kiwords

Mom and I took the boys to a huge dinosaur exhibit today. It was very cool, many animatronic dinosaurs growling and posturing above us. Raphael teetered between scared and amused the whole time we were there. One minute he’d mutter anxiously, “Dey not gonna hurt me. Dey can’t hurt me.” And then the next minute he’d chuckle, “Yook at da cute dinosaurs! Awww…”
Max wandered through the exhibit, utterly engrossed in it all, until about an hour and a half had passed. Then it was like a shutter clicked down behind his eyes and he was done. He wanted to be carried. He wanted to eat something. He wanted to go home.
At one point we were having a snack (hoping to help Max recover) and Tre was…well, he was bugging me. He wanted to go to the gift shop, so his method of trying to make that happen was to ask repeatedly if we would go to the gift shop. “Maybe,” I’d reply, “let’s wait until we’re done and see if everyone wants to.” Ten, maybe twelve seconds would pass. Mom or I would try to finish a sentence, Tre would make a joke about some gross bodily function, I would give him the look, and he would respond with another request to go to the gift shop.
Finally I forbade him to even say the words “gift shop.” I threatened to make him not only miss out on this gift shop but the next seventeen gift shops we encountered. I snarled and generally acted like a very mature adult. Hah.
Tre shrugged and bounced off to look up the nose of some dinosaur while we waited for Max to finish his snack. I sighed to Mom, “He’s just so persistent sometimes. Frankly, he drives me nuts. Why is he like that?” Mom snorted at me. She’s so short on empathy sometimes.
“He’s an eight year old boy. They’re like that. He’s perfect.”
I shook my head at her. She clearly didn’t understand what I have to deal with.
This evening Tre’s Cub Scout den had their meeting at our house. Dad taught them a little about tools and helped them all build their own tool boxes. Dad is a saint. Dad is a genius. Dad, inexplicably, did not kill even one of them - despite the fact that he had power tools in his hands at times and no jury in the country would have convicted him. Dad even enjoyed himself. Thank God for my Dad.
Let me repeat: Thank God for my Dad.
I watched the proceedings, only jumping in to lay out newspaper and once to pull Zachary off another kid. Zachary was into tackling people for much of the evening. Dakota was into muttering, “blah, blah, blah,” whenever someone was trying to give instructions. Parker liked to fill any lull in the conversation with the news that he had gotten grounded that day. Repeatedly.
And it’s not that they were doing weird things, it’s that they were so very…dare I say…persistent about it. It was like being dropped in the middle of some mental hospital, filled with little OCD patients. Those small sized males of the species…they’re downright odd.
Watching the boys be their own weird selves in my living room, I had to admit that Tre is a pretty normal eight year old. Mom was right. Again.
Sheesh.