Many times it seems that Myron isn’t paying attention and then he surprises us.
We went to visit Great Grandma Teresa last weekend. It was the first time in a while that I took him with me. He was very much not looking forward to this trip. In fact, he hid on the floor, partly under my chair for most of the visit.
So last night, we were making our way through the bedtime routine quickly, and I decided to tell him a bedtime story about Great Grandma – how she immigrated twice (kind of not by choice) and how she sent her three children to live and go to school in another country with their aunt before she herself could come over. I didn’t get into the point that she gave the family her last name. Anyway, I was pretty sure Myron was absorbing maybe 10% of this. I think it also may have been his first introduction to the concept of countries.
The night after that, he was in more of a bouncing-off-the-walls state right before bed. He was also doing a lot of stalling, which one of his former preschool teachers noted he has gotten very good at. Kind of like this:
And this:
After he asked for a bedtime snack and tried to find the second flashlight to take to bed so that his stuffed owl could use it at night and asked for his other water bottle (not the one we usually keep upstairs) and we read two books as usual, he asked for a story. I told him a story about one of the people we named him after, Myron Rosander. I said that he was a show designer in a performing group called the Santa Clara Vanguard, but the reason he was important to us was that sometimes he came into a high school gym where the members were about to go to sleep and told us stories that were rambling and vulnerable and emotional, and when he did that, the members would sit up and gather in a circle around him. I said that when his mama and I were having a baby, we wanted to name him after this person.
Our Myron was jumping around in his bed and pointing a flashlight all around the room throughout this story.
Then when he laid down, he asked, “And what is Joseph?”