My E
I can’t believe that my E will be 4 in less than a month. I guess that this means that I’ll have to stop referring to him as the baby which is okay since he will always be my baby. He is an out-of-the-blue kind of child. And I say this with some authority — anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that some of my sons are kind of interesting, shall we say.

But E is different from all the rest in his own ways. For one thing, he is an extrovert. Make that a major extrovert. You know the kind….he has never met a stranger. He is always introducing me to people that I don’t know and telling me that I should talk to them. Just last week, while looking at the lobsters (something we do every time we go to the store) he noticed the sushi chef. E immediately turned to me and said, “Hey, Mommy, come meet this man. Look, he’s making these rolls. Come on, Mommy!” So, of course, I went and met the sushi chef. He didn’t know much English but sure smiled a lot. Now he’s our new friend.

Lately, I’ve been sure to bring extra change with me for the Salvation Army buckets. Why, you ask? Because he loves putting coins in. He also loves having a turn with the volunteer’s bell. He always asks to ring it and, bless their hearts, they always let him. I guess that it is nice change of pace for them to have someone not only stop and say “Merry Christmas!” but to also be so thrilled to ring the bell for a few minutes.

E has been asking for a reindeer suit lately. I finally asked him why he needed a reindeer suit. His answer, “So I can fly.” (Like, duh.) He’s also pretended to be a reindeer a lot lately. In fact, he pretty much alternates between pretending he is a train and pretending to be a reindeer.

He has his preferences, bless him, and some of them drive me crazy. Some of them are sort of strange, for an almost 4-year-old. One of these is his liking to have his hot cocoa (“NOT hot chocolate, Mommy, hot COCOA!”) in a china cup with a saucer underneath. How many boys his age care about china?

Finally, he has the funniest explanations for things. It was a little wet on Sunday, and he noticed that he could squeak his sneakers on the floor under the pew. I shushed him and told him that he didn’t need to make his shoes squeak because it was loud. He looked up at me and gasped, “Mommy, der’s mice down there!” Mice, indeed.