Well, here we are, the year seriously moving on. It's been, for those of you not in the know, quite a decent year as years go. Sunny, warm, full of things to do and one of the best summers I can recall in years. We're now having the perfect Autumn; rain interspersed with warm sun, the leaves are turning perfectly and it's dusk when I pick the boy up from school. We see bats in the park every evening now and the other day, an owl.
This perfect fall is a source of frustration round ours at the moment however; the child is already tiring of walking home in the gloaming and today became insistent about demanding spring and summer back, despite winter not actually having arrived. He was even willing to skip Christmas for the promise of camping. Something may be wrong with him, come to think of it.
He asked some fairly detailed questions about how many days it is going to be until summer, and then when I told him it was over 200 he started telling me what he thought about my answer and his sentences were full of phrases such as 'and then I was like' i.e. "So when you told me summer was so far away, I was like 'that's a long time' and now it's like, going to be winter I'm like 'I wish the winter was already over' but it's going to be, like, a really long time."
The addition of the word 'like' as a quotative in his sentences is relatively recent; I'm not exactly sure when it arrived, but it's become a fixture since the onset of the latest school year. The worst thing is that I'm not certain whether or not I use it in sentences myself and am in fact the model. I recently subjected myself to the ordeal of listening to a recording of me talking in a meeting and realised that I hugely overuse the phrase 'you know' as a sort of sentence bridge or a pause when I should more properly be shutting up, so perhaps 'like' is equally a feature in my grammar and he's getting it from me.
Either way it's a sign that at 7, he's seriously grasping the things he needs to do to blend in and grapple his way up the ladder into adulthood, which I guess is all well and good. I guess that misusing the word 'like' is possibly the least of my worries given that we're raising him in a massive urban pressure-cooker of a city.
In the meantime, it remains to grapple our way through the year, which time we have agreed to mark by the highlights to come - Halloween, Bonfire Night, Yule, Christmas, Equinox, Easter, Beltane and then camping. Or rain. One or the other. Or, more likely both.
But, it will be, like, fun.
