Parenting Is A Battlefield

This afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave for work (hey, look, I don't teach on Mondays, and Isk is at school in the morning; I leave for the office after family lunch, okay?), Isk gestured to the bookcase, where my XF box set had been pulled down off the shelf. "Look!" he said. "One of them is looking for the others!"

I looked, and, sure enough, the folder for season nine was sitting on the shelf, on top of my antique cookbook collection. "Yes, it is," I said, and picked it up. "You know, it's appropriate that it was this one, Isk, because during this season, one of the characters wasn't on the show."

"Uh-huh," he said.

I opened the box. Two of the season folders were upside down, and they were out of order. I calmly started rearranging them. "Yes, he had to leave, and the other characters spent their...time..." I looked down into the box. "Oh. Did you mean that you had put one of your cowboys into the box, and his friends were looking for him?"

"Yes!" he said enthusiastically.

"I see," I said, and extracted the cowboy.

***

At bedtime, as I lay with him, he decided to do another round of role reversal, in which he becomes the mommy and I become the baby. (We do this a lot. He has announced that, when he grows up, he will be a mommy. "Really?" I ask. "You won't be a daddy?" "No," he replies. "A family can have two mommies. I will be one of them.") Anyway, after a long period of silence, he announced, "I have to go to work tomorrow."

"Really?" I said. (Tomorrow is the day I teach for six hours straight, so he got that right.) "Where do you work?"

I expected him to reply "at the college" or "on campus." Instead, he said "I can walk to my work. Because I can see two ways."

After a minute, I put it together. "Oh, you mean you look both ways when you cross [major road that I cross on my walk to school]? Yes, that's very safe."

"Yeah," he said, and put his fingers back in his mouth.

***

We drove to Hippieville, the coolest of the three "cities" we live close to, on Sunday. (Forgive the quotation marks, but I did just move to the boonies, people.) At a children's consignment store, Isk saw exactly what he wanted from across the room. "IT'S A JESSIE HAT," he announced, and made a beeline for it. And, yes, it was a foam replica of the hat that Jessie wears in Toy Story, complete with yarn braid. He's been wearing it around the house proudly ever since.

Proof, ladies and gents, that fandom is a learned behavior.