“You going to eat that?”
My four-year-old son has never had trouble eating.
He’ll polish off a plate of pasta with Bolognese sauce and hold out his plate and say, “More. . . please.”
He’ll then have a go at a second helping, followed by large gulps of water.
Today, the reason for why he has such a voluminous appetite for such a small frame was exposed.
He’s got ambitions.
“I’m going to grow higher and higher and higher. All the way to outer space.”
“We can do it, we can do it.”
As a kid, I always dreamed of having my very own super-duper get-you-there-in-a-sec traveling machine.
It would work wonders. Get you where you needed or wanted to be in a second. Just like that.
You’re at the beach and you have no bus fare and you’re exhausted and famished. No sweat. You’ve got a super-duper get-you-there-in-a-sec traveling machine and with a push of a button and a flick of a switch you’re at home and you’re piling into your third sandwich, polishing off a bag of potato chips and downing your second glass of apple juice while splayed out on the sofa watching “Gilligan’s Island” reruns. Just like that.
If only, you think.
Instead, you have to trudge an hour home, lugging your surfboard and a backpack that gets heavier by the minute. All you can think about is what you’ll eat first and how you’d kill for a swig of water or cash of your own to catch the bus. Or, if only, your very own super-duper get-you-there-in-a-sec traveling machine.
I hadn’t thought of my grand contraption for years, not until we returned to the city this year. It would sure do the trick in making life a lot easier here. You see, the city can be hell for short car trips. It can be quicker and better to walk, take the bus or hop a cab than to fight the traffic and circle the streets in the search of parking.
The problem is that my four- and six-year-olds are in schools in the opposite directions. So how much easier it would be to have my wondrous invention. Get here and there in a sec with a flick of a switch and a push of a button. And then back home. Just like that.
That’d do the trick. Yes, that’d do the trick. Especially when the kids are dragging their feet and saying, “Pick me up,” and you’ve got no coins for the bus and not enough cash for a cab. So you have to plod home with your son on your shoulders and your daughter begging you to buy her a piece of bubblegum. And you’re thinking not about what you’ll feast on when you get home and not on “Gilligan’s Island” but on how to meet deadlines on three news stories when you finally walk in the front door.
You’ll have to work super-duper fast.
“Not me, please.”
My son is refusing to go to the doctors. He suffers chronic bronchitis so trips to the clinic and the hospital are frequent. But he doesn’t want to go now because Tommy went.
“No, mummy,” the four-year-old says, “Tommy went.”
Tommy, aka Tomas, is our neurotic cat.
You may know from a post last month that he went to the doctors and never came back. He died and left us with a house full of fleas and itchy legs.
My son didn’t mind. He’d have Tommy back fleas and all.