DADWAGON

JP’s mother and I just signed him up to be tested for the city’s Gifted and Talent program. Next month, on a Sunday, we’ll take him to the public school around the corner (the one he wasn’t able to get into for Pre-K), where world famous educators will spend a couple of hours prodding him wires, asking trick questions in pig Latin, and making him do jumping jacks.

Do I think JP is gifted, and/or talented? Of course I do! I guess. I mean, as far as I know–he’s never levitated a car, or calculated Pi to 4500 numbers. He’s never even read my mind.

He is, however, an exceedingly sweet boy, who appears to have a facility with numbers, a good memory, likes to sing, wants to read (that hasn’t happened yet), enjoys drawing, pulling the dog’s tail, and soccer. Who knows what his abilities really are? I think he can do just about anything he likes, but obviously I’m biased; but if he can, he should at the very least start making his bed and cooking a proper omelet (I like mine with mushrooms, please).

I find the notion of the testing a stress, really. Does he need to be judged and evaluated at age four? Shouldn’t he learn how to wipe his own butt before we predict his academic level?

I know, I know, testing isn’t destiny, and getting into the G&T program gives him access to the best free schools in the city. It just brings out the protect instinct in me.

Maybe I can help him cheat on the test. That oughta help.

Assuming I can pass.

Stayed home this morning for an extra hour or so, to wait for a repairman, and kept my son at home–mostly because I didn’t want to run out and back before 9 a.m., but also because I spent so little time with him in the past week, it seemed like a way to get in some daddy-and-baby time. And it was, in fact, hectic fun. Something interesting happened, though, which I haven’t really experienced before. As I got dressed, he sat and played with a few of his blocks and other toys, quietly, in a corner of the bedroom, for something like ten solid minutes. I didn’t have to do anything, other than talk to him when he made conversation.

This is, as I say, new. (My wife noticed it for the first time a couple of days ago, while they were out of town together.) Play, in the past, has always been squirmy, and has always required a parent to constantly be there, and be involved: keeping him from frustrated and teary, or just plain getting himself killed on some hazardous household implement. Since we’re a no-TV household (until he’s asleep, that is; after that, we start mainlining), I’ve literally never seen him sit and amuse himself till now. Suddenly we can…well, not ignore him, exactly, but actually get something done. Clean, cook, answer an e-mail or two, whatever.

Is this the flickery beginning of a (small) return to civilized adult life for me? Or am I fooling myself? Remember, he’s 19 months old; parents of 2-year-olds, please enlighten me, down in the comments.

Passed along by Alex Smith, the beared rockfather behind Flaming Pablum, here’s a music video from Astronomical Kid highlighting the terrible costs paid by possessive pseudo-sexual adolescent boys who happen to have hot moms.

The second verse gets right to it:

I don’t understand why these dudes just looking at her
Like they never seen a beautiful black woman
She just happens to be
The one who birthed me
The one who burped me
The one who nursed me
..
Don’t ask for her number, no you can’t have it
And if you ever do, then we gonna be goin’ at it

Not the best rap song ever (I like Astronomical Kid’s freestyle better), but if Smith says watch something, I usually do.

Only at the end of last night’s dinner of oxtail stew did we finally understand what Nico, our two-year-old, had been happily prattling on about: he thought he had been eating a pony.

“It’s not  a pony?” he asked. He finished the sentence with the same exaggerated uptilt he puts on the end of all questions, a verbal tick that makes us want to flash-freeze him at this moment of seemingly insuperable cuteness. “Not a horsie?”

I’ve had my own well-chronicled adventures with meat, and even with horsemeat–a Pferdewurst with mustard was a favored hangover cure when I was in high school in Germany, and I know the horse-platter at Chaikhona in Moscow to be pretty fantastic.

But in this case I was slightly disturbed by my son. Horses are by far Nico’s favorite animal. He sleeps with a stuffed horse, which still has the tiny hospital bracelet the nurse put on it when Nico went for surgery last month. He has been known to wake up from this sleep whining, mama, can I ride a pony? He claps and hoots and shouts each time we pass a horse carriage in Central Park, and I never thought it was because he was hungry. And yet, he was completely insouciant during dinner last night, popping big fatty bites of what he thought was horsemeat in his mouth, then laughing, then eating more.

My second thought was a little more confusing. How much of life was like this for him? How little did he actually understand what was happening to him in a given moment? Maybe he was more in the dark more often than we thought, not understanding what we’re saying about why we’re leaving or where we’re going or what we’re eating.

Because babies can understand much earlier than they can speak, and because they are born with such wide, wise eyes, I tend to think that they understand just about everything. This illusion is only heightened by Nico’s habit of answering yes to just about any question, the way I do in a country where I don’t speak the language.

But if that’s the case–if he’s often eating beef and thinking it’s horse–it’s also remarkable how calm he is about it. It’s no secret that two-year-olds get wired and frustrated when they can’t express themselves. But when they can’t or don’t understand something, it seems that they are more than happy to let their imagination fill in the blanks. There’s no pressing, no exasperation. Just happy fictions and half-truths humming along in their minds, as they laugh and preen and eat another bite of delicious pony.