perspective

Remember a couple weekends ago I was frustrated because Henry wouldn't go outside? Well this weekend I decided to try harder to join him in his activities, rather than force him to join us in ours. It's just as fun to spend a Saturday afternoon reading with him in his bedroom as it is to be splashing in the little pool in the 90 degree weather. (And safer for our pale skin too.)

If I take a few minutes to step into his world, I gain a new perspective.

We have this box of animal fact cards from when Kate was younger. One of those sets that you pay for in installments and they mail you 10 more cards every month or something. So Henry was looking through these thousands of cards and had them spread out all over the floor. He was attempting to read each card which is such a thrill for me. And he's really good at sounding out/guessing what a word might be.

I showed him that each animal has a different color code, depending whether it's a mammal, a bird, an invertebrate, etc. I thought the sorting aspect might really click with him. But he didn't really respond. He kept flipping through the cards. Then, suddenly, he was finished, and asked me to pick up all the "water cards", gesturing to the pile of cards to his left. Turns out that he had already been sorting the cards. He was putting every picture that involved water into a pile. This included not only obvious ones, like dolphins, sharks, and whales, but also the zebra and the hippo, as the pictures on those cards depicted the animals drinking. "The zebra is right behind the water", Henry explained.

Later I asked him to come look out the window into the back yard. "See what Tommy is doing?" I asked. Again, Henry didn't really respond. So I kept on prompting: "see, he's scooping some water from the water table. Now he's carrying it across the yard and dumping it in the pool. Oh, he spilled some."

Henry didn't respond to any of this. But he pointed, and said, "it's a baby daddy."

Thomas and Bill were both wearing wide canvas sunhats. From above, we couldn't really see their faces. Henry thought Tommy looked like a "baby daddy"- a smaller version of the same thing.

I told Grandpa the story last night, during my father's day phone call, and he suggested that Henry might also have noticed a similarity in how Bill and Tommy move- their mannerisms and gestures.

It's so easy for me to dismiss Henry as one-dimensional sometimes: he only wants to watch Disney movies, or look at the same pieces of paper over and over... but God, there's so much going on inside that tousled blond head. He really just needs those familiar things to help him put some order to it all.