Three more anecdotes

Isaac is branching out with his professional aspirations -- lately he has pretended to be a teacher and a doctor. Sometimes he refers to himself in the third person as he plays these games, and when he does, he often calls himself "she." When I point out that a man can also be a teacher, invariably he looks down at his shirt and says, "She must be a woman. She doesn't seem to be wearing a necktie."

Who does he know who even wears a tie? Certainly not the male assistant at his preschool, who is about 25 and a total hippie. And who calls it a necktie anyway?

(This is similar to his earlier pronouncement that his alter ego Loader Driver must be a woman, because she wears make-up.)

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Yesterday I was trying to coax Isaac into the bathroom to wash his hands, so I challenged him to beat me there before I counted to five. In order to make it funnier, I skipped numbers three and four.

Isaac was displeased. "Mama, that's not right. You must be a bad person."

I tried to explain that I wasn't a bad person, just a bad counter. He seemed to think the two were identical. Later Craig told me that when he had accidentally used the wrong word for something, Isaac had informed him he was a bad person. Isn't that taking pedantry a little far?

I try so hard not to tell Isaac that he's doing a good or a bad job. I even try not to describe his behavior as good or bad, because that might be confusing for a little kid. And I've certainly never called him bad!

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Isaac's nightmares continue, along with increasing agitation at bedtime and difficulty falling asleep. He's genuinely upset, too -- it isn't just his regular bedtime resistance. But last night he came up with his own solution: a dream whacker.

It's actually a toy space shuttle. As Isaac describes it, the pointed wings serve as knives to chop up the dreams, and the wheels run over the dreams and smash them flat -- either way, they end up dead. Apparently sometimes it can also be filled up with water to spray on the dreams, which also kills them.

He can speak at great length about the dream-killing, sounding incredibly (and yet amusingly) violent. But he's still uncertain about the status of the dreams. "Are they then really dead?" he asks.

He doesn't understand what dreams are, I think. Maybe when he figures them out, the dream whacker will actually provide him with some comfort. So far he enjoys talking about it, but I don't think it has any therapeutic effect.