Eight is Great!

Saturday mornings Wayne and Abby get up early and go grocery shopping. Peter and I pretend to be asleep until they leave and then he'll sneak over and say 'Try to tickle my nose.' Sometimes we'll have breakfast in the living room and watch Clone Wars or I'll watch Peter play the Wii or DS. He doesn't ask very often to actually play together like he used to. This weekend he did and we enjoyed a long morning constructing an elaborate underground playground for the Lego Power Miners. It is also a great time for us to chat. We talked about the swine flu. I shared how people at my work are jokingly doing 'fist bumps' instead of shaking hands. He didn't think that was good enough...suggesting 'belly bumps' as even safer. The mental images that brought up made me really laugh. We also talked about some of the reasons why he and Abby don't get along sometimes (it really bothers him when they fight, but he can't always figure out what went wrong or how to get out of it when it starts to turn sour...). Not sure we resolved anything in that conversation, but it was a very thoughtful and mature discussion. At eight he really is getting a much more subtle understanding of the world, and that makes talking to him really fun. We got in a long conversation about how as they get older he and Abby will be taking on more of the chores. After about ten minutes of me rambling on, he interrupted me and said 'This is a much more fun conversation for you than it is for me.' Laugh. Later we were talking about how old he might need to be before he could stay home alone. I told him I didn't worry about him being alone in the sense that he'd purposefully do unsafe things, (or eat all Abby's candy - he volunteered as an example of something he might have done last year...) but I did worry that he'd feel sad and scared. I broke into "I'm all alone" from Spamalot - in my worst falsetto. He laughed and said "I wouldn't sing that!". I said I bet him 5 dollars that withing 10 minutes of being alone he'd be singing that very song...he laughed really hard, put his arms around my neck and sang in HIS worst falsetto..."I'm all alone...all by-my-self...." It was wonderful. ;)