electric boogaloo

Every day Nicolaus comes home with some complaint about the fact that there are other kids at school. A kid whapped him, a girl told him “no”, someone didn’t want his help with their work. The other day he told us that whenever they go out on the playground, that turns him into a carnivore dinosaur and he chases the other kids and goes RRRRRRRRRR!!!

“Oh wow,” Kevin said, “And do they like that?”

He shrugged, “No, not really.”

Look, I’m not going to talk about me and my own childhood here and why I maybe don’t have a lot of friends to this day. All I’m going to say is that genetics is fascinating stuff. And that if those kids had all watched The Black Stallion like I had told them to, they would have understood that I was racing – not chasing – them, and then maybe I wouldn’t have had to lock them behind invisible walls in a jail cell made of playground equipment and cedar chips, where I presume they still reside to this day.

So to hear Nicolaus tell it, you’d think that school isn’t going all that well when it comes to social stuff. But today when I dropped him off, a little girl squealed “Oh Nickiss is here!!” She ran up and hugged him, “I SO HAPPY to see you!”

And everywhere we go, he now boldly marches up to other kids and – well, mumbles to them a list of fascinating facts about dinosaurs or dog breeds, or some other Ross Gelleresque thing – but still. He’s talking to other kids! This is huge. Where he used to refuse to play on playground equipment that was infested with other children, now sometimes he gets so excited about meeting another kid that he forgets to actually speak to them and instead runs over to me to announce that he made a new friend.

I’m about to fall asleep, but want to make note of the fact that:
1. Today was really nice. Nice weather, nice hanging out with Kevin this morning, nice visiting with my parents this afternoon.
2. I could have done without Graham screaming for much of the drive home
3. And the being so tired that I thought about putting the car into park and crawling into the floorboard to take like a teeny nap during every red light
4. But it’s really hard to get good sleep with all that screaming
5. New boots! Wooooo! Boots!
6. We spent a lot of time in the car today, leading Nicolaus to ask me a bunch of questions about churches that I wasn’t sure how to answer
7. And a bunch of questions about cars. And whether grownups ever get hit by cars, and does that cause them to die? Ever? And what if daddy gets hit by a car?
8. Oh! And this:

I turned left at a light, trailing behind two other cars. Graham had finally given up on screaming, having fully expressed his outrage over the current political atmoshpere of our nation. I thought Nicolaus was asleep back there when I heard him say, “We’re following two cars.”

“Yep, we are. So that’s three – one is us, plus those two… that’s one, two three.”

He patiently waited for me to shut the hell up before continuing, “And with those two cars – we are like a car puzzle.”

Oh. Shit, well that’s much cooler than my counting thing.

“But I don’t want to do that puzzle.”

“Why not?”

“Because! If we put all those pieces together, that will be something called a wreck.”

Hearing an analogy that cool made me almost glad to be awake.