My big man

Our neighbor, Jayne, dropped over today.

"How are you doing, Ulysses?" she inquired.

"Doing good," he answered.

"Do you like school?"

"Yes! I have fun."

"And your birthday is coming, too, isn't it. What are you going to be?"

I expected to hear "Six."

Instead, he said, "I'm going to be a big man!"

Ends with a "k"

Yesterday Ulysses had off from kindergarten for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday. A day off for him means a day on for us, of course, but I'm always glad to be around him.

Last night I asked him, "Are you looking forward to going back to school tomorrow?"

"Mm-hmm," he hummed with enthusiasm. "It's fantaskick!"

"Fantaskick?" I said.

"Yes!" he replied. "Fantaskick ends with the letter 'k'!"

Princess Leia: Where's the crown?

For over a year, one of U's favorite video games has been Lego Star Wars II: The Original Adventures. This is, of course, the interactive-play retelling of the original movies (the ones I think of as "the real ones") starting with the 1977 release that Changed Everything. His favorite character: Princess Leia.

"Princess Leia is a princess," Ulysses observed many times last summer. "But Princess Leia doesn't have a crown."

By gum, he's right. How did I never notice that?

"She's sooo beautiful!" he says, and has been saying frequently for several months now. Remember, he's not talking about Carrie Fisher, the human. He's talking about the cartoon video game character based on the blocky Lego toy based on an idealized, simplified construct of a fictional inhabitant of a fantasy universe last played by a flesh-and-blood actor over a quarter of a century ago.

He's seen the three 1970s-1980s movies several times, but he always goes back to the Playstation II as the lodestone. I'm pretty sure he thinks they're some sort of live-action adaption of the game. A novelty, perhaps.

So I always have to wonder when he says, with some heat, "Princess Leia is so beautiful!"

Meanwhile.

In kindergarten, his class has been learning about rhyming words. I was impressed when I heard Ulysses singing this song, to the tune of "The Wheels On the Bus": "Mouse and house are rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Mouse and house are rhyming words; they sound a lot of like." (I'm assuming the teacher sang "alike," but I'm not going to correct him; those cute little-kid linguistic quirks will be gone forever soon enough.) "Wall and ball are rhyming words..."; "Cat and hat are rhyming words..."

Wow! I thought, he understands what rhyming words are! I tried to introduce him to the concept a few months ago, but had gotten nowhere. Great, he's got it, I thought.

Until.

"Princess Leia and Amidala are rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Princess Leia and Amidala are rhyming words; they sound a lot of like."

The old switcheroo

"Why can't we have a sticker on our car?"

Ulysses eyed the shiny row of well-scrubbed clunkers, lemons and rust buckets facing the highway as we drove by. Each sported a garish set of four digits in the top portion of the passenger side of its windshield. These numbers, I surmised, were the "stickers" U coveted.

"Those cars have stickers! Why can't we have a sticker, too? Those cars all have stickers. I want a sticker on our car."

"That's a car store. Those stickers show how much money you have to pay to buy one of those cars," I explained. "If we put a sticker in our window, then somebody could come and give us that much money, and then they would take the car, and then we wouldn't have it."

Ulysses answered quickly -- more quickly than I expected -- "We could take that money and go buy back our green car."

He was referring to the Dodge Caravan we traded in last March. We were lucky to get it while it was working to a dealer who would take it despite its quirks. We were also lucky U didn't seem traumatized by its loss, what with its being his favorite color and all. This was the first time in nearly a year that he'd mentioned it.

So this mention of the green minivan caught me by surprise. I had meant to quell the sticker campaign, but he had taken it in a new direction.

I paused, thinking how to respond.

"We don't know where that green car is," I tried.

"We can put a sticker on the gold car, and then somebody will buy the gold car, and then we can take that money and go buy back the green car."

"That green car is gone," I said. "There's no place we could go to get it. There's no way to find it."

"Somebody will give us money for this gold car, and then we can buy back the green car."

I switched to a new rationale. "But without the gold car," I said, "how will be able to go get the green car? Without a car, we won't be able to go to it."

U fell silent. It was the last word on the subject. Until the next day.

Don and I were driving U home from kindergarten. An urgent voice piped up from the second row: "Doald! We have to put a sticker in our car so someone can give us money for it so we can go get our green car back!"

Startled, Donald turned to me for interpretation. I filled him in.

By now Ulysses was pumping up the drama. "Some bad guy came and stool our green car. We need a sticker! We need that money! Doald! We have to go find the green car and get it back!"

"We traded that green car for this one," said Donald, reasonably.

"What?" said Ulysses, catching his breath.

"We made a trade," he repeated. "We traded the green car for the gold one."

"Oooh!" Ulysses crooned. "So it was the old switcheroo!"

Ulysses and Santa

Picasa Web Albums - Vesna - 2009-12-05 Esquire Club Santa Breakfast