The Adventure of Staying Home

Today is a supreme Saturday for Daniel.

Almost every day, he asks me whether it's a work day or if I can stay home. When Friday comes, he asks me if I have three days off. The last time I explained to him that I work Monday through Friday (quite parallel to his Kindergarten schedule, incidentally), he announced that, although he likes the place where I work, he hates my work, because they have bad deals. Ian has made some effort, I think, to explain to Daniel the near-universality of the five-day work schedule in our culture , but whenever Daniel realizes that I have to go to work on a given day, he is crestfallen afresh.

Today, since it's Saturday, he wants to make the very most of it by... staying home. After I took my shower this morning, he told me all about everything he wanted to do today, and made it clear that it should all take place in the house; he doesn't want to go out anywhere. Practically dancing with excitement, he enumerated many of the things that we can all do right at home. He even worked out a kind of Cartesian verbal matrix of all the play sub-groupings we could have: Daniel could play with me, Ian could play with Daniel, Ian could play with me, Daniel could play with Madeleine, Ian could play with Madeleine, I could play with Madeleine. You basically take the number of agents-of-play an start multiplying. He was very, very outspoken about how important it was that we all stay home to maximize our quality of play. In fact, he was still in his pajamas (Buzz Lightyear), and he urged me to put my pajamas back on, to assume the official garb of the Not-Going-Out-Just-Playing-At-Home Society.

When I came downstairs, he led me by the hand, as is his wont when he's especially happy, into the family room, where he put on a Latin Dance Music CD and urged me to customize the track selection to my taste as he, Daniel, Madeleine and I all danced, including with dogs (Daniel loves to dance with Golden). Then he paired us off to fight each other - first Ian vs. Daniel and Me ("I'm the leader of us," I think was the proclamation). The whole tournament of hand-to-hand combat (plus the occasional prop), was very well organized, and quite thorough in its elaboration.

When he, himself, disappeared from the Family Room for a short time, he came back and apologized for the deviation: he had seen Ian with a cookie, so he wanted one, but it didn't taste good or smell good, so he got a honey-stick instead - kind of the "Pixie Stix" of current-day semi-rural New England - , which he was currently tapping for the honey within.

(October 29, 2011)