Scooter

Just realized that I’d utterly neglected to post on the scooter, which seems like old news to us by now. But shortly after my last post, Jen got him one. It was the center of his universe for a week or two. He would have taken it to bed with him if we’d let him. For a week or so, he’d tell everyone he met: “My have bee-loo scooter!” He was that proud of it. The first time we went to the playground with it, he rode it more or less continuously for four hours.

But already, he’s antsy to trade up. Yesterday, on our way home from school, he said to me: “Oscar no have skateboard.” I gave him my stock answer -- Someday we’ll get you one, but not for quite awhile, and first you have to master the scooter. Later, at the playground, he observed: “People like skateboards!” Yes, they do. Later still: “Get Oscar skateboard.” Sigh.

“My” is pretty much Oscar’s all-purpose first-person pronoun. Subjective, objective, reflexive, possessive, it’s all “My,” as in “My ride scooter,” or “My want to go playground.” Once in awhile he goes all Bob Dole third-person on us and uses “Oscar.” Similarly, his universal third-person pronoun, lacking a name, is “people,” whether the people he’s describing are singular or plural.



With the summery weather, we’ve been taking him to a lot of band events recently, which is so nice. He’ll see me playing and he gets really excited and comes up and grabs my leg or my horn, as if to say, “This silly man with the tuba is my paw!” Which is absurdly gratifying. Of course, in a few years, he’ll probably envy the kids whose parents merely embarrass them by insisting on walking that last block to school with them or friending them on Facebook. For now, though, he just loves live music and dances like a dervish.

Jen was walking him home from school a couple weeks ago, and they stopped for cupcakes at Sugar Sweet Sunshine, the Lower East Side bakery where we got his birthday cake. Highly recommended. Anyway, they had their cupcakes, and Oscar tried to order another by going up to the counter and exclaiming: “My… have… lello cupcake?” Jen walked up to retrieve him, and the pierced and tattooed kid behind the counter said to her: “Excuse me, and I hope you won’t think this is weird, but was he in Washington Square Park last weekend?” Indeed, they were. “My friends and I saw him dancing [to the buskers] and we just thought he was the coolest kid in the world.”

Small world. Small child. Big personality. “But he still can’t have another cupcake,” said Jen.