Everything Happens on Tuesday

Preschoolers are funny people. Living alongside a person who is learning to quantify, identify, and describe the world around them can be a challenging, and rather delightful, experience. This post, for instance, is being written on Tuesday, because that's the day in O's world when things happen. If he asks someone to come over to play, it's on "Tuesday." If he knows he's going somewhere, his day of departure is "Tuesday." If there was something fun in his recent past, it happened on "Tuesday."

The numerical equivalent of Tuesday is 5. When we play board games, every card he draws is a "5." The time always starts with a "5." (The best example was today. He was playing airplane, and he announced that "plane-ah fly five-seven-one-five." If anyone knows what time that is, please let me know. I'd hate to miss the flight, as they are serving soda and donuts, and the in-flight movie is "Buzz 2(Toy Story 2, for the uninitiated).")

"Breakfast," usually the first meal of the day for most of us, for O specifically refers to breakfast foods from the freezer. If it isn't French toast sticks, frozen pancakes or waffles, or bacon, it isn't breakfast. When you suggest yogurt, fruit, or cereal to him, he looks at you as if you had four heads, and says, "No, C. Dat no beckfest. Dat 'nack." So, I have, in reference to this phenomenon, created a new meal, the before breakfast snack, in order to get more fruits and dairy into his convenience-carbohydrate laden diet.

I think, because O was slower than the other kids to speak, that I'm perhaps more sensitive to how he expresses himself, now that the words, if not the precise diction, are here. Pretty amazing that seven months ago, he had little more than a handful of words, and called me "Lala."