Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Father-Son Bonding

Unfortunately, I haven’t taken the time to go on many solo outings with my second-born son, Pete. He’s still very young and may not have yet benefited from the experience. (aside: you know you have been in-country a long time when you want to use a Portuguese word instead of an English word. I wanted to write ‘aproveitou’ instead of ‘benefitted’ in the previous sentence. More so, the Portuguese word better fits what I wanted to say.)

Last week, Pete and I had one of our first solo outings. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to get ice cream, throw a football in the park or see a baseball game. We went to the dentist.

In a follow-up to the visit the day after the bathroom massacre, Pete and I delivered the x-ray of his remaining tooth to the dentist. “How do you take an x-ray of a 1 year-old’s tooth?” you may be wondering. Well, let me tell you, it ain’t fun.

Both Elise and I went. Elise sat in the chair with him, a lead-lined apron as heavy as a small elephant compressing her chest. As Pete started screaming and crying, the x-ray tech, a pimpled Brazilian youth with a full set of braces who looked not a day over fourteen, told us that it would be better if Pete was “bem tranquilo” and then proceeded to wait expectantly as though there were something we could do to keep Pete from crying as Pete is staring down the metal barrel of the x-ray machine. Elise and I looked at each other in disbelief. I tried communicating over Pete’s screams, that my son wasn’t going to stop crying to which he seemed to reply that we weren’t going to be able to take the x-ray today because he was crying.

Elise speaks her best Portuguese when she’s pissed off. She looked at me and said, “Tell him we’re doing it today.” Then looked at the x-ray tech and said “Agora! (Now!)” So while Elise held Petey’s arms down, I braced his head between my palms and held it there, vainly looking away, hoping I wasn’t being bombarded with too much radiation, as I was the only one in the room not draped in anything lead-lined. At any rate, we got the pic. Now, we just had to hope that it was a good enough image to satisfy the dentist so we wouldn’t have to go through that misery again.

Pete cried a few more times upon his second visit to the dentist, including right as we walked into the waiting room. He knew something wasn’t right. Fortunately, she didn’t have to re-examine the tooth, the x-ray was sufficient and we learned that the root of the tooth that didn’t fall out was not cracked and didn’t appear to have impacted the permanent tooth behind it, all this to the tinkling of a Mickey Mouse snow globe in the background, the only thing that kept Pete from spontaneously bursting into tears. He earned a balloon for his bravery.

I wasn’t quiet done with him, or hadn’t gotten enough, so the next night, a rare TGIW (Thank God It’s Wednesday) because of a mid-week Brazilian one-day holiday, Pete and I, just Pete and I, went to the store to pick up groceries for dinner.

Pete is at the stage where he won’t let you get away with anything. There is no definitive moment when you cross from being able to go about your normal routine into a realm where the little person who totters around you day in and day out is ready to glom off of you and adapt for his own everything you do or say. It happens without you knowing it. One day you can curse without fear of being repeated and the next Pete is in the bathroom tearing a small square of toilet paper from the roll and pretending to wipe his butt with it (only he can’t quite reach his butt so it looks like he is wiping the middle of his back, but it is unmistakable what he is trying to do).

One day I belch in the kitchen without an echo, the next I hear a gurglish squeezing noise, like Donald Duck choking. It’s Pete. Trying to burp, looking up at me before bursting into giggle.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I laughed out loud, more than once or twice. Thank you!
Mom.