Field Notes

1. Pointing to a photograph on the refrigerator of me as a wee-one:
"Look! It's baby Mama!"

This would be the first time I've been called a baby-mama.

2. Sitting at the dinner table discussing why solely eating ketchup in the absence of any other nutritional matter is not a good idea, I asked my son, "Would you want to wake up and find that you'd become a bottle of ketchup?"

"I'm a boy!" he replied, in a moment of literalism uncommon for an almost three year old.

"Well, what's a boy made of?"

"Nothing," he replied.

I poked his soft belly. "Then, what's inside you?"

"God," he said. Then, after a pause: "and blood." A longer pause. "And ketchup."

3. Often, when playing with insects and other small creatures, I say to him, "Be gentle. Remember it's alive."

The other day, during a routine bum wiping episode after (well, don't make me say it, the word is already flagrantly littering this blog), my son said: "Be gentle. I'm alive."