Several weeks ago, during writing time, Owen and I were investigating -ow words, like how, now, cow, etc. Owen being Owen, he thought silently for a moment, then said, “So my name is really Ahw-en (not sure how to write that phonetically, but -ahw like in c-ow).”
A few minutes later, he came and showed me what he wrote: “Look Mommy, I wrote my name: Ohin.” Can’t argue with that, just many in a long life of lessons about the absurd and inconsistent English language.
While hiking through the woods yesterday, Owen was jumping from boulder to boulder just off the path. At one point he stopped, holding his hand and rubbing it and exclaimed:
“I just stepped on my own pinkie!”
That about sums up our last couple of weeks. Owen is growing so fast that his gross motor control can’t keep up with it. The result has been lots of banged heads, elbows and the like. Right now, he has a bruise on one knee and a gash on the other (complete with frog band-aid). He falls down. A lot. In tennis class, even.
We thought maybe a chiropractic treatment would help, but the pinkie incident and one of the knees happened the day after, so I think we’re stuck with Jack Tripper for a little while longer.
The other night, when we were getting ready for bed, Owen was getting into his jammies and exclaimed, ”My world is the best world in the whole wide world!” Then his whole, gleeful expression morphed into slight confusion. I could tell he was processing the fact that he wasn’t sure if there could be a world within a world, but he was too tired to try to revise his comment.
It’s OK, Owen, I know just what you mean. Life here is pretty great from my end, too!
I’ve tried, I really have. I can’t begin to even type the ways I have tried to express to Owen why he shouldn’t walk all over the furniture, why sliding down the bannister is a bad idea, why entering the family room from the playroom by climbing over the railing and leaping onto the back of the couch is not good for anyone, why climbing the baskets to sit on the kitchen island will eventually break them … to no avail. I am somewhat resigned to the fact that he is part monkey.
However, after putting a hole in the antique reclaimed wood coffee table last weekend, I figured it was time to focus my efforts a bit more strongly. He now knows that when he climbs the baskets to the kitchen island, if one of them breaks, he pays for it with his piggy bank cash. Heartless, right? But that’s a logical consequence for the blatant disrespect of ignoring my pleas to not step on the baskets.
Today, while climbing the baskets, I repeated myself for the vigintillionth time to deaf ears … so I thought. But once he was perched happily on the kitchen island (which I need to leave more cluttered so there’s no room for him!), another Owen classic burst forth from King Clever. Have I mentioned I’m not quite sure where I got this kid?
“Well, I can’t break this (referring to the granite countertop) … unless I had pickaxe toes.”
It’s comments like this one that get me into trouble. Really, how can I discipline that kind of reasoning?
Keith and Owen were playing with Legos just before bed, as Owen was munching on trail mix. Not an unusual evening. As were we transitioning to getting ready for bed, Owen began sneezing a bit. While I went to get his room ready, Keith accompanied him to do teeth and potty. I could hear the sneezing continue, assuming he encountered an allergen or was coming down with a cold.
Then Keith came in and told me he thought it was way too dry in the house and that we needed to turn up the humidifiers or something, because Owen had just sneezed a bunch of brown gook out of his nose. Yuck.
All during bedtime reading, sneezing. (“Owen, is your nose itchy?” “Oh, yes, so itchy!”) During prayers, sneezing. Lights out, more sneezing. I finally asked Owen if there was something I could do to help and he said no. So I asked him if he knew what was going on with his nose:
“Yeah, when I was eating my trail mix I laughed and snarfed a carob chip up my nose and now it’s making me sneeze.”
When I told Keith, he said, “Oh. Now it makes sense why Owen said, ‘Yum!’ when he sneezed the brown gook.”
Ewwwww. ….
Honestly, there are times I’m not quite sure where I get this kid. After the hugest dinner a 50-lb child could possibly ingest, Owen proceeded to sit on the kitchen island, and in a loud, deep voice, issue the following proclamation:
“In the name of George Lucas, stop shaking your head.”
There is not even a glimmer in my feeble brain as to where he would have gotten this from. All I know is it was worth the intense round of giggles that burst forth from the cutest 7-year-old in the land … every time he repeated this. Because he said it several times, once he saw the reaction he got — he knows a good thing when he sees it.
Amidst a flurry of conversation that included the MacKenzie brothers, Bryan Adams and “eh,” came talk of Canadians in general. Owen, who ever since he turned seven is more interested in being a part of the adult conversations, added his two cents (and more; much, much more) with, “Isn’t Jay Black a Canadian?”
Keith and were like, um, no, and wherever did you get that idea?
It was like watching the light dawn in those sparkling (with the dickens!) blue eyes when Owen said, “Oh, not a Canadian, a Comedian!”
But wait — there’s more! “What does a Comedian do?”
Keith told Owen that comedians tell jokes for a living. Without missing a beat, the little cherub exclaimed, “Wow! That’s got to be the easiest job in the world!”
Probably I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t properly parent that one, so Keith jumped in and explained that Jay had to travel a lot, perform shows late at night and not get to see his family very much. Owen insisted that all Jay would have to do was go to www.cleanjokes.com and tell them to the audience — easy as pie. Keith continued to patiently detail the fact that comedians have to make up their own jokes, and usually they tell their jokes in the form of a story.
So does Owen still want to be Jay Black when he grows up, or did Keith kill the dream?
Owen had a homework sheet this week that had four sets of three words, each with a letter missing. There was a box with four letters to choose from, and each set of words would have the same letter missing. His letter choices were P, O, T, M.
So you just knew that one of the sets would look something like this:
FAR ___
___Y
JU __ P
You gotta give him props for inevitably sounding out the word “fart,” and for bringing himself back from his hysterical round of giggles to realize that he could also make the word “farm.”
Soon after that, he deemed homework as not fun and refused to do the rest. Is it because he wasn’t allowed to write down the word “fart”? We’ll never know.
Last night, when Owen and I were laying out his clothes for school today, he came across an old black sweater vest from last Christmas and wanted to wear it with a long-sleeved black shirt underneath it. Not one to discourage individuality, I said nothing negative about his choice of garments and continued to get them ready.
Owen then started telling me about his friend who said that fancy clothes aren’t cool, but that he didn’t agree. I told him that I didn’t agree either. And since Owen had been listening to ZZ Topp’s “Sharp-Dressed Man” all day long, I explained to him that “every girl’s crazy ’bout a sharp-dressed man.” He dug that!
This morning, he decided to wear something different, because he “didn’t want the girls to be all over me at school.” He’s just not ready to be adored for more than his dimples, I guess!
Owen and I were reading a riddle book tonight (Riddle Me This). We’ve read riddles from this book several times before and I’m always impressed with how well Owen does with the guessing. The we got to this riddle:
What belongs to you but others use it more than you do?
The answer, of course, is your name (but I’d argue that it could also be your phone number), but Owen was a bit stumped. So I started to repeat the riddle using his name a lot, and when Keith came into the room, I was sure to add in a loud, “Daddy,” after I read him the riddle.
It didn’t take Owen long before he came up with the perfect answer: “Your Bed.”
Now it probably won’t take you long to guess that Owen is having trouble sleeping (what else is new?) and he’s been sleeping in bed with me while Keith has taken over sleeping in Owen’s bed. A queen-sized bed just doesn’t work with a 6-year-old.
Will the cleverness never cease? I hope not.