if there’s a tomato...

We’ve reached the age where we chain-ask “Why?” for fun.

“Hey, don’t bang on the piano so hard. You have to be gentle.”

“Why?”

“You could break it.”

“Why?”

“It’s not made for you to bang on it so hard.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about piano making, I didn’t go to piano school.”

“Why?”

“Because I went to [name] school.”

I was prepared to go on and defend my educational decisions and career choice, but surprisingly that satisfied BB and we left the piano to do something else.

(Mom likes to end the conversation by saying “Because the sky is so high.” BB finds this funny and will cheerfully move on. But I’m too stubborn to opt out like that.)

We’ve also reached an age of competitiveness. On Wednesday, I got in the car and buckled my seatbelt. BB got mad because he wanted to be the first to put on his seatbelt. Then we went to the library and read The Berenstain Bears Take Turns. So we agreed to take turns putting on our seatbelts first each time we got in the car, and peace was restored to the land.

Then on Thursday morning, we had red bean bao for breakfast. BB was like “Mine is the daddy bao and yours is the baby—” and then I put the last bit of my bao in my mouth. So he was doubly mad I spoiled his pretend and finished my bao first. I was hungry, okay.

Mealtimes are tricky. I was doing a food journal, sketching my food at the table like all the cool kids. BB wanted to draw too. Mom busted out the Mom Voice (We Don’t Draw At the Dinner Table and Stop Distracting Him). So, oops. But I was not the only miscreant. Near the end of the meal, Dad started eating a cookie before BB finished his meal, and he didn’t offer BB any. BB started wailing. Mom had to put out the fire. In the end, BB calmed down and Dad gave him half the cookie.

I feel like life is going to get tougher for Mr. Firstborn Son once he gets a little brother in February. For now, he’s cool with the idea of getting a brother. We made a magnet-tile house with rooms for Mommy & Daddy, BB, and BB’s little brother (and a bus depot). But I foresee issues with him needing to be #1 all the time and needing attention all the time. I stop in the kitchen to talk to Mom for a couple minutes and he gets all whiny and teary. “I want A to play with meeeee” Well, he deals at daycare, he can learn to deal at home too.

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He's a smart little guy, but sometimes understanding him requires a bit of context. Today he woke up from his nap and told everyone very clearly: “If there’s a tomato, you need to run out of the house.” I was like, huh? He likes tomatoes. We were eating cherry tomatoes from Dad’s garden earlier that morning.

Mom figured it out. “Does he mean ‘tornado’?”

Yesterday, we went to the mall, and we saw a door labeled EXIT (he knows that E-X-I-T means “go out”) with a tornado shelter sign on it. We stopped to look at the stick man fleeing a tornado, and I explained that if there was a tornado, you’d go into the shelter and be safe.

(No you don’t run outside in a tornado. But he saw an exit door that was somehow also a tornado shelter door…he did well with the information he was given)