noooooo

J has an irrational rage about babies. It started with a weekend's exposure to one exceptionally loud and long-running baby 5 years ago, and while he no longer runs away as though they were rabid mountain lions, nor does he start walking over to pre-emptively shout at them before they can annoy him first. That's real progress, but he still gets annoyed at any talk about babies, to babies, near babies, anything he thinks is for babies, or any reference to the fact that he did used to be much smaller.

Anna's nailed down a cookie recipe that everyone can eat (gluten-free flour, no refined sugar, no chocolate) and with the irresistible d20 cookie cutter:

there's been a consistent stream of cookies. As yesterday's were baking, Anna said "C is for 'cookie'," which got the boy's hackles up and he made an annoyed growling noise.

"What's wrong?"

"Sesame Street is for little kids!"

"Actually, a big chunk of it is made for adults."

"No, it's for babies!"

"Seriously. Little kids will watch the same thing over and over,  and Sesame Street was made so that adults could watch it too and not go crazy, so there's all kinds of stuff in there that only adults can understand. That's why Blue's Clues came along: it's better for little kids because it's just the same thing over and over, and adults go insane trying to watch it."

Anna chimes in: "Blue's Clues, or Caillou. Ugh."

"My friends and I used to watch it back around 2000. We called it 'Stoner TV'. It was made for adults."

I turned to look at him. He was unhappy.

"NO! Stop being silly!"

"Hey. Hey. Look at my face. Is this my silly face? Look at the muscles around the eyes, corners of the mouth."

He looked and sounded exactly like this. It was uncanny.

  Learning is hard, sometimes.