Snakes and Snails and Little Boy Tales

The man-cub - that's how I like to think of him now because his half-nakedness, jungle hair, and enthusiastic boyness remind me of Mogely from The Jungle Book - seems to have fully transitioned from baby to little boy.

He plays like a boy. I guess he might play like a girl, too, but he plays very differently than his sister. They both have vivid imaginations, orchestrating entire worlds of play around themselves, but he becomes the characters and acts out the world. He is Mickey Mouse flying the Toon Plane to rescue Santa from Mistletoe Mountain. He is the circus magician making bunnies disappear all over the house. He is a dog playing fetch in the aisles of Target (literally, on hands and knees, picking up the toys with his mouth). He's a football/basketball/soccer player. He's a gymnast. He's a doctor and a bear and a shark and a snake handler.

Man-cub has talked about snakes so much lately that I dreamed the other night that someone gave him TWO for his birthday. One of them was venomous and I was trying to get it away from him before it could bite him, but I was afraid to kill it because my snake-loving sister-in-law was there and I thought she would be mad at me. I really, really don't like snakes at all. I can keep my head about it if there is one in the yard, but I do not like them. Some of my most horrible nightmares are about snakes - bone-chilling, sweat-popping nightmares that tell me I need to get a handle on my stress level ASAP. That my sweet little boy child seems to be so fascinated with them right now makes me very uncomfortable. If he asks me for a snake one day, the answer will have to be, "Not while you live in my house."

On top of being a ball of frenetic energy, he is disarmingly honest and cheeky. It sometimes makes discipline difficult. I can see him being a kid who approaches punishment matter-of-factly so he can get on with his business. Case in point: This morning, he was walking around on the bed and I asked him, "Do you know what happens when you stand on the bed?" He said, "Uh-huh." I said, "What?" He said, "Time out."

I was thinking more along the lines of, "You'll fall and break your head," but I guess he wanted to be spared the lecture. He didn't have a time out. He did prove that sometimes there is more than one right answer.