George and I have been diligently working to prepare Alex for various emergency situations. I don't think we made a conscious decision to do this, but given George's line of work, his paranoia because of his line of work, and my worst nightmare ever having to do with something or someone hurting Alex, it makes sense that we should just naturally start.
Alex now knows his full name (and he now acknowledges his middle name, which is a huge thing considering he angrily denied it for almost two years), his father's full name, my full name, what I do for work, and 8 of the 10 digits of his home telephone number. I expect that once he gets his whole phone number, we will teach him his address, his SSN, and the account number of my checking account (just kidding....about the checking account, and possibly his SSN. Does a 4 year-old need to know his SSN?). He also knows how to call Daddy when using Mommy's cell phone, which he used to do often by accident and now does often on purpose (this is a kid who always has a lot to say to his daddy). I suppose we will teach him to use the home phone, though I suspect he already knows how and just hasn't made any long-distance calls to Timbuktu yet.
What is really funny to me is that when you ask Alex what his daddy does for work, he always mentions guns in the answer. This started shortly before his 4th birthday, because before that, Daddy worked at a toy store (if this wasn't an indication that George was bringing home too many toys too often, I don't know what is!). These days, Daddy is a gunshooter (George quickly corrects him, pointing out that the appropriate word is 'gunfighter') who goes to the gun store everyday to get a gun and shoot the bad people like the police. When I point out that Daddy is a police officer (I guess technically he's a detective), Alex says, "Yeah, and he's a gunshooter."
In addition to a connection between his father and guns, Alex has shown a sudden, intense interest in GI Joes and Star Wars figures. Yesterday, George brought out a couple Joes from the stash in his Dungeon (we refer to his room in the house as The Dungeon). George has all kinds of things in The Dungeon, ranging from a treadmill to $70 worth of Star Wars toys that have never seen the light of day and were purchased long before I even became pregnant! So I didn't bat an eyelash when he came out with these dolls (because they ARE dolls! They are called 'action figures' so as to be more appealing to fathers who would otherwise refuse to buy dolls for their sons). He and Alex promptly proceeded to play with these toys, battling each other and making sound effects for the automatic weapon one GI Joe was holding and the swords the other had. They disappeared into The Dungeon for almost an hour, and when I was finally curious enough to see what happened to them, an entire sackful of GI Joes had been released onto The Dungeon's floor and the two boys (because let's face it, George reverts whenever he's playing with Alex) were still battling each other. It was a funny sight that I was not able to photograph, but I did tell Alex that his father had been waiting about five years, from the moment we heard, "It's a boy," at the first ultrasound, to be able to play GI Joes with his son. It kind of makes me wonder what the heck we would've done with a girl!
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