The Mind of a Seven Year Old Boy
For some reason, the whole family had weird dreams last night. I was actually shaken awake by my wife after I called out. I had never done that before. I had been having a perfectly ordinary dream that suddenly went freaky. I did finally manage to fall back to sleep, but when we all woke up this morning, we found that we all had similarly restless nights. That's probably why, when my seven year old son came into our room and mentioned that he had had a strange dream, I asked him about it and pressed for some details.
"There was a . . . time machine," he said.
"Oh, OK. Wait, who was there? Were you the only one in your dream?" I asked.
"No," he replied. "Mommy was there, but she wasn't a mommy. And there was a really cool robot. And there were two, no three, Skylanders."
"And what happened?" I asked, intrigued.
"Well, we traveled to another world, and it was another time. And there was this step-mother, and two step-sisters, and they were trying to kill us!"
"Wow, that's really interesting." I was amused at his imagination. "So was Godzilla there?"
"I didn't think of him," he said, and thought for a second. "If I had, I'm sure he would have been there."
I told my wife this story later and she just burst out laughing. The mind of a seven year old boy is a wonderful thing.
My son's name is Lucas and he is a precocious and cutie-pie of a two year old. My wife and I have been dealing with the challenges of the onset of the terrible twos, as of the last 3 and one half weeks. That's how quick the transition was. From a cute, sweet, and fairly quiet 1 and 1/2 year old, to a terrible two year old occurred exactly three and a half weeks ago, over the course of about 24 hours. By the end of that day, Lucas had become a demanding, obnoxiously independent, seemingly suicidally fearless, screaming, pounding, early to rise and never quietly to bed, ultra possessive, pugnacious, (and did I say demanding?) and demanding mass of toddler nerves.
Back in 2002, Adriana took a trip to the Netherlands and Italy with her parents. I wrote a poem, a sonnet, for her then and sent it to her in Italy. I just stumbled across it today. We're almost never separated these days, but the feeling remains.