Boys

Alouicious’ stitches come out tomorrow, about the same time that I’m supposed to be having an ultrasound. He’s barely noticed them all week, except that there’s a little bit of string or thread sticking out that he can see if he looks down cross-eyed. Every now and then he’s banged his nose while crashing around the house (it doesn’t matter how many times I say ‘Please slow down! Please be careful of your nose!) and been very unhappy about it. I don’t know how to stop them from their evening lap–running crazily around and around the living/dining/kitchen over and over and shouting while supper is being made. Last night I tried closing doors and putting up gates but that caused a large amount of banging on the door and shouting.

I’m not complaining. It just takes psychological work to have boys (and a baby toddler girl who’s as hyped up as a boy). My natural instinct is to always to achieve quiet. ‘Please be quiet’, ‘please lower your voice’, ‘please stop hewing and smiting’–these words are always on my lips and in my heart.

The trouble is that I don’t really know where they’re coming from. ‘Imagine that our family was a fire dragon’ Alouicious just whispered into my ear.
‘Ok,’ I said, ‘but I’m not really awake yet, and I don’t know really know what a fire dragon is.’
He seemed disappointed, like surely his own mother should know what a fire dragon is. I’ve never, in a thousand days, even considered the existence of a fire dragon. In my haze filled memory I think I pretended a lot that my parents had had more children and I had siblings. And sometimes I would stand in the yard, looking up at the sky and pretend that visitors were coming that day and we needed to bake a cake. Surely I imagined other things, but I can’t remember any of them.

The imagining of my boys is so beyond a cake for visitors.
‘Are you the princess?’ Romulus will ask his sister. ‘I have a sword. I will save you.’
‘I guess I can be a princess,’ Elphine will concede, ‘Don’t step on my dress.’
Then he will run around wildly shouting ‘Princess! Come here princess. I am saving you,’ cape flapping behind him.
‘Please lower your voice,’ I whisper to myself. But less and less out loud. Maybe some day he’ll really save something, and it would be terrible if he did it so quietly that I missed it.