Eli 5.0
Here are some Eli 5.0 stories from the birthday weekend.Eli's birthday party at school was last Friday. He came into our room the night before, wide awake, and said "The morning will NEVER get here!"
This was at 3:30 a.m.
This weekend, we were all investigating a smell in the kitchen. One of those ugly, food rotting kind of smells. One of those smells that stops you dead in your tracks when you get a whiff.
I started systematically opening cabinets, pulling back the refrigerator to examine underneath, and just hunting around in general. Eli watched for a few minutes, then went and got a flashlight and become The Smell Inspector. He examined every square inch of the floor and brought several microscopic fragments of cracker to my attention.
"Well, let's see," he said, "I don't see any food that could smell. And I can't find anything else. Mommy, are you SURE it's not you?"
Gloria burst out laughing, of course, and let me make it extremely clear that there is not a whiff of rot about her.
On Sunday, for reasons I can't exactly remember, Eli (still 4.11) and I were talking about lateral lines. We talk about all kinds of things, and we get there by the strange routes that little kids take in conversations. He was very interested in how a lateral line functions.
So yesterday, we picked Eli up for lunch on his official birthday. He came out holding some pictures he'd colored, and he said "Daddy, we colored some fish today, and one of them has a secret."
I said "Did you color a lateral line on the fish?"
He immediately said "IT'S A SECRET! I CAN'T TELL YOU!"
I read an article about someone (their name long forgotten) who was reminiscing about their dad, and he said that every year on his birthday, his dad would take him out for a drive, and they would talk about what he wanted to work on during the coming year--things he wanted to learn, qualities he wanted to improve, goals he wanted to set. What made it cool is that his dad wasn't forcing anything on him--he just listened to what his son had to say. I thought that sounded like a nice tradition, so I told Eli that we were going to start doing that every year, and he seemed to like the idea.
We were eating out on Sunday, and I decided to have our conversation about the next year. So I said, "Eli, let's talk about what you want to do before you're six. What kind of things do you want to work on?"
He said "I'd like to work on being more patient."
"That's a very good goal," I said. "Anything else?"
"No," he said. "I think that's enough." And with that, he started eating his chips again, very satisfied.
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