The Daring Young Man
This morning, after waking me up by crawling into bed with us and proceeding to kick me in the calves for about twenty minutes as he tried to use my legs as a blanket and dragging me downstairs, I was sitting on the couch, and Max was doing his Max thing. Max‘s “thing” includes drawing, spelling one or more of the thirty words he knows how to spell, jumping off the couch, singing, asking lots of questions about what just happened and making up songs that usually contain just two syllables repeated over and over and over to a tune he makes up as he goes.
Hopefully, I’ve set the scene properly for you. So, I’m watching something on TV, and Max is running around. Suddenly, he stops in front of the couch, puts his arms half-cocked at his sides, elbows in, hands out and begins grunting. He’s straining his shoulders down, chin out and making a lot of noise. Now, I’ve never seen Max do this before. Max does some funny stuff, but this took the cake. So, I asked him what he was doing. Max stopped grunting, turned to me with a look of indignation that I didn’t know what he was doing and said, “I’m trying to fly, daddy,” and went back to grunting.
He gave up on the grunting after a few seconds, and decided that the best way to get airborne was to jump off the couch, which he did several dozen times, flapping his arms madly between the couch and the ground. The couch is not a great height off the ground, so he got maybe two flaps in before he landed loudly on the floor, slapped the ground with his hands and started all over again.
He’s gonna fly some day, I swear.