Blastoff!!

A couple of days ago I took my son to go get his haircut. I had to wake him up early from his nap, but he was excited to go on a ‘big adventure’ with daddy. While waiting our turn he saw a picture on the front of the newspaper of a rocket that India had recently launched as a test. It ended up malfunctioning, with a color photo on the front page of the newspaper that showed what looked like a trail of red smoke following the self-destruct of the rocket. Clark explained that something went wrong with it and they had to shoot it and then ‘it was bleeding all the way down until it CRASHED into the sea!!’ While that was funny, what was to come next was even funnier. I will try to do justice to it.

Picture a nearly 5 year old boy, telling his dad how the world works. The words in quotes are his actual words, the words in parentheses are the things communicated by his facial expression and his other actions.

“Hey daddy, did you know that when a rocket takes off they go ‘Ten!’” (holds up only one hand with all five fingers extended, looks from one hand to the other and realizes that is not right and gives daddy a sheepish grin)
“Ten!” (holds up the other hand with four additional fingers extended, looks from one hand to the other and realizes that is still not quite right - another sheepish grin)
“Ten!”(Finally holds up both hands with all ten fingers extended followed by a proud, confident smile)
“Nine! (holds up both hands but with only seven fingers extended, quickly realizes that is not right – sheepish grin)
“Nine!” (holds up both hands with all ten fingers extended, again looking from one hand to the other realizing something is not right – sheepish grin)
“Nine!” (holds up the right number of fingers – confident smile)

And so on the countdown went down to zero, at which point he exclaimed “Blastoff!!!”.

I was desperately trying not to laugh out loud as he did this, but it was so funny. It took almost a full minute to get from 10 down to 0.

And then he capped it off with an almost equally funny statement. “When airplanes take off . . . they don’t do that.”

I hugged him tightly for being so smart, and yet so cute and funny too. Who knew a trip for a haircut could be so much fun.