A True Story

Early Sunday morning and when I ask Zane where he wants to go hiking he says that he doesn’t want to hike, he wants to go swimming like we did last week. Well, ok. He has a big breakfast of eggs with stinky cheese and some of his bagel. Oh, he’s on a stinky cheese kick. He likes the camembert type cheeses best. I bought a gruyere and he didn’t want anything to do with it, not stinky enough.

So off we go, the two of us, and spend the next two hours swimming like, uh, four year olds. I mean, these guys have NO concept of personal safety whatsoever. I had him in a floating vest for the first part of the morning along with a cool bug-eye snorkel mask, kind of like these. His game was to throw a sinking thing into the water and then try to jump in to get it. Of course the vest kept popping him back to the surface and he actually did pretty well at that point. A little later he wanted to try it without the vest and, well, mostly just sank and sputtered a lot. A lot.

The funny thing is I try and caution him, he says “because why?” (his mantra), I explain because he can’t swim yet, and he yells out I CAN SWIM with such earnest emotion that you want to believe him.

Two hours is a lot of swimming and by the end of it the two of us were fully waterlogged. This time he did not fall asleep on the drive home. He really wanted to go to the new dunkin donut and subway shop, so we ordered a 6” sub with lots of veggies, he ordered a donut with sprinkles, and we headed home to eat. Halfway home he informed me that the food was all his and, no, he wasn’t going to share.

And he almost didn’t. He ate all but the last inch or two of the sandwich, some chips, and then proceeded to eat the whole donut. That’s a pretty big meal for Mr. String-bean. I even managed to get him to take a short nap. After the nap he was a bit low key, wanting to snuggle and tell me about street sweepers. An actual conversation:

“I need to talk to you about street sweepers.”
Why’s that?
“Because street sweepers sweep the roads and keep them clean.”
I mean why do you need to talk to me about them?
“Because I like you!”

You can’t argue with that…