went back to the phone carrying the screaming boy in my arms. I said, “There’s an injury. It’s not life-threatening. I’ll call you back.”
I comforted him and he clung to me, naked as the day he was born, his desperate sobbing very like that of a speechless newborn. He always seems so much smaller when he’s hurt. After a while he calmed down and started pretending he was a baby. “Ba!” he said. “Ba-ba!”
“Do you want some juice?” I asked.
“Ba-ba!” he said nodding.
I got him the juice, but by the time I came back with it he was already a cat and scampering away on his four paws.