Saturday Morning Inquiries

Daniel is always very happy when I'm home, such as on Saturdays, but sometimes his enthusiasm manifests itself in his own especially colorful ways.

Daniel was quite pleased to find me sleeping next to him when he woke up this morning, so he had a pattern where he would sit up, share some important observation, and then lie back down again. This happened a few times, which made me nervous, because each time he acted on a new inspiration, Ian would stir again, and I wanted both boys to sleep as long as they could. One example of this iterative communication cycle was when he sat up, told me something about the big monkeys and the little monkeys in the movie Madagascar, and then lay back down again.

But finally, he couldn't contain his world of revelations to a series of pronouncements; we had to make a field trip. He sat up and asked:

"Daddy, would you like to come look at my bureau?"

Of course I would!

So we journeyed the two or three steps from his bed to his bureau, where we admired his gallery of stickers on the drawers. And he had a particular work in mind: he pointed to a small yellow circle - smaller than a dime - in which was drawn, with what looked like a brown felt-tip pen or a thin magic marker, a rudimentary smiley face with abundant, parted, wavy brown hair, much like Daniel's own profile.

Then he said something more-or-less identical to the following:

"I think that looks like me - actually I think it looks like me when I was about three."

There were other stickers to review, but apparently smiley three-year-old Daniel in magic marker was the main feature for this particular module. And one of the great things about Daniel is that, when he has made his point, he moves on to the next project. But the visit to the bureau was definitely a trip worth taking.

(June 25, 2011)