Wednesday, 7 April 2010
His Father's Son
There are a lot of bookshelves in our living room, so part of raising a toddler is keeping him from trying to climb them or pull all the books out of them. Since the books that are closest to his toy shelf (and therefore his most frequent targets) happen to be Greek and Latin poetry, I quickly devised a system of "punishment" whereby if he pulled one of these books off the shelf he would be subjected to listening to me read it to him.
It turns out that this is quite an effective deterrent.
On Easter Monday, however (a holiday in France), my adorable little son woke me up by climbing into bed and giving me a big hug. A few hours later, he actually deliberately pulled out a copy of Virgil's Eclogues and brought it over to me, then climbed up into my lap! (This is exactly what he does when he wants me to read him one of his picture books.) I duly read the discourse of Melibœus and Tityrus to a surprisingly attentive toddler for a good five minutes before he quietly whispered "all done", and climbed down. And to top it all off, later that day he also came over and sat with me to watch the Red Sox opener! I don't think there was any way possible that I could have been prouder of my son :-)
We may be embarking on the "terrible twos", but this age so far is by no means all bad.
