My Boy....

So the other night, I took Connor to Red Lobster. Boy, do I hate that place. I always have. Not because of some faux-elitest sense of what "real seafood" tastes like. No, it's more basic than that. I detest seafood. I hate it. I've tried, believe me. But still, no thanks. So being at Red Lobster is a bit like being at a Mexican restaurant looking at the paltry non-Mexican food list they serve for morons who come to a Mexican restaurant wanting a grilled cheese sandwich. The waiters are surreptitiously rolling their eyes at the fool who would come to a seafood restaurant desperately looking for something on the menu NOT seafood.

Connor, on the other hand loves every kind of sea food. (Thank you, Awake! magazine, for the suggestion that we not be vocal to our children about our food dislikes, lest we bias them against certain foods.) So he went to town on some Snow Crab and shrimp. And played with the claw, and the tendon that sticks out of the claw, making his own claw puppet. (Yes, I let him play with his food. I am a bad parent.)

But it was all part of a celebration evening. Connor came in 2nd Place in his school's Science Fair, engineering category. The project had to be done almost entirely at school, lest some parents decide to do the project for them (*whistling innocently*). So this was his baby. And he did a great job. Of course, I helped him work out the hypothesis and the test, but he had to put his project together, do the testing, record the data, come up with his conclusion, and build the display board himself. I was proud.

He deserved to have all the crab and other gross seafood he wanted.

I love my son. I love being a dad. We have so much fun. And I am constantly impressed. The other night he did something that blew my mind.

We have our shows we watch together. One of those is Psych. We're in season 4 now. So we were watching the show and there was a scene in a library, with the rows upon rows of shelves of books. As the camera followed the actors down one row and stopped, Connor said, "Hey! I have that book!" There were like 500 books on the shelf and it wasn't as if the camera were running over the books, showing them to the viewer. They were peripheral to the scene; the action was the people talking in the row. So I asked, "What book?" He pointed to a shelf on the screen (in the top corner, mind) that showed, among a number of books, the back of a large black book. Seemed like a generic book, perhaps a bit big, and there was a partial image on the back that, to me, looked like Saturn. I said, "No you don't." "I do. Look," and he ran off to his room and came back with a large black book: "Star Wars Complete Cross-sections" (Yes, I buy my son Star Wars books. I am a bad parent.) He showed me the back and lo and behold! It was the book on screen. The thing I thought was Saturn was actually the Death Star.

I am unable to comprehend this. Panning camera. Thousands of books. Small image. And he sees an image and instantly connects that to something he has, like he has an inventory of all his stuff filed away in his mind or something. And he does this kind of thing a lot.

I am in awe. I truly think the best part about being a parent is seeing this person that you had a part in making, grow from being an infant (already with a personality) into a adult human being, and discovering all the miraculous and wonderful traits and abilities your child has. It's a relationship of exploration that never, ever gets old. He's 11 years old now (12 in October) and I find myself enjoying him more and more every day, as I discover who he is and wonder who he will become.

I think it's the greatest thing we can ever do. Jehovah is so good to us.