Everett is wanting to recreate the My Otter’s Map. Surely, if you’ve read the third Harry Potter book, you remember the My Otter’s Map. It’s really cool. It’s a magic map of Hogwarts that shows, with footprints, where everyone in the school is at the moment one is looking at the map. Very cool. Spectacularly cool.
You don’t remember it? Oh, maybe that’s because you know it as the Marauder’s Map. That, in fact, is it’s name. But Everett can’t say it properly. Or won’t try hard enough, excited as he is about the map itself, whatever its name might be.
I won’t be correcting him, of course. He’ll get it right soon enough. Heck, he’ll be reading Harry Potter soon enough. He absolutely whizzed through his reading lesson this morning. In no time at all he’ll be reading chapter books.
And that’s a theme, really, with me and parenting. “In no time at all….” We were out with friends the other night, and one of them mentioned the Batman costume, and all at once I realized that the Batman costume is a thing of the past. It’s still in his drawer, full of holes despite his Nana’s careful efforts to repair it. But he hasn’t worn it in months, after months (read a year and a half) of wearing it Whenever Possible. No, he doesn’t wear it anymore.
He lost another tooth the other night. He was munching on popcorn, and it just dropped out. It had been threatening to leave him any time, and then Ben accidentally popped him in the mouth with his elbow (Everett didn’t seem to mind) and severely loosened it (a hanging-by-a-thread kind of thing) and it just fell out while we were eating popcorn. After solemnly informing his father and me that we ourselves are the tooth-fairy (Imagine!), he put it under his pillow, and was pleased to find the next day a penny, a nickel, a dime and a quarter for his efforts.
He’s growing up, and it seems to be happening in no time at all.
“She started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at once that he was Peter Pan. He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth.”
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
