Bullzoder

We're in a major truck phase right now. Airplanes and helicopters are still hot, and he can spot the tiniest speck of an aircraft with his eagle eye. But garbage trucks, dump trucks, bulldozers ("bullzoders"), wheel loaders, hydraulic excavators, cement mixers, you name it -- if it's big and it's on wheels or treads, he goes nuts. And fire trucks? It's all over. We have a fire house right around the corner from us, and every time a siren sounds, he has to be at the window, preferably held aloft by an adult, so that he can see them pass. He'll gallop down the hall, shouting "Fire engine! Fire engine (emphasis on the 'en-')!"

It's all so butch. Jen's a little concerned -- is it nature or nurture? Are they teaching him this stuff in school, or are little boys really just hard-wired to gravitate towards heavy machinery? She's plotting to get him some dolls to balance things out.

It has taught us something about garbagemen -- they know that really little kids think they're the bomb. Whenever we pass a garbage truck, Oscar waves, and they wave right back with genuine delight.

It's so sweet. Think about it -- you clean up the city's mess all day or night for what, in today's New York, is a pittance. Filthy, dangerous work. Hard physical labor. And people take you completely for granted. There hasn't been a good garbage strike since, what, the Lindsay Administration? The biggest perk of the job is free furniture, and the resurgent bedbugs have put the kibosh on that. But little kids look up to New York's Strongest the same way they do to New York's Bravest, and the adulation of the stroller set has to count for something.

The other day, Jen was walking Oscar to school and they came upon a garbage truck. The crew invited Oscar to pull the lever that makes the trash compactor go, and Jen held him up to do it, but he just froze. It was too much.

On a related note, our current favorite from our library of board books, apart from the oeuvre of Mo Willems, Jules Feiffer's "Bark, George" and "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel," with its dark allegories of globalism and Taylorism, is "I Stink!"

It sometimes seems like everything's a struggle with Oscar these days. Diaper changes, eating, getting dressed, getting undressed, coming or going, whatever -- it all has to happen on his timetable now. He's too big to wrestle with, and he wants what he wants. Try and confound his will and he cries "Mine!" "Mine" being his person, or whatever course of events he wants to see unfold. He'll do it his way (and I'm thinking less of the soggy Sinatra original than the snarling Pistols cover).

For awhile, this sentiment was expressed as "Mommymommymommy!" Now it's just "Miiine!"

But then there's the sweetness, like last night when he made me and Sue present the crowns of our heads so that he could kiss them. Here he is at the Zoo, having just spotted an airplane, a distant twinkle in the sky above.