PALS

It was a brief but intense relationship.  A boy of six wakes feeling pangs of hunger.  His mom lovingly fixes his breakfast of homemade pancakes (sweat on brow as she retrieves from the fridge the ones her mom sent over) and peanut butter.  Not just any plate will do, no, it must be a Zoo Pal plate.  With utmost care, I randomly grab whichever one is on top of the stack.  Le Tigre.  Perfect.  Boy quickly eats his favorite breakfast in a short 47.5 minutes.  And then, being six, he gets up to start his day, leaving tiger buddy on the table.

"Can you just this once finally remember to throw your plate away?  The syrup smell is making me sick," I lovingly suggest from across the house.  But this is the moment of parting.  How can a young boy of six possibly throw Tig in the trash?  After all they've shared?  After how close they've become?

"Can I keep him for another breakfast?" comes the high-pitched and at all times (cough) melodious voice of my son.

"Well that's just gross.  How can you keep a plate that had peanut butter and syrup, don't you know how disgusting that will be I mean it's a paper plate after all, it will just get dirty and make everything sticky, well, of course you can keep him.  Go rinse him in the sink."

And so with carefully sudsed hands and tiger plate dripping across the floor, the Zoo Pal plate has found a warm and comfy home, amongst 75 penguins, three broken squirt guns and four super magnets, nestled amongst the shelves of my tender-hearted son.

Some relationships are simply too good to let go.  Even when they're sticky.

What the kid sees...

One of the best things about having children is seeing the world through their eyes.  Sometimes that view is more about being on your knees scraping dried milkshake splutch off the floor or hearing a fourth retelling of some weird show on Disney (not your Mother's Disney, for sure).  But they can also make you stop and smell the proverbial flowers and see something lovely you would have missed as you dash out the door.  Sometimes the backyard is just the backyard.  Other times it's a perfectly framed snapshot.  Burrdboy was only 9 when he took this, but it made me realize when he looked out back, he saw something I'd missed.

True, Blue

There is an episode of Nickelodean's Blue's Room where Blue asks, "My juice is blue, what color is your juice?" For some reason this line has always stuck in my mind as the epitome of innocence. The simple discussion of juice, shared between friends. Okay, to me, it was also an indicator that my children were still young. As long as Blue was in our house, as long as songs of juice and sharing and clues swirled from the television, I could still revel in all things toddler; pretend they weren't growing up as fast as they were.