Lessons my Son Taught Me (about how wrong I can be)

Sometimes I think I have amnesia. Like the time I awoke about one o'clock in the morning and heard sounds of crashing and running coming from downstairs. Brad was beside me, asleep. I instantly concluded it was ROBBERS. Of course! And then the robber started running upstairs...and in my half-wakeful, fully terrified, totally illogical state, I suddenly knew it was a dog. Yes, a dog had somehow broken in to our house. This was not my finest hour in the reasoning department. And then, I heard the dog open Aiden's door. So I went back to thinking it was a robber. Only it was about to become a kidnapper! All this happened in the space of about three seconds, it seemed, and I was shaking Brad's arm, trying to wake him up. He knew instantly that it was just Aiden. Why couldn't I have thought of that? Seriously, the thought had hardly even entered my head. Oh yeah. I have a child. Children do these things. The only thing is, when heard in the dead of night, the pitter-patter of little feet tend to transmogrify into the clump-clump of burglars.

Aiden came in all distressed and disoriented and I was still sort of in terrified/angry at the kidnapper/fight or flight mode...which weirdly and instantly turned into comforting, motherly mode as soon as I heard his voice. A wrenching and disconcerting transition for one o'clock a.m.

It turns out that Aiden had woken up, was thirsty, didn't have his drink beside his bed ( my fault), and so got up, opened his door, closed his door ( both of which should have woken me up), and went downstairs to forage. It's not quite been two months since he graduated from a crib to a big boy bed, and even though he has gotten up out of bed several times, this was the first time he had done it after I was asleep. That is all to say, in my defense, I'm still getting used to another person around the house who is potentially nocturnally mobile.

And then there was the time I found a small piece of plum sitting on a kitchen chair. I looked in the fruit bowl and lo and behold, there was a plum with a small bite missing. For some reason, my brain instantly condemned Brad. I formed this mental picture of him taking a bite and deciding it wasn't ripe enough and spitting it out. I don't know why I had this rush to judgment - it's not like he does this kind of thing often! And as I held the plum in my hand, I shook my head and said in a quiet, slightly exasperated tone, "Brad...!" Aiden looked up at me and said quite penitently, "I bite it, Mama." It reduced me to hysterical laughter on the spot. I just love that he owned up to it immediately, when he could have gotten away with it. When I told Brad, he thanked Aiden for not throwing him under the bus. ( Hmmm- a violent idiom for a two year old to puzzle over.)

I just felt like clonking myself over the head - DUH, CLAIRE! You have a two year old boy! Those are the kind of creatures who climb up on kitchen chairs and take big bites out of plums and spit them out. That's practically in their job description!

It's just funny how our brains are constantly trying to solve mini-mysteries, struggling to instantly make sense out of what we see, or hear ( as in the case of the midnight marauder who turned out to be my son), and in my case anyway, the conclusions are not always correct.

And on a totally unrelated note - we were reading a Dora the Explorer book tonight before bedtime. ( For the lucky few who are uninitiated in the ways of this fictional wunderkind, I will explain. Dora is a bilingual cartoon child who leads a shrill crusade to teach the Spanish language to young Anglo urchins everywhere.)(No un-politically correct comments from the peanut gallery, please. Yes, I agree, we shouldn't have to press 1 to hear something in English... but on the other hand, it really doesn't send our beloved country to the dogs to learn a little Spanish. Trust me. ) I was reading a Dora story to Aiden about how Dora says goodnight to a host of animals, bilingually, of course. "Goodnight snakes! Buenos Noches, culebras!"( What normal little girl says Goodnight to snakes? Well, at least now I will never forget the Spanish word for snakes. Oh goodie - another useless brain wrinkle.) Anyway- with each "goodnight" I would prompt Aiden to say, "Buenos noches!" And his utterance of the phrase was so cute, that I knew if I could bottle that cuteness and sell it, I would be an instant millionaire. As I wrote on my Facebook status: " I think the sound of Aiden saying "Buenos Noches" as I turn out the light is sweet enough to melt the stony heart of the cruelest despot."