[Author’s Note #1: I’m using this set of short stories as an opportunity to catch up on the timing of my posts — which, needless to say, has significantly deteriorated in past months. This one, at least, was actually completed during the month it purports to represent… even if the events herein occurred well before February.]
[Author’s Note #2: You Can Read a Girl to Water… was originally an entry within this compilation — but I chose to develop that story into its own post when *this* one was still incomplete at the end of January. Thus, while my last post was late — as usual — at least this one is not!]
Beauty is in the Eye of the Four-Year-Old
This past September, I attended my ten-year high school reunion — which made me feel soooooo old.
But, at least my classmates couldn’t accidentally overestimate my age — which is more than I can say for my church fellows, almost all of whom assume that I’m already in my early thirties.
[Note: The lead singer thinks that I’m at least thirty-three. I was too embarrassed to correct him.]
So, not only do I feel old — but apparently, I look old, too.
Taylor thinks I’m misinterpreting the situation. Instead, he optimistically chalks up this universal overestimation to my early entry into motherhood.
“How many other twenty-eight-year-olds have six-year-old kids?” he chides me.
Admittedly, he makes a good point. The parents of Bo’s classmates are, on average, at least ten years older than I am.
But, even so, I remain unconvinced that my appearance truly has *nothing* to do with this phenomenon — and two recent incidents support my assessment.
It began one lazy winter day, as Aza and I were painting her nails. (Because, apparently, I’m a fool who loves wasting my time.)
In the midst of our salon session, I caught Aza scrutinizing my face.
“Yes?” I prompted. “What are you thinking about?”
Aza shrugged. “I was just thinking that you look like a tiger.”
I laughed. “Why do I look like a tiger?”
“Because of these lines,” she answered — and with that, she placed one delicate finger on my forehead… precisely upon my deepest furrow.
I sighed. “Yeah. Thanks for that.”
And then we finished doing her nails. Very astutely, Aza didn’t again liken me to a tiger.
(Or, at least, not in the same way.)
Apparently, though, my daughter just couldn’t resist the lure of my aging forehead. In the following weeks, I several times noticed her keen interest — until, eventually, she became so absorbed that her interest turned physical. Instead of just intently examining my deteriorating skin, she decided to help — placing her little fingers above and below my forehead furrows, and then puuuuuuuulling them taut.
At the time, I could only laugh at my daughter’s scandalously flagrant [but conscientiously silent!] critique. (My tears would come later.) So, as Aesthetician Aza worked her low-tech magic, I asked, “Well, are you going to tell me again that I look like a tiger?”
My daughter dropped her hands and looked me directly in the eye. “No. I have nothing to say to you.”
… which, of course, only intensified my laughter. (And future tears.)
Aza, though, could nevertheless sense that some ruffled feathers needed smoothing. Thus, she maintained eye contact, carefully placed a hand on my cheek, and assured me, “Mommy, you don’t look like a tiger!”
“Oh, so now I don’t?”
“No. A tiger has lines everywhere… but you only have lines on your forehead.”
Well played, Aza… well played.
Aza the Depressive, Part I
Within our family, my oldest son typically goes by one of his nicknames — either “Bo” or “Bobhi” — with his full name generally reserved for moments of discipline. (Which, admittedly, occur with some frequency.)
However, out in the wider world, he has chosen to be known exclusively as “Borealis” — among his classmates, teachers, church friends, etc. It’s to the point where, if I unwittingly call my son “Bo” in conversation with one of these people, they’ll often do a double-take. “Bo? Oh, you’re talking about Borealis!”
…which just goes to show that even young kids engage in image management.
Thus, a few months ago, I was wondering whether the same shift would happen (or was already happening) for my daughter. I suspected not — since she has attached to her nickname much more closely than has my son — but I thought it reasonable to ask, all the same.
Careful not to prime her answer with either name, I caught her attention and asked, “Hey, what do your friends call you at school?”
She sighed and returned to her coloring. “They don’t call me anything.”
I scoffed. “No, like, do they call you ‘Aza’?”
“No.”
“Do they call you ‘Australis’?”
“No.”
“Like, what do they think your name is?”
Another deep sigh, and a dramatic pause in coloring. “They don’t think my name is *anything*. No one even knows who I am!”
I stifled a laugh as I pulled her into a hug. “Oh, sweetie. I’m sure that’s not true,” I murmured.
Aza just whimpered in response.
“And also,” I added. “Four years old is a little too young to be so depressed. You gotta wait until you’re at least, like, thirteen.”
Aza the Depressive, Part II
There’s a certain question that people ask all the time. It ostensibly solicits information — yet it rarely produces any.
The question is this: How was your day?
Ask any parent of a school-aged child. This question inevitably receives the answer “good” or “fine” — as though those responses mean anything at all.
Accordingly, I now try to pose queries that require more than just a one-word response. (This list is a good resource for such questions.) Of these, my initial go-to is this: What was the best part of your day?
The resulting answers reveal what activities enliven my children. For example, Bo loves to play outdoor imagination games with his best friend. In contrast, Aza prefers to stay indoors and independently color or draw. I frequently receive the same (or similar) answers from day to day — but, taken altogether, the responses help flesh out my mental image of each child.
However, when I first started posing this specific question a few months ago, my daughter was a bit confused at its purpose. One memorable bedtime, she countered, “Mommy, what do you mean?”
I laughed. “What do you mean, what do I mean?” I paused, then clarified, “Like, what was your most favorite part of the day?”
“Oh, ok,” Aza nodded.
Success! She now understood the prompt.
“Go on,” I encouraged.
“Well…” she hemmed. “Well, my favorite *sad* part of the day was that Gavin didn’t play with me.”
“Oh, uh,” I stammered. “Ok, uh, we’ll roll with that. Well… did you ask Gavin to play with you?”
“No.”
“Well, next time, you should ask. Maybe he didn’t know that you wanted him to play with you.”
Aza sighed deeply. “I was just too sad to ask him. I wanted him to just know that I wanted him to play with me.”
I smothered a laugh. “Sweetie, you have to ask people if you want them to play with you. Otherwise, how will they know!? Boys *can’t* read your mind!”
No matter their age, I added silently.
My daughter sighed again. “I think I will be too sad to ask him.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ok — but I’ll keep reminding you, alright?”
“Alllll-riiiight,” came the breathy reply.
I gave Aza her bedtime kisses, then remembered my original question. “Oh, and what was your favorite happy part of the day?”
Aza yawned and closed her eyes. After a few seconds, I suspected that she had already fallen asleep.
But then, with her last sliver of consciousness, she answered, “I just… didn’t have one.”
Three Strikes, You’re Bo
A few months ago, Borealis brought home an unexpected — and unwelcome — note.
Borealis threw snow today, which is against the rules. We discussed the rules again and talked about the importance of following them. Please sign and return this note.
Unwilling to completely concede the point, I wrote back: Noted — although this seems like a silly rule. If he’s not throwing snow *at* anyone, I don’t understand why he can’t throw snow *at all*.
Unfortunately, my son was not to be outdone. About a month later, we got another note.
Borealis threw a rock at a classmate today, which is *obviously* against the rules. Please reinforce with him that it is *not* alright to throw rocks.
I was quite disheartened by this turn of events. Sighing deeply, I wrote back: Agreed. This is also a rule in *our* family.
“Bo!” I barked after concluding my response. “You threw a rock at a classmate today!?”
He shrugged. “I, uh… I don’t remember.”
“Borealis. Did you, or did you not, throw a rock at a classmate today?”
“Oh, uh… yeah, I did.”
“Why!?”
He shrugged again. “I dunno.”
“Is it ok to throw rocks!?”
“No.”
“So why did you do it!?”
“I said, I don’t know!”
I sighed heavily. “Well, regardless, the chief takeaway is this: do not do it again! We do not throw rocks!”
Bo screwed up his eyes. “Well… sometimes we do throw them. Like into the creek or something.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, but we don’t throw them at people, ever!”
Borealis: <silence>
“Right?” I prompted forcefully.
“Yes, right,” Bo mumbled in response — which was, though unenthusiastic, at least correct.
Thus, I considered the matter put to rest. Borealis was now well aware of the rules: he was to throw neither snow nor rocks.
You might see where this is going. I, however, did not.
That is… until the following week. This time, I didn’t receive a note from the classroom assistant; I got an email directly from the vice principal.
Today, Borealis threw ice at a classmate, resulting in that classmate having to visit the nurse’s office. We discussed how it is unsafe to throw ice at people, and he apologized for his actions. Please reinforce that he should not be throwing *anything* at school.
Not snow. Not rock. Ice: a combination of both.
“Borealis!” I moaned when my son arrived home. “What are we going to do with you!?”
“What do you mean?” he asked in surprise.
“You sent a classmate to the nurse’s office today?” I prompted.
Recognition flashed in Bo’s eyes. “Oh, yeah! It was Austin.”
“What did poor Austin do to you?”
“Nothing! We were just playing.”
“You were playing by throwing ice at him?”
Bo nodded. “Yeah! Just like with the rocks.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. “You threw a rock at a classmate because you were playing? That’s not what you said last week!”
My son shrugged. “I forgot. But Austin threw ice first, but it missed — and then I threw ice second, and I didn’t miss. And that’s what happened with the rocks, too.”
A long sigh presaged my husband’s entrance into the house. “Yes, Wifey,” he announced. “All of this trouble has been caused by our son’s killer arm.”
I groaned in response — but Borealis merely grinned.
“And the vice principal?” I asked my husband.
“Yeah, no need to answer that email — she caught us during pickup. So I, like, gave my verbal acknowledgement, or whatever.”
“Small victories,” I muttered. Then, turning back to my son, I asked, “Ok — what lesson did you learn here?”
“Don’t throw things at school.” <pause> “Well, except at P.E., probably.”
I sighed. “Yeah, that’s close enough.”
Taylor: <grunts in agreement>
“And also,” I added, “Maybe pick friends with better aim — you know, so that it’s actually a fair fight.”
Borealis gave me a corny thumbs-up in answer.
I scrutinized my son, then asked, “Oh, and just out of curiosity… where did the ice hit Austin?”
Bo gave me a mischievous smile. “Right in the forehead… just like Goliath!”
Gobble, Come Home
I am consistently and deeply grateful that — thus far — Rhys’s development of language has much more resembled Aza’s path, not Bo’s.
[Author’s Note: For a refresher on the painful period of Bo’s speech delay, you can reference basically any post between “D” as in “Rabbit” and The Brave Little Toaster Has a Brave Little Toaster. Put simply: it was a long, arduous journey.]
To our delight, Rhys began earnestly attempting new words sometime in early November. Thus, by Thanksgiving Break, he had reliably acquired a whole slew of animal sounds — including that of the holiday’s namesake bird.
“Gobble, gobble, gobble!” Rhys chirped happily on our way to his godparents’ house in Wichita.
“Aw, Rhysi said, ‘Gobble, gobble!’” Borealis observed.
And, indeed, he continued to do so: all the way to Wichita, all the way home to Golden, and all the way to my parents’ house in Colorado Springs — where he found a *new* use for his latest word.
After greeting my mother — “Amma!” — Rhys turned to my father and proclaimed, “Gobble!”
“That’s not ‘Gobble’, Rhysi,” Australis admonished. “That’s ‘Poobah’!”
Aza’s correction was accurate: since becoming a grandparent, my father has been known exclusively as “Poobah”. In fact, that appellation originated significantly before Bo’s birth.
At some point during my late teens, my father sardonically declared, “Your children shall know me as ‘Grand Poobah’!”
[Note: The proximate source of this name is The Flintstones, but it ultimately comes from this 1800s comic opera.]
Not to be bested, I retorted, “Oh yeah? Well, *you* won’t remember this moment… but *I* will.”
And, in fact, I did. By the time Bo was born, my father’s name was set in stone — even over his protestations.
… which is why Rhys’s proclamation was so hilarious.
“Gobble,” my son repeated after being by corrected by his sister.
I smothered a laugh at my father’s resulting scowl. “Is ‘Gobble’ so bad?” I asked. “You’ve never really loved ‘Poobah’.”
My father ignored me and instead addressed my son. “Say ‘Poobah’.”
“Gobble.”
“Poobah.”
“Gobble.”
My father sighed. “Say ‘poo’.”
“Poo.”
“Now say ‘bah’.”
“Bah.”
My father nodded. “Ok, now put them together — ‘Poobah’.”
Rhys grinned. “Gobble.”
And that was that: the battle lines were established.
“I’m just not going to respond until he says ‘Poobah’,” my father huffily announced. “He can say it; he’s just being stubborn.”
“Yeah — and I have no idea where he gets it,” my mother deadpanned.
Thus, the masculine standoff began. Their sixty-year age gap vanished in the face of this ludicrous debate… but who would win?
Finally, after weeks of ridiculous posturing — on both sides — this absurd war came to a head one night in December.
The epic showdown began when my mother made the mistake of telling my kids, “Poobah is getting home from his trip tonight!”
“Gobble?” Rhys clarified.
My mother rolled her eyes. “Yes — Gobble will be home tonight.”
This statement seems innocuous enough — so why was it a mistake? Well, because Rhys was determined to hold my mother to her word — and to him, “tonight” means “before I’m asleep”.
Thus, while Bo and Aza [mostly] compliantly prepared for bed, Rhys distraughtly lay on the floor and wailed, “Gobble! Gobble! GOBBLE!”
My mother — now aware of her error — checked my father’s iPhone location. “He’s in Castle Pines.”
I grimaced. “That’s still, like, forty minutes away.”
“Well, thirty, the way your father drives.”
I rolled my eyes. “The kids are supposed to be asleep in, like, five minutes.”
My mother scrutinized my wailing son. “Uh… I don’t think he’s ready for that.”
Unfortunately, I agreed — but there was little we could do, save pray for my father’s safe and speedy arrival. Thus, we got Rhys (and the big kids) prepared for bed, all the while attempting to ignore his piteous howls.
“Gobble! Gahhhhhhhh-ble!”
We read the children’s Bible, sang the Lord’s Prayer, and tucked in each child — with little hope that anyone would fall asleep any time soon. The kids’ room fairly rang with Rhys’s heartrending cries, and no amount of snuggling or singing lessened his lamentations.
“Rhysi is too loud!” Bo complained.
“Uh, yeah,” I agreed. “Hopefully Poobah will get home soon.”
My mother checked her phone again. “He’s almost to Monument Hill, at least?”
“Ok, so maybe fifteen minutes,” I acknowledged. I turned back to Bo and asked, “Can you put up with Rhysi’s crying until Poobah gets home?”
“No! It’s too loud!”
I sighed. “Well, then I guess we should just pray that Rhysi wears himself out and falls asleep right away.”
And with that, my mother and I scurried out of the kids’ room and back upstairs.
For a few minutes, it seemed that Rhys might indeed surrender to sleep. His wails lessened, and he seemed to be listening to his siblings’ admonitions.
But then, something changed. Maybe he remembered why he was sad, or maybe he just got bored of attending to his brother and sister. Either way, he unleashed a fresh wave of furious screams.
“GOBBLE! GOBBLE! GAHHHHHHHHHH-BLE!”
“Dear Lord, please bring peace upon this house and upon my child,” I prayed.
The minutes felt endless. Each crawled by with all the haste of a Galapagos tortoise. I endured an entire hour [or maybe just a tenth of one] before returning to the kids’ room, hoping to assuage my son’s distress.
Unfortunately, though, Rhys’s affliction could only be cured by Gobble. Thus, rather than calming at my arrival, he only grew more frantic — and bossy.
“Yeave, Mommy! Yeave!” he ordered.
And so I reluctantly returned upstairs to pray for God’s deliverance.
Finally, it arrived — in the form of my bleary-eyed, road-weary father. At his appearance, I immediately barked, “You gotta go downstairs, now!”
“What!?” he spluttered.
“Listen to your grandson!”
“Gahhhhhh-ble! Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-bllllllllllllllllllle!”
“Oh, that,” my father acknowledged. “Uh, well—”
“Go *now*!” I implored. “Please! Nothing else will calm him down!”
“Uh, ok,” my father relented. “I’ll go.”
We raced downstairs to the kids’ room, where my father diffidently attempted to calm my hysterical toddler.
“It’s ok, Rhysi Bear,” he tried. “Look — I’m here. Poobah is home!”
My son lifted a tear-streaked face toward his grandfather. Tremulously, he asked, “…Gobble?”
My father froze. Then, after a few interminable seconds, he slowly set down his weapons.
“Yes, Rhysi Bear… it’s Gobble. Gobble is here.”
Gobble loved this!
🤍