It's been a lazy weekend full of tickling, naps, snuggles and general silliness. Yesterday Isaac demanded pancakes yet again; it never ceases to amaze me how the simplest interactions can be full of opportunities to engage.
I ask him to get the New York Times Cookbook--my mother's, so it holds many memories--and he lugs it from the book shelf into the kitchen and plops it on the counter unaided. I ask him what page the pancake recipe is on. "Six-fifty-four" he instantly replies.
But then again, this is the boy who refers to places by address and Sesame Street shows by episode number. "I want to watch 3287," he'll inform me, and I have to question him in detail before realizing that it's the one where poor, unimaginative Prairie Dawn finally learns to become more "monstery."
[It's notable also for an uncharacteristically goofy performance by Maria, who usually maintains a more dignified persona. And it fills me with a strange delight to know that I live in a world where I can type "Wubba Wubba Wubba Wubba Woo Woo Woo" into Google and, in a fraction of a second, find the exact episode I'm looking for.]
But I digress.
We assemble the dry and wet ingredients. Isaac reads the amounts off the recipe, but the fractions confuse him so I skip them and he carefully pours the contents into the bowl. After a while, he loses interest and wanders into the study. It's okay: I finish up and bring him the fruit of his minimal labor. He wolfs them happily, demanding more milk.
*
Yesterday we went to see new friends--those same friends with the son who Isaac seems to like so well, but he ignored the boy for the better part of the afternoon, preferring instead to explore and stim and, at the playground, repeatedly check out the bathrooms and try to scrounge cake from other people's birthday parties. J. and I were tense, and at one point our friend G. lightly touched me on the shoulder and told me to relax. So reassuring to be with people who understand.
It wasn't until we went to a frozen yogurt shop that Isaac finally began to unwind a bit. The four adults sat at a table eating yogurt and chatting while the boys gravitated to the ATM. After a while, they struck up a game (you heard me: they struck up a game) and began chasing each other through the place. Isaac would run through the shop, fall to the ground dramatically, and wait for his friend to catch up with him, flapping his arms a little from excitement, his eyes locked on the other boy's face. Best of all, we had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it.
I considered asking them to stop--it was a restaurant after all--but it was pretty much empty except for the six of us, and the teenaged employees didn't seem to care or, for that matter, notice. When we said goodbye, Isaac hugged his friend.
I'm tapping this out on my laptop now as J. putters around the house. We're listening to the commentary from Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, which is a classic, deft and charming piece of film-making, graced by the elegant performance of Kay Francis, whose difficulty with her "Rs" gave rise to her nickname around Paramount as The Wavishing Kay Fwancis. Even movie stars need speech therapy, I guess.
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