Things that I thought I would never say in my lifetime

"Do not let the dog lick your penis."

There, I said it. The dog stopped.

pumpkin patch 2004

pumpkin patch 2004
Originally uploaded by iaminpdx.

Another picture of E. from the Pumpkin Patch this week.

The Pumpkin Patch

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Originally uploaded by iaminpdx.

This is the field of pumpkins that we found our pumpkins in.

E's Muddy Hands

emMuddyHands
Originally uploaded by iaminpdx.

After a "big" breakfast the whole gang went to the pumpkin patch with the preschool gang.

Pumpkins, hayride, wet hay, mud, oh my.

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe

Reading to teach vocabulary. Tonight we learned clever, shrewd, stag and wounded. The results of teaching vocabulary to your 4.5 year old? He tells us on the way home in the car that "your talking up there is driving me insane! Mama, insane means "crazy" in spanish."

"I grow old, I grow old,

…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…" --T.S. Eliot

I have been reorganizing in the office in-between study sessions for class. This project involved moving books around from shelf to floor to table. E walks around and starts to help me. He is picking up books and is looking through them as I am working. He picks up my boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia that I have from reading in middle school. He is looking at the picture of the Dawn Treader and Prince Caspian with his sword and shield (four year olds love swords) and he says, “let’s read these tonight, Papa.”

“Well those are chapter books and they don’t have pictures.”

“But Papa they do have pictures,” he shows me as he is rifling through the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. So they do (at the beginning of each chapter). So we read the first chapter and at bedtime and he is really listening and asks questions about the British English (what is a parcel? What is queer? What is a stag?) And all the time I am living this, I am reliving reading it in my bedroom on the second floor of our house in Everett, Washington and all of those junior high feelings…and then the C.S. Lewis movie comes back to me and the scene with Anthony Hopkins and his colleagues teasing him in the pub about the success of his children’s books and ribbing him about the vulva imagery of Lucy pushing through the fur coats in the wardrobe…and I can see the perspective of the writer and of the teacher and the envy of the colleague’s success and the perspective of the reader reading it for the first time.

It was a little overwhelming…and glorious. Dear God, I am reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my 4 year old…is this heaven?

I didn’t think that E would be that interested in the story. So I didn’t get my hopes up. But he wanted to keep reading...we read three chapters before he wanted to take a bathroom break.

After bedtime I was talking with my mom to tell her and she said, “It's like this: Isn’t that every literature major’s dream come true? A child that wants to read and be read to?”