Isaac’s latest enthusiasm is octopuses. (Yes, not “octopi”– I learned recently that that is not the correct plural. The root is Greek, not Latin. Duh.) It started a week or two ago when we were at the zoo. We were looking at the gift shop briefly to kill time while waiting for our beloved trainride around the Australian Adventure. Isaac selected a rubber octopus, maybe a little bigger than your palm, yellow with blue spots, to take home. I bought it for him. As we walked along I idly imparted what octopus facts I could think of– they have tentacles, they eat crabs, they have suction cups, they can change color, they make ink, they are shy and like to hide, they have a beak. As I mentioned the beak I began to worry that it’s the squid who has a beak… but luckily for me it turns out they both do. Isaac took this all in. A little while later, we were sitting at this “Dr. Zoolittle” live animal show, waiting for it to start, when Isaac began to tell the lady next to us all about the octopus. “It eat oysters and he is very shy, and have tentacles, and the mouth is under there, and have a beak, and make ink…” etc. etc. The lady said, “Wow! Did you learn all that today?” And I was too shy to tell her that he had learned all that in the past hour.
Later that day, Isaac was in a burning fever to learn more about the octopus (having exhausted my paltry store of facts) and we went to the library on this quest. He marched right up the librarian, as he has been doing these days with ever greater confidence, and said “Can I have an octopus video?” The librarian of course leapt to the task, and while walking along towards the video section starting chatting with Isaac, who was still clutching his rubber octopus. “So, how many legs does your octopus have?” the librarian asked. Isaac replied (rather coldly I thought): “He has TENTACLES.”
So now from the octopus, we have expanded to the moray eel, who we learned is the mortal enemy of the octopus. Did you know a moray eel can eat an entire octopus in pretty much one bite? We went to the zoo and saw the eels in person– damn creepy if you ask me, lurking in holes with their sharp needle teeth at the ready. And in another tank far away from the eels, a beautiful octopus, a rich red color at the time. What struck me about it was the incredible delicacy of the tips of the tentacles– the way the suckers taper down to tiny specks without losing any detail. Now knowing what I do about octopuses, their intelligence and shyness, I will never eat them again at a sushi bar. (I never like it anyway– too rubbery).
We’ve been playing a chase game in which one of us is the octopus and the other an eel. A variation on this is an eating game in which Isaac is an eel and a piece of food swimming by is an octopus. (This reminds me of another important chase game, Mr. MacGregor and Peter Rabbit. Isaac wants to be MacGregor for Halloween. And he does a pretty fine impression, running at top speed and yelling, “Wee beasty! Wee pest! Wee varmint!” He is fantasizing about having a rake, and a beard, and slippers, and a sieve…)
A few weeks ago we went to this “Big Bug” exhibit out at the arboretum. It’s maybe ten or twelve huge wooden sculptures of bugs set along a wooded trail. Kids are given back packs with little activities to do at each bug. At the assassin bug, they had a syringe and a film canister. Isaac (with a lot of practice) managed to fill the syringe with water, then push the water into the film canister through a tiny hole. Then draw the water out, only to see that it had changed color!! Wow! This was to demonstrate how the assassin bug injects poison into its prey and then sucks the bug out like a milkshake. Well, this impressed Isaac a great deal. The next night we were at a dinner party and he regaled the guests with all this, acting it out as he went. I understood the whole thing, but those not familiar with the assassin bug were rather baffled. I translated and explained– but still I could see that it was all a bit too esoteric for some.
Meanwhile, he’s into spiders. We went to the Natural History Museum and while we were there, I checked out several guides to spiders. Can you imagine that in my ignorance I came in asking for a guide to insects?? I didn’t even know that spiders are NOT insects! When I was buying it I was chatting with the cashier and said, “My son is pretty into spiders these days.” And she asked how old he was and I told her. Then she said, “Wow! That’s pretty good. Are you going to home school him?” I said that we’re seriously thinking about it. And she said, “That’s what you’ve got to do with a kid like that.” (Which may well be true…) Anyway, since then we’ve been out finding orb webs as compared to funnel webs. Luckily we have a lot of both these days. Isaac used to say the silk came out of the spider’s BUTT (with much snickering about butts in general). But now he says the butt thing just for a joke. He knows that the silk actually comes out of spinerets.
This reminds me, we were watching an undersea video and a manta ray came by. I said, “What’s that?” And Isaac said, “I don’t know.” Then he started to laugh. He said, “I’m just jokin’ you. It’s a ray.”
Meanwhile, of course, his interest in construction equipment has not faded. It’s only become more detailed. He has a toy backhoe (a scale Cat machine) and will tell you all the parts: bucket, teeth, dipper arm, boom, cab, step, levers, steering wheel, loader, exhaust pipe, outriggers, etc. The other day we were driving along and came upon some guys working with a skid steer loader with a strange attachment on the front. It seemed to be some sort of shallow cage that was spreading top soil evenly. I did a U-turn and came along side the guys and rolled down my window. “My son is really interested in skid steer loaders,” I told them (a true statement). “What’s this attachment called?” They were incredbily friendly and explained that it’s called a “rock hound.” It has a big wire brush inside that rolls the dirt, breaking up the clods and spreading it nice and evenly. The guys talked with Isaac for a few minutes, saying things like, “You want to work? We got a lot of work here for you!” And one guy with this really long and luxurious beard said, “Stay in school kid or you could end up like this!”
Since then I’ve been hearing a lot about the “‘kid ‘teer noader with rock hound!” I think this may be his new favorite piece of heavy machinery. Although when offered to choose anything on earth that this clown (we came upon him in a restaurant) would make out of balloons, Isaac chose a crane.
And dinosaurs are still pretty important. Isaac is very fearful of T-Rexes, but has a strong attraction to them too. The other day we were driving our cat to the vet (Mr. Cat is very old and sick) and the cat was yowling in the back seat beside Isaac. We talked about why the cat was unhappy, that he hated being in his cat carrier and he hated going to the vet. Isaac conjectured that perhaps, like himself, Mr. Cat was afraid there would be T-Rexes there. So then Isaac (in one of these heart-clenching moments of unexpressable cuteness) started trying to comfort Mr. Cat like this: “It’s okay Mr. Cat. There are no T-Rexes at the doctor. They are extinct!”
He’s also gotten really good at his bird identification. He can tell several calls by ear, and spends a lot of time in his room playing with his trucks and listening to bird calls on tape. He can identify some on our bird clock: white throated sparrow, mourning dove, black-capped chickadee, and cardinal for sure. When outside in nature he can hear them too– especially the mourning dove. If I claim that a cardinal says, “Wa-cheer, wa-cheer” he will correct me and say, “No, he says, CHEER CHEER, not wa-cheer!” He has a little collection of index cards with bird pictures on them and will flip through them identifying them all. He sometimes says “red-tailed hawk” when really it’s a “sharp shinned hawk” but then… he catches himself and corrects it.
He’s also trying to learn the alphabet in earnest. He has no interest in the alphabet song, in fact he sort of hates it, but he likes the letters themselves a lot. He loves it when I hold out, say, a letter B and say, “Isn’t this a nice Q?” and then he can say, “Noooo, that’s not a Q, that’s a B.”
Ben observed the other day, “I think he’s creating taxonomies.” I think that’s true. He’s sorting the world into trucks, dinosaurs, farm animals, zoo animals, sea animals, bugs, birds, etc. and then within each category trying to gain mastery over the information.
Oh, also he’s into maps. He has a map of the US on his wall and has learned how to accurately find where we live. He’s trying to do the same on the globe too. We play a game where he points to a random place on the globe and then I try to tell him what it’s like there. (This poses a challenge sometimes, and then we have to find out. Thank god for the internet.) He’s into outer space too. The other day we were dropping a check off at this office, and Isaac decided to share his future plans with the ladies there. “I want to be an astronaut!” he announced. “Wow!” one of the ladies said, “How many 2 and a half year olds have career aspirations?”
All in all it’s safe to say that the kid (like all kids) is a learning machine. He is a knowledge fanatic. I’m just standing back and trying to feed the beast.