The Daniels' Excellent Adventure

Today presented a rare opportunity; to reward everyone at work for several months of hard work on an unusually ambitious project, my company gave the entire workforce the day off (and next Monday), including me. However, Ian still had school, but Daniel's preschool was not in session, so this meant Daniel and I would have the day off and Ian wouldn't...

Daniel is a boy who needs extra attention. He tends to "slip between the cracks," being the middle child, and an easily marginalized one at that, and many people have felt that he needs some time of his own with his parents, and I agree. And Ian, although he's very sweet, is significantly Type A against Daniel's Type B, which means that "Numero Dos" is easily overshadowed. So of course, today became the occasion of a special father-and-son outing; everyone named Daniel in our house got to go out and do something fun, entirely as an end unto itself.

I agonized about where to take him, but it occurred to me that I really should include him in the decision-making process. My fear had been that he would get stuck on one single "idee fixe," to the exclusion of all others. So we went on the Internet, and I used Google images to conjure up concrete pictures of where we might go, across several options, so that he would make a decision based on a very clear-and-present set of choices. We looked at children's museums and science museums in two different states, a zoo... I said we could go into Boston, visit the children's museum, and ride the subway, and maybe go to Chinatown. Then I showed him a trailer for the movie "Yogi Bear"... After all of this, he still wanted to go to the Space Center and watch a 40-minute movie about outer space, so I accepted that he really did know what he wanted to do, and he wanted it very badly. It's not about me, no matter how much more interesting I might think my agenda is...

So we trekked up to our humble state capital to visit the Space Center. First we stopped at a Thai restaurant, where he was already a celebrity when he walked in the door. The owners of this restaurant have a son who owns another Thai restaurant closer to our house, where we're regulars, and where the owner's wife, Grace, is a gigantic fan of our three kids (she even buys them toys...). I had only been to this parent-owned restaurant once before maybe seven months ago, but I had mentioned that we were enthusiastic patrons of the sister-restaurant, and apparently the waitress instantly remembered me from that prior visit. She asked whether we knew Grace (of course we do...), and she was very pleased to meet one of Grace's little heroes, and lavished attention on him. Before we left, she took a picture of Daniel on her cell. phone, to send to Grace. As usual, he provided a hard-meltingly beatific smile for the occasion.

At lunch, Daniel drew letters on his paper place-mat - a good number of A's, one rather random string of letters, etc., and made me guess what they stood for, and there were other guessing games where that came from. He also formulated letters out of silverware, followed by more guessing. [Daniel is a rigid task-master when it comes to guessing; he doesn't cave in after two bad guesses or so - he keeps saying, "You have to guess" no matter how many times you attempt surrender, until, at some arbitrary moment, you find out you have disqualified yourself, and he tells you the answer because you're so obviously incompetent...]

Daniel has a fierce enthusiasm for "Viennese" food [by Viennese, we mean from Indochina, rather than from Austria...]. However, there are no Vietnamese restaurants in our state capital, so that's why we took the vastly inferior, by Daniel's reckoning, option of Thai cuisine. [Ian and Daniel have Southeast Asian wars-of-gastronomy almost every time we have to choose a restaurant. But luckily the Thai restaurant had a chicken noodle soup that closely resembles the chicken-and-vermicelli "pho" that Daniel likes to order in Vietnamese eateries. However, he did have a request:

"But Daddy, I just want to eat the noodles, broth and chicken."

I asked him, with m own silly simplicity, "What do you not want to eat?"

Daniel clarified: "All the other stuff."

During lunch, I said it was nice to spend time just as Daddy and Daniel, but he clarified his preference - something along the lines of "No, Daniel and Ian and Madeleine and Kristen." It seemed he felt guilty about the exclusive attention. But he seemed to enjoy every minute of it.

So eventually he had ingested a critical mass of chicken soup and we headed back to the car. However, en route to the car, he found a small cement slope, from a higher level parking lot to the street where we were parked, covered with gravel, so he immediately undertook to drop or throw various rocks and pieces of gravel from different positions along the slope, and from the wall over it onto the sidewalk below. This probably took up about 15 minutes of our time, but once again, it wasn't about me. I gently reminded him that the Space Center was waiting, but he had to get this rocks-and-gravity business out of his system, and he really seemed to be relishing it. At one point, he explained: "This is kind-of a scientist's program," and then he proved that indeed it was: he released two rocks from the same point on the cement slope, and then explained to me that we now knew that the one that fell further was heavier than the one that stopped rolling higher up.

I told him we needed to get to the space center and go potty, because if we had to get up during the movie, they wouldn't let us back into the planetarium to watch the rest of it. So he asked the obvious question about what would happen if we attempted to leave the movie before it was over: "...And we would get sended to jail?""

After we left the space center, including the gift shop, Daniel made sure that we hadn't missed an opportunity to buy a toy that deals with his favorite astronomical subject:

"Daddy, do they have any toys that are black holes? I hope they do..."

As we drove around town, we passed some statue (I presume), and Daniel announced: "Now that is a bad statue to worship!" He also mentioned, quite correctly, that a car is a bad thing to worship.

As an ambulance passed us, Daniel, who only experienced an ambulance up close when Mommy broke her leg last Spring, surmised, "There might be a fire - either a fire, or somebody's leg is hurt."

I spent much of the day scribbling the utterings of the young sage, and he noticed that I was busy writing when we got to a traffic stop, so he volunteered, "Daddy, I'll keep my eye on the cars so you can keep your eye on that paper." And as soon as the car in front of me started moving, as the light turned green, it was duly reported.

We appeased our appetites with East Asian snacks, procured from a Chinese-owned pan-Asian grocery store in Burlington, Massachusetts, where I spend well over a hundred dollars on each visit, usually at the beginning of a lenten period. So Daniel was about to eat some Filipino corn chips, which I was opening for him, and I had to laugh when I saw the brand name was "Boy" (or had the word Boy in it...). Daniel asked me what I was laughing at, and I told him, so he asked for clarification: "'Boy'? 'Boy' like I'm your boy? That's a funny name."

Of course, by the time we got home, it was quite dark, and Daniel was quite asleep. I think I can speak for both Daniels when I say they had a wonderful day on the town together.

(December 23, 2010)