Neighborhood-Kids All Local. All for Kids. All the Time.

Ty has been reading Calvin and Hobbes this week. He’ll go off and read for a while and then come back to the kitchen and quote the comic strips verbatim. He thinks they’re hilarious.

But this picture of Calvin is his all-time favorite, and the first time Ty saw it he laughed for several minutes. I think he must be living out his dark side…

Last night, a fellow Girl Scout parent and I hosted a “Girls Night Out” event for kids who are already in Girl Scouts or who are interested in becoming a Girl Scout. You have to provide a craft or two, as well as a couple games. This kind of thing is not my forte—that craft thing, remember? (See My Crafty Daughter.) But the event went fine with the help of several girls from our troop. It was even kind of fun.

When we brought the leftover craft supplies home—supplies to make chocolate kiss rosebuds—Ty wanted to know how our evening had gone and what we had done.

“We made chocolate kiss rosebuds. Want to make one?” I said.

“Yeah!”

So I showed him how to make one, giving him instructions as he put the thing together.

“Daddy,” he called to Curt in the other room, “Come here. I want to show you how to make a rosebud.” So Curt dutifully appeared and sat down to learn how to make a chocolate rosebud. My boys working on a Girl Scout craft.

Ty began explaining: “So you stick the two kisses together, bottom to bottom, with this double-sided tape, and then you stick a skewer into the tip of one kiss, and then you wrap the cellophane around the kisses by putting the tip of the kiss exactly in the middle of the cellophane so it wraps evenly…”

His instructions were impeccable.

“Wow, Ty, you were really listening,” I said. He smiled at me. And a thought began to dawn on me.

“Do you like crafts, Ty?”

“I love them.”

Well, crap. How did I manage to birth two crafters?
 

Ty went to a friend’s house for a sleepover on Sunday night. And when he came home late the next morning, he pretty much headed out to play with another friend down the street, whom he hasn’t played with in months. He seemed fine, so I let him do it. Not like the early days when the day after a sleepover was a complete wash, and the afternoon had to give over to meltdowns and a nap.

At dinner he still seemed fine.

Dinner, as it happens, was the staging ground for another sleepover, this time with a friend of Leah’s at our house. Curt and I watched Ty go into pesky-little-brother mode for R. It’s hard to put a finger on what he does exactly, except to say that he brings up topics he would not normally think of (the topic of who knows how many swear words was this evening’s top choice), and he likes to moderate the conversation. Leah, predictably, gets seriously irritated. I find it all a little amusing, but the fall-out from an irritated older sister is enough for us adults to keep Ty in check.

At Mallard Ice Cream, our after-dinner outing, Ty sat with the girls at one of the tall tables with the round stools. They didn’t seem to mind him hanging around. And when we got home, I let him watch half an hour of a movie with them. (Just for the record, he and I had agreed on this arrangement at Mallard's.) At that point, I said it was time for bed. For him.

He came unglued. “But I want to watch the rest of the moviiiieeeee.” And then, after I explained the arrangement again, “But I’m wiiide awake.”

Uh huh.

The tears began, coursing down his cheeks as he ate his requisite post-dinner, pre-bedtime snack of bread and butter (really salty butter tonight). He sobbed as he glugged down a glass of water. He sobbed as we hiked the stairs. He sobbed as I undressed him, pushing angular, eight-year-old limbs into sleeve and leg ports. He sobbed into his toothpaste. In bed, lying on his back, he sobbed until the tears ran into his ears. “But I’m wiiide awake. Really. I’m wiiide awake. ”

“Goodnight, Ty. I love you.”

Sob.

We didn’t hear from him until the next morning.
 

“Hey,” says Ty, during a lull in the table talk, apropos of nothing, “today when I was playing with W. and H., H. said ‘technical’ instead of ‘tentacle.’”

He doesn’t explain the significance of tentacle, or what the kids were playing that would involve tentacles, nor do I stop long enough to ask. Instead, out pops, “Well, at least he didn’t say ‘testicle.’” This from my mouth, not my eight-year-old’s mouth, the mouth—his, I mean—that somehow, every evening, always at the dinner table, veers into what we call (what most families call) Potty Talk. (Not that my comment equals potty talk, mind you, but one glance between adults tells me Curt knows as well as I do the line between body parts and all things scatological is razor thin. And, frankly, I’m done with hearing about poop while I’m eating my dinner.)

Ty chuckles, just as I expect him to, and on the heels of my declaration, Curt trots out a quick joke, a play on words he thinks Ty will enjoy: “So there’s this old guy in a hospital gown sprinting down the hall away from a nurse who’s chasing him with a pair of scissors in her hands. And the doctor behind her says, ‘No, nurse, I said slip off his spectacles.’”

We all laugh, and then Ty cocks his head. “Slip off his spectacles?” He knows he’s missing something.

“It’s a rhyming thing,” I explain. “What does ‘slip’ rhyme with?”

Ty shrugs his shoulders.

“What do scissors do?” I ask.

“Snip?”

“Right. Now, what rhymes with spectacles?”

“I don’t know.”

“What were we talking about earlier?”

“Testicles?”

“Right.”

Ty cants his head to the left, studying me as his mind replays the joke. And then he begins to giggle. I have to laugh, too, because I can see he’s getting the joke.

“Wait,” he says, amid his giggles. “What’s a testicle?” Now I really laugh because how can he not remember? He learned this way back when he was three or so and pondering those marble-like body parts in the tub. So I tell him again. His eyes light up—this is his kind of conversation—and he dissolves into giggles as the full meaning of the joke hits him. He giggles and giggles and giggles, his laughter bubbling out uncontrollably, and then we’re all laughing because Ty’s laughter is just so funny and sweet, and, as Leah points out, laughing is contagious. Who cares how you get there?