Captain Adventure: Rockmelter

Captain Adventure got a haircut yesterday. It was so long overdue that, upon being informed of our destination, his teachers gave out a cheer. You could barely see his eyes beneath his bangs, and his ears had long ago vanished into the tundra.

So we wandered over to Supercuts and he went from resembling a St. Bernard to being a rather handsome little boy in a matter of about ten minutes.

Then, we went next door to Starbucks for the traditional bribe reward for Good Behavior While Getting Haircuts.

Boo Bug got a krispy bar with miniature M&Ms. I got a triple grande non-fat (sigh) latte (double sigh) with one crummy Equal in it (LE SIGH). (This is another part of the Sonoma diet – for this first ten days, I’m supposed to avoid sugar in most of its forms, even ‘fake sugar’, on the theory that going cold turkey will cut my cravings for same. I consider the fact that I shared some [like, two nibbles] of MY Godiva bars with Eldest to be proof that I am taking this part of the diet very, very seriously indeed…because usually I’d hide in the back of the closet under the pile of outgrown clothing donations in the dead of night and suck it down, you know, in private.) (But I don’t have a problem. I could stop, any time I wanted to. I could. Just watch me. Because I might do it. One of these days. When I feel like it.)

Captain Adventure? He got a Snickerdoodle the size of his entire head, chosen for him by mommy in the midst of chaos, so he had no idea what he was getting.

We sat down at a table and I handed out the bags. Boo Bug, being much more sophisticated a diner, simply grabbed the krispy out of the bag and started picking the M&Ms off the top of it, chattering casually away about school, and friends, and haircuts, and bang trims, and how people can be expected to pretend Rapunzel if they keep getting their hair cut, duh!

Meanwhile, Captain Adventure was exploring the bag. He cracked it open and peeked inside. He looked up at me with his eyes {{{{THIS BIG}}}}. His newly-visible expression clearly said, “Mom, you won’t believe what is In. This. BAG!”

He reached in.

He pulled out the cookie.

All the concrete in the building promptly melted from being in the presence of the sweetest, gooiest, there-is-nothing-bad-in-the-whole-world-right-now smile that lit up his entire body. He just stared at that cookie for a long moment, taking in the cinnamon-sugar splendor before him.

Then, he brought it to his mouth with great reverence and took a nibble. Oh joy! His free hand lashed out, caught hold of my arm and held it. Mommy! Oh, Mommy! It’s a cookie! A great big honkin’ huge cookie! For me! It’s mine! Cinnamon sugar is the best flavor in the world and it’s on a cookie!!!!! (Does Mommy know her boy? Oh yes, Mommy does…)

It was overwhelming. He set the cookie down dead center on top of the bag and stared at it worshipfully, while I tried not to fall out of my chair laughing at him. You’d think the boy had never seen a cookie before in his life!

After an appropriate meditative pause, he leaned over, took my face in his hands the way he does when he wants to assure my complete attention, and gave me a great big drooly-crumbly-cookie kiss. Complete with sound effects: “MMMMMMMMMWAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

Then he ate the cookie as if it were his first and last meal ever in his life. I expected him to eat maybe half the cookie, maybe as much as three-quarters of the cookie.

No. He ate the whole entire big-as-his-head cookie. And licked his fingers. And helped me clean the table, and trotted over to put his bag in the trash, and wiped his face with a napkin, then held up his arms to be picked up.

He put his arms around my neck and gave me another big kiss.

“Was that a good treat?” I asked him, rushing us back out to the van to start the evening frenzy: picking up the older two children, dinner-bath-story-bed-clean-pay-a-bill...

“Uh-huh,” he beamed up at me, patting my hair approvingly.

The child could melt a fifty ton block of granite.

Pray for me, friends. I am powerless to resist him already, and he only has 23 months practice thus far…