Pants

This morning, Joseph came bounding into our bedroom.

"I had an askident," he informed me. "But my Iron Man shirt didn't get wet."

I started to get up to help him, but then I realized my back hurt a lot. How do you sleep on a back funny? But I guess I did.

"I need to stretch a little bit first," I told him. I lay back down and began to stretch, lifting my arms and legs a little bit to try and stretch just the right muscle.

"Hey, you're not stretching. You're exercising!" He then stopped for a moment to ask, "Do we say 'silly-billies?'"

Presumably he was planning to call me one, but first he wanted to make sure a word he had picked up from his friends would be allowed in our house. Occasionally I have to remind him that we don't say some words even though his friends do (they're not bad words, just unnecessary ones), and he asks things like, "What do I say instead of 'what the heck?'"

But "silly billies" was okay today. He didn't end up calling me that, and I went to change his damp pants. "What do you want to wear now?" I asked.

"My astronaut ones!" he said.

". . . What color are those?"

"Green." Okay, now I knew what he was talking about.

"Actually I want to wear Iron Man pants," he said, reaching for some black pants with a red stripe on them. He took off his wet strawberry shorts (that is, the red mesh ones) and put the Iron Man ones on instead. Iron Man shirt and Iron Man pants. He could be really strong today because he was Iron Man.

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After Institute, I did a little bit of shopping for Christmas. We stopped in the men's active wear section, and Joseph commented, "Black strawberry pants? That's so funny." I looked, and there were some black mesh pants. Once I had decided on an appropriate pair, we finished shopping and headed home.

"Now, Joseph, do we tell Daddy about the pants?" I asked him at a stoplight. I looked back and he was nodding. "No, we don't. It's a secret. We want them to be a surprise for him. So do we tell him?" He nodded again. We went back and forth like this til he said he wouldn't tell.

When Kevin came home, he brought a package from the mailbox with him. "Looks like a present for Mommy," he said.

"Oh! We got a surprise for you, Daddy!" Joseph said.

"You did? Well don't tell me what it is."

"It's a present."

"Yeah, don't tell me about it yet."

"It's pants."

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Today was a really great day, but there were some really hard things about it. I've wondered throughout the day when we'll be through all the meltdowns and bad-guy fixations and taking things apart and roughhousing and all of that. I've also wondered how on earth you teach empathy and compassion and inclusiveness and gentleness and resilience and selflessness to a little person, especially when you're not an expert at any of them. Do these things ever come naturally?

So in a lot of ways, I'm really grateful for all the cute things Joseph said about clothes today. A lot of it is just little kid cuteness, but a lot of it is also the real him, the him who will last when all the hard little kid things will stop being such a big issue.

And in the meantime, at least we can enjoy the company of Iron Man. (Or Capta Nerica. Or Superman. Or Buzz. Or Batman. Or even X the Owl. Depends on the shirt and pants that day.)

Iron Man today!