Milo at the wedding

Milo at the wedding

Here is what it is like to be five and a half.  On Sunday you go to a wedding because the very first nanny you ever had is getting married.  You insist on wearing a tie because that is what grown ups wear, and spend a lot of time in front of the mirror before we leave looking at yourself in your tie and saying things like "I look like an old man!" and "I'm the President!"

You declare the wedding "the best wedding I have ever been to" despite the fact that you have not been to any other weddings and also assert that the food is "the best food I have ever eaten." You drink two Shirley Temples, which are "delicious!" You like superlatives.

You turn out to be a pretty good date, mostly because you are fascinated and thrilled by the entire experience.  You behave yourself beautifully, you chat with people you have never met before, and you attempt to dance the hora.  By 9:30 you've had it, though, and you nearly fall asleep on the car ride home.

The next day we decide to go out for frozen yogurt in the neighborhood.  You take your scooter and barrel along on the sidewalk, until we scream at you to stop before you get hit by a car.  Dad takes away your scooter, you announce you don't care, and you are then told you also aren't going to get any frozen yogurt.  You cry hard.  Really hard.  It breaks my heart. You still don't get any frozen yogurt.

The next day you are off to camp, which you have announced, of course, that you "love."  You come home and you are telling me about your day, about how you mastered the back float in swimming and how you drew pictures at art and how you and your best friend were playing near the slide and decided to eat some blueberries that grow near the slide.  You are proud of yourself for this because your friend didn't want to eat them at first, but encouraged him and, like the wanna-be-parent you are, coaxed him into trying some and then eating handfuls.  At which point I stop the story and say, "Wait, these were pretend blueberries, right?"  And you say, no, no, they were real blueberries, from a bush.  I ask how you knew they were blueberries and you tell me that some older kids told you they were.  So the next three hours are spent calling the camp to establish whether these were actually blueberries or whether they were something poisonous that will kill you in the next 5 minutes unless we find an antidote, then calling the doctor when the camp is unreachable, and then communicating with your friend's mother just to let her know that her son was possibly coaxed into eating poisonous berries by my son.

Today the camp called to say that they had gone to look at the bush and the berries were in fact blueberries.  Though we had deduced that by the fact that you woke up this morning.