Okay, okay!

My husband is mocking my 'light' post.

So I'll leave you with this:

My 4-year-old is just figuring out quantities. He reminds me very much right now of that scene in "The Trouble with Harry"--the Alfred Hitchcock movie starring a very young and very airy-voiced Shirley MacLaine and a very young and very dark-haired John Forsythe. "Beaver" (from yes, "Leave It to Beaver"), Jerry Mathers, finds Harry's body at the beginning of the movie and then tries later to explain when he found it. But he has no concept of time. Yesterday, today, tomorrow? They're all just too foreign for him to grasp. That's my Ivan right now, and I love it. He entertains me endlessly.



"Can we go get ice cream tomorrow?" he asks. "Someday," I tell him. And he gets so excited because, again, someday, tomorrow, next year... it's all the same to him, and all he knows is that at some point, yes, I will take him for ice cream, and it could be tomorrow. Or tomorrow. Or tomorrow.

He also loves me "a year" at the moment. And that's huge to him. Simon, however, my 12-year-old son, is only loved "a day." Simon has a sense of humor, so his feelings are spared. After all, the rules could change completely tomorrow. Or tomorrow.

Ivan's lucky number is Q-U-X because, he says, it's the biggest number he knows. A friend let me know what that is: "The fourth of the standard metasyntactic variable, after baz and before the quu(u...)x series." I'm sure Ivan already knew this and that somewhere in that definition is the explanation of a large number, perhaps the largest.

We're always amazed at how kids can live in the moment. We're told to live in the moment ourselves, to stop and smell the roses, to try to emulate kids a little now and then, to recapture the innocence. I think this means letting go of time and quantity. I think children have to live in the moment, because they don't know anything except the moment.

I was on the way back from the library once when Simon was about 2 and a half and Owen was a pretty fresh newborn. We only lived 2 blocks from the library, so I'd walked there with Owen in the stroller and Simon at my side. It started to rain on the way home. And I mean rain. I struggled with trying to open the umbrella over the three of us, only to realize resistance was futile. We were going to get wet. So I slowed down and laughed. Simon looked up at me and started laughing. And the three of us had a fine time getting drenched. It's one of my happiest memories as a mother because I let go of time. It was a perfect moment, with no concern about what would follow.

Maybe I'll have another moment like that tomorrow. And tomorrow.