“So, I get there, put my backpack away,  take down my chair and sit at my desk. Get out my morning work.  It just feels good, you know, to be combobulated.”

“My mom told me, ‘Don’t try to please everyone’ at a dinner party when everyone kept asking me to pass things. I couldn’t keep up and everyone got agitated.” 

Such demands placed on a wee dinner party attendee! It’s a good thing he has my sage advice to guide him through trying times.

Me: Maddie, you still have candy from Easter?

Joseph: Maddie’s eating radius is 10 years.

Joseph has always eaten the treats out of the plastic eggs as he finds them. Maddie, on the other hand, can stretch her cache clear through to that same holiday the next year.

Joseph, you look older today, more grown up!

Well, yeah I guess, except for the fact that I’m wearing a t-shirt with a robot riding a dinosaur. 

Me: Joseph, you can’t wear that green Minecraft shirt again.

Joseph: No problem, that’s why I brought down a backup! (He takes off the green shirt and unfolds the yellow one he knows will pass.) I know you too well, mom.

“Mom, can we go visit Ancient Greece some time?”

Joseph and I were walking through a parking lot and one of these bad boys pulls into a handicapped spot.

“Whoa!” Joseph says. “Check out that car! What do you call those?”

It is like the maroon Buick Century we had when I was young, with the torturous backward-facing seat, only bigger, and woodier. I’m running through the names we called them as kids–beaver car (for the wood sides), bubble butt car (for the swollen rear)–and trying to figure out how to answer…

“Luxury!” Joseph says, stopping and admiring. “That’s it. Luxury.”

“You like those wood panels, eh?”

“Man, those just look so nice.”

Indeed. 

J: Mom, which of these would you say is more beige? (He shows me two blue crayons. He is coloring in squares of math problems on a bunch of pages that you put together to form one big image.)

Me: Neither. 

J: What? 

Me: Those are blue. Beige is a light brown. A grey-tan, kind of.

J: Oh no! I made a really big mistake! Oh. Man. (He slides his hand down his face.) I thought beige was a kind of blue. 

(He is part of a school project where each kid colors a sheet then the are going to put them together to make a big Disney picture.) 

J: Oh well, I guess that fairy’s face will just be blue. Oh man.