Things I learned from one bath

The boy talks incessantly.

I know this because I just looked up the word “incessantly” to double check that it means what I think it means and it does and it’s the correct word here.

This habit of wondering what words mean has already started for the boy. Yesterday, he told me he likes a car because it has “good aerodynamics.” Then he looked at me to see if I would correct him.

I did not. Ferraris are, in fact, known for this.

Or, in another instance, he chastised his brother for not “showing kindness.” Again, nothing to correct there. His words are—from a technical if not a grammatical sense—accurate.

The bathtub is where he maximizes his word count for the day. Maybe it has to do with the end of the day and him feeling a need to recount everything or maybe it’s because he knows we won’t leave him alone in the tub and are therefore as captive an audience as he will ever have.

Either way, tonight he wouldn’t stop talking about ostrich eggs. Granted, it took me a long time to figure out what he was saying. Then, we both laughed at how ostrich eggs is difficult even for me to say.

What, you may ask, does a three-year-old know about ostrich eggs? I’ll tell you.

First, the parents protect the eggs. They are valuable to them. They do not want the eggs to break because then they couldn’t scoop everything up.

Second, the hyenas want the eggs. So do the lions and cheetahs and rhinos. The elephants and giraffes do not.

Third, when an ostrich has an egg it can still run but not very fast. Here, I should say that as these facts came at me in the order I’m relaying them now, this was the first one I questioned aloud. I was skeptical of rhinos wanting the eggs but let it slide. An ostrich running with an egg though? That’s where I draw the line. Ridiculous. Absurd. Untenable, I say!

He was, of course, adamant and deemed this argument quite tenable: “I saw one running.”

“With an egg?” I asked.

“Yeah. It cannot just leave the egg.”

“How does it hold the egg?”

“In its mouth.”

“So, it can still run fast with the egg in its mouth?”

“No. It can’t breathe good.”

“Oh, so it has to take breaks.”

“Yeah, it takes breaks. But if it sees rhinos it has to run anyway even if it’s tired.”

When the boy is in this mood—meaning, when he wants to pass off his completely random thought as a well-known fact—none of his sentences connect to each other. Most of them, I think, don’t have a planned ending until he gets about halfway through.

I asked if the ostrich has any friends and he started by listing other African animals before slowly drifting into characters from The Lion King.

I wish I had his confidence. I wish I waxed poetic about the behavior of branches of the animal kingdom with zero impulse to fact check anything. I wish I jumped off of couches backwards knowing I would be caught.

But I cannot. I am an adult. I am responsible for the catching of children and, in this case, the correcting of falsehoods.

But before I could burst his ostrich-sized bubble, he asked if I knew where mom was. I said no. He said that’s ok. We can find her together, he said. You’re right, I agreed.

“Also,” I added, “ostriches do run with eggs in their mouth.”

“I know.”

Thanks for reading this far.

- jd

And also…

Happy Open Week to all who celebrate. For those simultaneously watching the Tour de France and The British Open while sipping your coffee, I salute you.

In order to see The Odyssey on IMAX 70mm, I will be seeing it at 7:45am on August 11. This is proof that marketing works.

The Invite and The Drama are two movies that I cannot recommend but that are perfect case studies of how Millennials and Gen Z respond to the fear of both regret and commitment.