Friday, November 05, 2010

'Well, it's a fiat actually...'

I am surprised and bemused by Hugh's fascination with cars and types of cars. At the age of 2, he's starting to get a bit Jeremy Clarkson on me. It started with black taxis. They prompt a joyous exclamation from him each time. 'Black taxi!'

Then I told him a red car was a 'Mini car' and he started identifying Minis everywhere. I tried him with 'Volkswagen', just to see if he could even manage the word, and then he started pointing out Volkswagen Golfs too, with less accuracy, however. Today I heard myself say, 'Well, it's a Fiat actually,' while thinking, how did I get us into this 'trainspotter' zone with motor vehicles? To me a car is a car. Sometimes I feel eco-guilt about having one, so why don't we look at some trees/flowers/goldfish instead?

Still, I take joy in Hugh's joy - whatever he's interested in. I'll enthuse about cars. I already do! 'Broom, broom.' Today was his second birthday and after his bath, I turned off the bedroom light and we looked out at fireworks going off across the city. I felt really moved to think of the moments of dizzy happiness of the last two years.

-C

2 comments:

Sue Jackson said...

Ha ha - it's amazing, isn't it? It seems boys are just born with this innate fascination with vehicles. When our first son started running little cars across the floor and making vroom noises, we thought, "how'd he know to do that? It's not like he heard us doing it!"

His real fascination, though was dinosaurs. At 3 years old, he could look through his huge picture book of dinos and identify every one, with its proper 5-syllable name. we could read and didn't do that well!

So happy for your dizzying happiness!

Sue

greenwords said...

Happy birthday, Hugh. 2 already! Here's to more dizzy happiness.