When I Grow Up

My son has been staying up after bedtime in his room reading.   He’s been reading different things, some fiction and some non-fiction.   The book that’s been the most interesting to him is one I found in the attic when my husband and I were cleaning up that I thought would be a good present from Santa, called The Visual Dictionary.

It’s a large volume with pictures, broken down and sliced through labeled diagrams of all sorts of things.   I got it years ago when I was in a book store because I was fascinated by it myself.   I spent a little time paging through it and then shelved it.  I had hoped it would interest my son, and it has, only in a few ways I didn’t expect.

He found the page on weapons or something last week and wanted to talk about them when we were on the ride to school.   I figured he’d moved on from the weapons page to other things when I saw him carrying the big book up the stairs to his top bunk bed before I turned out their light and left for the night.

I had just gotten in bed and was comfortably ready to spend time on my iPad and relax at the end if the day when my son opened the door to the bedroom and asked me to come upstairs.   He said he wanted to show me something.   When I asked what he told me he’d figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

So I went upstairs.   He had the reading light on in his bed and the visual dictionary open.   And you guessed it, he had it opened to the weapons page.   He pointed to the word at the top of the page and said, “I want to be this.”

“Ah,” I said.  “You want to be a hunter?”  Yes.  He was pretty sure he wanted to be one.   Only could I tell him what some of the things pictured were used for?   The one I thought would bother or scare him was the bear trap.   When I described how it worked and how it was a fairly cruel way to capture a creature he just nodded.   I was worried he’d have nightmares about it but so far so good.

Children change their minds on what they want to be when they grow up many times before they actually do.   I wonder how long the hunter phase will last?   Tonight he’s up in his room on the chess board making up alternate ways to play chess.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has a favorite math problem.   He’ll tell you what is it.   He’s been sort of obsessed with it for two weeks now.   Tonight at dinner with my parents he made his favorite math problem (72 ÷ 3 = 24) into a word problem for my parents to solve.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is going to go on a short train ride with my parents to a neighboring town as an expedition one day.   She knew it was on Sunday (because parking for the car is free) but was sad to find out it wasn’t today, but two weeks from now.   She’s excited about the thirty minute train ride there and back and the hot dogs they’re going to eat when they get there.   My mother said they’d try to find a day sooner to do it since she’s looking forward to it so.