It hasn't been six months since my last post yet, so don't complain!

I'm thinking I might just give up on trying to back-post all the things I've missed... birthdays, holidays, trips, school stuff, etc. and just post what I think of on a given day. Otherwise I might as well just stop blogging altogether, because I keep bothering myself by thinking about all the posts I'd need to do to catch up. So... here goes, with the 'now.'

Matt. Matt is nothing if not curious, and he is very very chatty, and full of questions. He also will get hooked on a topic or idea and not let it go. When he was two-ish, he always wanted to hang things. Everything had to be hanging on a hook, or he would hang things from his doorknob, or something similar. I actually potty-trained him by tapping into this love... someday I'll show you a picture of his reward system of hooks. He went through a stage recently where he wanted to stick everything to the wall with sticky tack, so I guess the hanging stage is still upon us.

When he was 3, Matt loved shovels and rakes. Tractors, too, but shovels and rakes for sure. Diggers, yes, but SHOVELS and RAKES. He still asks to go in "the shovel entrance" (the garden entrance) at Walmart. So cute. He has many different shapes, sizes, and colors of shovels and rakes, and if you ever ask him what he wants for a birthday or Christmas, he will nearly invariably answer, "Shovels and rakes!"

Well, now he is four, and my beloved Matthew has become fixated on something new(ish): fire extinguishers. He is a little fire extinguisher inspector, and he won't let us walk past one without pointing it out. He'd prefer to stop and admire it, but you MUST at least acknowledge it, or he will persist until you do. He likes to check to see which type of extinguisher it is (grease/electric/general), while noting the color and size of the canister. He checks the gauge to be sure it is "in the green." He likes to look at the tag and pretend he's checking the date of its last inspection. When he finds a fire extinguisher (or several) at a location we frequent often (i.e., church, preschool), he likes to re-inspect frequently. You know, just to be sure. This love of fire extinguishers soon extended to include fire alarms, smoke detectors, and emergency lights. Imagine the string of questions I was fielding! But really, I had no idea. Because we have now entered the realm of first aid kits and

Automatic External Defibrillators.

That's right, folks, my 4 year old blasts my ears with AED trivia on a daily basis. We are ever so lucky to have an AED on the wall at his preschool, and each day that he has school, we must visit it and appreciate its size, color, and zipper. He wanted to know why the heart on the front was broken in half. I explained that it wasn't broken, the zig-zag line was more of a lightning streak, to represent electricity. He wanted to know why you would ever put electricity on someone's heart. I tried to explain in simple terms... if someone's heart has stopped, you can sort of jump-start it with a shock. I did not at the time feel it was necessary to go into fatal heart rhythms and the like. He later took note of the warning label (that's a new obsession, warning labels) on my hair dryer - you know the one, it has a lovely picture with a red circle and a line through it, of a bathtub full of water and someone dropping the hair dryer into it. Of course he asked why you can't drop your hair dryer into the bathtub, so I explained that if you were to do that, you could get a very bad shock. So he asked what would happen then. And I said, well, it could stop your heart. So THEN he said................................... "But I thought you said shocking someone's heart would make it start beating again. How can shocking your heart make your heart stop beating, then?"

...

...

Speechless.

Today on the way home from preschool we talked about ventricular fibrillation, and how an AED works, and how you "attach" an AED to a person, and whether or not it runs on batteries, and what you would do if the AED's batteries were dead. He wants to know why we don't have an AED at our house. He was mulling all of this over and came up with this:

"I think our family is the luckiest one."

"Oh yeah? I think our family is very lucky, too. Why do you think our family is lucky?"

"Because none of us has ever died! For like hundreds of years!"

Awww. I'm just now thinking, does he think that we will die repeatedly? Because of course if someone's heart stops and we can "bring them back," that's sort of like dying, coming back to life, only to eventually die again sometime, right? Oh, I never know how to answer these questions. I always think honesty is the best policy, but you can vary how much information you give a child. Matt doesn't really settle for a pat answer, though. I find myself getting into the weirdest explanations with him! I try not to cop out, but occasionally I will say something like, "Hmm, I don't know... you'll have to ask Daddy/Papa/Mrs. Bernie about that, I guess" because I am either stumped or fried on being grilled about why a person can't make his own AED out of "crafty stuff" or why Lucy is always so "feisty" or why some outlets are circuit-breaker protected right at the outlet and others are protected at the breaker box downstairs.

He is an absolute joy a lot of the time, and it's a good thing, too... because he is also exhausting. :) Love that boy.