Gavin is very interested in ice these days. Considering we live in Michigan and it is Winter there is plenty of it to go around. He's fascinated by the idea that he could slip and fall on the ice and he is ready and willing to test this theory. Today after school I told him he could play on the playground for five minutes and what he wanted to do was swing, but under each place on the swing set was a deep icy mud pool and I appealed to his saner nature to do something else. And the something else he chose was walking across the soccer field which was a patchwork of mud, snow, and ice, with a particularly large patch of ice right in the center. He fell twice, once on his butt and once on his side. And had I not made him leave the playground I have no doubt he would have fallen again and again.
Which is what he did on our walk today. Gavin and Henri and I set out for a trek around the block. The slightly warmer weather today made being outdoors tolerable and the sidewalks in our neighborhood are largely snow and ice free (except in front of houses that never bothered to shovel their walks in the past few weeks and have treacherous bumpy, wet, and slippery expanses in front of their homes advertising their abject neglect. And, no, I'm not just talking about foreclosed homes where no one lives. The house I have in mind as I type this has a brand new snow shovel propped up agains the house by the front door. I don't know, maybe it's load bearing and if they move it their house will collapse. Who am I to judge?). While Henri and I were on foot, Gavin rode his scooter, something he's been dying to do all winter, but something we've discouraged since a Razor scooter is no match for snow, sludge, or ice. And Gavin's on a real, two-wheel Razor scooter now. Last year he was riding a three-wheeled one for little kids, but it was slow and cumbersome and he was eager to graduate to two wheels. I was doubtful that he'd be able to pull it off at first, but he's actually quite good at it. He falls a lot, but, like I said, it's almost always on purpose. I make him wear a helmet, too. It's a Nutcase helmet and on the back it says, "I love my brain," and every time I read that I think of how much I do, indeed, love my son's brain.
Take, for example, a conversation he and I had about toilets right before our walk. I was putting a Lowe's circular we'd gotten in the mail into the recycling bin when it opened to a page advertising toilets, something I have never actually had to buy before. The average price of the toilets on the page was 200 bucks. "Do you know how much a toilet costs?" I asked Gavin. He did not. When I told him $200 he asked, "Is that a lot of dollars?" and I said it was, relatively speaking, and he inquired as to whether I was planning on buying a toilet. I said no. He then asked if there were any toilets that could be bought with one dollar. I said probably not because a toilet that costs only a dollar probably wouldn't work and that a broken toilet could be had for free if you got it out of the garbage. Lo and behold, we found just such a toilet on our walk. It was like a miracle. After Gavin eagerly posed beside it (because this mom knows a photo opportunity when she sees one), we dragged it home because, hey, free toilet. I'm kidding. We left it where we found it, but I will always have this photo to remind me of what could have been.Speaking of toilets, Gavin's love of potty humor seems to have reached a cruising altitude. For awhile there he loved to say all of the potty-related words he could think of anywhere and everywhere. So we instilled a rule that he could say these words with abandon so long as he was actually in the bathroom (I mean, they are called "potty words," so this makes a logical kind of sense). For what seems like months he would sit on the toilet and string together words like "pee pee" and "butt" and "poop" in every conceivable combination with such a fervor you'd think those were the only words he had ever been taught. And soon he was combining them with all of the other words he knew creating gruesome compound words like "peanut butter poop" and other words I can't even remember right now to repeat because I have probably blocked them from my memory in order to protect my brain. But I'll tell you what: we very rarely hear potty words outside of the bathroom, say at the kitchen table or in the car. And when he does slip and say something potty related outside of the potty zone, he realizes it immediately and says, "Oops, sorry." But in the past couple of weeks this pottywordpalooza seems to have lost steam. Instead of Tourette-level outbursts, he now mostly tells stories or sings to himself. Which is nice. Permission can be a great threat to subversion.
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