An Interview with James (Or, How Many People Do You Have In There?)

Me: Lightning, what's your favorite food?
James (as Lightning): Gas

Me: What's your favorite color?
James (as Lightning): Red

Me:Who is the fastest car?
 James (as Lightning): Lightning

Me: Who is your best friend?
James (as Lightning): Lightning is his own best friend

Me: Who do you like to play with
James (as Lightning): Lightning

Me: Mater, what's your favorite food?
James (as Mater): Wus mah favorit' food? Gas is mah favorit' one. Ah like gas d'best. Cuz cars eat gas.

Me: Mater, what's your my favorite color?
James (as Mater): Mah favorit' color? Brown.

Me: Who is your best friend?
James (as Mater): Lahtnin'.

Me: Mater, do you like Curious George?
James (as Mater): Ah like Curyus George. Yes, gee.

Me: Sally, what's your favorite snack?
James (as Mater): She lahks gas d'best cuz cars eat gas. Her favorit' color is byu, okay? She lahks Lahtnin'.

Me: Is Lightning her boyfriend?
James (as himself): Weww...yes.

Me: George, what's your favorite food?
James (as George):What's my favorite food? My favorite food is bananas, because monkeys eat bananas. Did you know that, okay?

Me: Who's your best friend?
James (as George): James!

Me: George, what's your favorite color?
James (as George): Umm...brown!

Me: Do you like Lightning or Mater better?
James (as George):I like Mater the best.

Me: What do you think of Owen? Does George love Owen?
James (as Mater) Yeah, he does. Hey, Owen's favorite color is green, okay?
(as James) Hey Owen, what's your favorite food? Owen says (as Mater) I like green beans...and milk. (as James) That's what Owen says. What's your favorite friend, Owen? Hey, one more magformer, Daddy! Grab it as fast as you can. I got them, I did it. I got those two, Daddy. Here they are, here they are Daddy.

Me: Hey, you didn't tell me...who is Owen's favorite friend?
James (indistuinguishable voice): James

Religious Education

I held out my hand to James.

"James, who should pray for our supper tonight?"

Usually he either lifts one finger at me and says "you!" or points at Mommy with his left pointer finger. On very rare occasions he'll offer to pray himself, provided we help him through it."

"James, who should pray for our food tonight?"

"George."

He bowed his head, looked over at George (who was propped up in the fourth seat at the dinner table) out of the corner of his eye, and began in a small voice:

"Oo-oo, ah-ah, oo-ah, oo-ah. Ah-ha, ah-ha, oo-oo, ah...ooo! Ah, ah, oo-oo."

He lifted his head up, smiled and declared. "A-men!"

A Day with James (and George)

James has started talking to George. Almost incessantly, in fact. He's always carried around with him and I suspect that until recently (when he became comfortable processing the world out loud) he's kept a silent conversation with his very curious friend. But now pretty much anything that happens is relayed out loud to George. "We're at Wegmans now, George. Did you see that?" (then he will hold George up the window so he can see.) "George, where did my car go? Oh, there it is George. Yay! We did it!" (James always refers to himself as "we" now, because George is there too.)

I. James and I were throwing a football around in the living room--this is the way many great father-son stories start, by the way; it's almost as good an opening line as "it was a dark and stormy night"--and James whipped it at me much harder than expected, so that the catch was almost as much in self-defense as anything else. 

"Wow!" I exclaimed, "that one had some mustard on it."

He started giggling.

"Daddy, you said that had MUSTER on it."

"Yeah, that throw had some mustard on it."

<More giggling.>

"George, that throw had some MUSTURP on it."

From then on, every throw had "mustard" on it, which made him laugh so hard that he could barely stand up, and when he announced that one particularly wobbly toss had "ketchup" on it, he got to laughing so hard that he just collapsed in a heap of giggles.

"That's funny, George!"

II. "James, if we're going to go outside we need to put your hat on."

"I don't want to wear my hat."

"You need to wear your hat if we're going to go outside."

"My nose is wunny."

"Yeah, don't do that with Steven. You don't want to wipe your snot on him."

"What's snot?"

"Never mind. Do you want a kleenex."

"I wipe my snot on Steven. That's what Steven is for. George, I wipe my snot on Steven."
"Don't wipe your snot on Steven, James. He'll need to take a bath."

"I wipe my snot on George too."

"Here's your hat, put it on please."

"George, I need to wipe more snot on Steven."

III. It is with enormous vindictive pleasure that I hereby report that the tag "cooking disasters" attached to this blog has NOTHING to do with anything that I screwed up. J made chili in the crock pot earlier in the afternoon and told us to eat that for dinner. When the clock hit six I walked over to the chili crock and found it completely cold. Sure enough, it was unplugged. Unplugged from the exact same outlet where I'd seen her ironing her clothes just before she left. I texted her.

She wrote back:

"Blargh! I told James to remind me to plug the crock pot back in!"

I suspect that James told George to remind him to remind J, and George just forgot to remind James.

I made hot dogs on the stove, cut James' up into pennies, and set it out for him with a squirt of mustard and a squirt of ketchup. "That's a funny noise, Daddy. George, that's a funny noise." He ended up having the dinner of champions. Half a hot dog worth of pennies, a pickle, three enormous piles of banana pepper rings, and several spoonfuls of ketchup directly off his plate before I caught him and took it away.

IV. James was working on a birthday card for Grandma Davis earlier today, so I think he had her birthday on his mind. That must have been why he was making her a cake in the bathtub.

"Daddy, I'm makin' a cake for Gra-maw. Here's her cake."

He put a cup full of water on the side of the tub.

"Here's another cake for Gran-maw. I need to tell George I'm drinkin' some cake."

He put another cup of water on the lip of the tub, and started drinking a third.

"I'm drinkin' yummy cake. Daddy, you keep Gran-maw's cake right there."

V. While James was making cake in the tub I saw this video posted on facebook by about four different musician friends. I know absolutely nothing about the tune that it's making fun of, but I absolutely love this woman's voice. If something should ever happen to J, and I say this in the full knowledge that she will read this in my blog, I would track this girl down and marry her so that she can come and do Flock of Uncles gigs.

James says "I want...to have to watch that again."

VI. When the bath was over I pulled the plug on the tub and the water started to drain out.

"Daddy, why that water go down?"

"Gravity makes it go down."

"What's grabbity?"

"You see this toothpaste tube? If I drop it, will it fall up or fall down?"

"It's gonna fall down."

"Yup, look it fell down. Gravity makes things go down."

"Why grabbity make things go down?"

"It's a force. It pulls down on everything that has mass. I think."

"Why it have mass?"

"Because...of something to do with...I don't know. There is a reason, though."

"Daddy, this is why you go to school."

"Are you telling me I should go to school to learn about gravity?"

"No, I wanna talk to George."

At the Carwash

I was walking through the frigid courtyard to our apartment building, and my legs were frozen from my toes all the way up past my knees. I'd left the house at 7:45 that morning and driven an hour and a half to Syracuse, where we'd played a two and a half hour rehearsal in an unheated auditorium, went straight to an orchestra meeting, and then played another two and a half hour rehearsal. The sun went down as we drove back, and by the time I parked in front of our building it was completely dark and completely cold. My shoes had been soaked all day, and I could feel the damp squish of my socks as I padded up the walk.

The foyer might have contained a blazing hearth. I stopped for a moment and leaned against the downstairs mailboxes, soaking in the warmth and quiet. J and James would be upstairs waiting for me. I slipped off the wet shoes on the doormat outside, and I hear James exclaim "Daddy!" inside when I turned my key in the latch. I heard him pitter-pattering up to the door as I pushed it open, and he grinned at me.

"Daddy! Daddy!"

I swung my trumpets off my back and grinned at him.

"What were you going to tell Daddy?"

"Daddy, COOKIE! Cookie! Cookie, cookie, cookie! Cookie, Daddy!"

I looked on the kitchen table, and there was a tray of gooey looking chocolate chip cookies set out to cool.

"Daddy, shh-shh! Shoes, shh-shh!"

"Shh-shh" doesn't mean silence. Shh-shh means car wash, which has found an even deeper level of fixation for James recently. He has loved walking down the hill by our apartment and gazing at the cars and trucks that pass through the Royal Car Wash for as long as we've lived at our apartment, and we even took him through once in the PT Cruiser. But last Friday he found his new favorite book in the world, Curious George and the Car Wash.

It is (as you may have guessed) the story of how Curious George visits a car wash with the man in the yellow hat. George then builds his own car wash with help from his friend Allie to wash his toy cars. We have read Curious George Car Wash so many times in the last week that we've started setting a timer between readings--we refuse to do it more than once every half hour. It is is the first thing that James asks for when he gets up, and the last thing he wants to do before he goes to bed. About halfway through the week we also discovered the corresponding Curious George TV episode, and it is a guaranteed 12 minutes of absolute still silence. (James' most recent haircut was done with the assistance of the Car Wash episode.)

Everyone in the house knows the book by heart. We've developed a read-aloud script where we leave out words that he can fill in without looking at the book, and he brings his entourage of toy cars (green, yellow, and red) along with George and sometimes Steven for each reading. And every time we go outside, he points to the car wash and begs to visit again.

So tonight, when I got back in and James asked to go see the car wash, I took him. I slipped my freezing wet shoes back on, pulled on his boots, coat, and hat, and drove down to the car wash. We pulled into the parking lot, and I switched him from his car seat to the front passenger seat. I paid the automated machine, and we drove through the initial spish-spish of the rinse, the flap-flap cloth, the blub-blub soap suds, the scrub-scrub scrubbers, and the spish-spish of the final rinse. (James helped me make all these sounds while transfixed in rapt wonder.) We drove out of the wash, and as soon as I put the car in park his eyes welled up with tears and he begged,

"Daddy, Daddy, do adain, do adain!"

"No, James, it's time for us to go home and have some supper."

"No, do adain!" he wailed, shaking his head.

He was still crying when I carried him back up the stairs, but when he saw what was on the table we were treated to the following chorus for the next half hour:

"Daddy, cookie! Cookie, Daddy. I want cookie. Cookie. I want that. Cookie, Daddy!"

(and repeat)

We read Curious George and the Car Wash twice before bed, and he asked to drive our car back down the hill to get washed again about twenty more times.

And that's why Julie and I are both tired at the end of the day.

At least we have some cookies.

A Good Morning

This morning was one of those beautiful half-days that I hope I'll remember twenty years from now. Outside it was crisp and bordering on downright cold, and James woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I got him up out of his crib at 7:45, he and his "entourage." His entourage is Steven, New Steven, and the stuffed monkey we've been calling George. James has fallen in love with the Curious George books, and so he loves anything monkey-related. He wants to wear monkey pajamas, make monkey sounds, and most of all to read "Curious George and the Birthday Surprise" about thirty five times a day.

"George" doesn't look much like Curious George from the books--he's too light, and the proportions are all wrong--but James felt it was important to have a monkey in his retinue, and insisted that we call him George. We visited the Pittsford Library last week, and in their splendid children's section there were two very authentic Curious George monkeys, along with about a hundred Curious George books. James toted the two library Georges around for an hour, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that we put them back on the shelves for the other library patrons to sneeze on. Our substitute George didn't seem as nice after that.

James' friend Alexa happens to own the exact same authentic George, and she brought it with her when we had a playdate at RWC the other day. Needless to say, James was the designated George-carrier all morning, and there were many tears at their parting. He howled and fussed and complained when we gave George back to Alexa.

I could tell right away that this morning was going to be a rough morning. He wasn't interested in his brand new Thomas the Train shirt. He tried to spill his cereal on purpose, he only wanted to beg for television and iPad time, and he fussed at anything that didn't go his way immediately. When he declined my offer to take him outside I wondered if he might be getting sick. "I think we need to strap him down in the stroller and take a long walk."

 "You know" said J "they sell the real G-E-O-R-G-E at Barnes and Noble."

And that was how we went outside. The sun was bright, the cold wind was behind us, and the leaves skittered across the sidewalks and crunched under our feet. We walked past Mt. Wegmans, circled round the grand plaza, and smelled the cinnamon brooms and pumpkin displays outside. We bought coffee beans and quinoa at Trader Joes, picked up hot drinks and Finger Lakes Coffee Roasters, and poked inside various shops. Then we went to the Barnes and Noble, and James set up camp with substitute George by the Thomas the Train toys. ("Dada, look, I have Thomas on my shirt!")

I browsed the children's books and thumbed through copies of Blueberries for Sal and The Mitten. We replaced our half destroyed copy of Chika-Chika-Boom-Boom, and debated whether or not to let him know we would by an authentic George. He found them on his own before we could decide, and attempted to carry off five at once. To his great surprise we told him he could take one, and he snuggled it tight as we made our traditional exit. (Go to the checkout counter via seven trips up and down the escalators.)

He wouldn't let go of the new George, and I had to hold him up on the counter, snuggling him tight, while the cashier scanned his tag. He snuggled new George (and old George) in the stroller in the face of the wind as we walked back home, and when we got back home he insisted on taking new George, old George, new Steven, and old Steven everywhere he went for the rest of the day. J pointed out that if we have another boy at some point he'll probably expect us to name him "new James."

He's been a completely delighted and delightful little boy ever since. I told J, "he knows this is the real George...George with a capital G."

"I think you mean George with a capital 'TM'."