My son is in love with his skeleton. No joke. He wants to know the name of every bone in his body. It all started when he’d pet the cat’s back. She’s pretty skinny, and he could feel her spine.
My son is in love with his skeleton.
No joke.
He wants to know the name of every bone in his body. It all started when he’d pet the cat’s back. She’s pretty skinny, and he could feel her spine. When he asked what it was, I told him it was the kitty’s bones.
From there, he wanted to know where his bones were.
I told him a few that I remembered from my college anatomy class days. The pisiform, patella, skull.
“What’s the skull do?” he asked me.
“It protects your brain,” I said.
“My skull protects my brains,” he said. “Like braaaiiiins.”
That last part? Said while waving his arms zombie-style. That’s left over from last Halloween, when a friend thought it would be very funny to teach a 1-year-old how to act like a zombie.
And it was.
The other day, driving to have dinner with friends, I heard him talking in the back seat.
“Are these my wibs?” he said.
I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. When I glanced back, he was pointing at a photograph from the Fourth of July. When we got where we were going, he asked again, this time pointing to his chest.
“Yes, those are your ribs,” I said.
His favorite book right now is the “Anatomy Coloring Book,” also left over from that college class. He loves to look at the drawings of bones and then feel where that bone is in his body.
He’s fascinated by the way that what’s on the outside isn’t all there is. There’s this mysterious inside, underneath his skin, that makes it all go.
These days, he quickly makes the connection that if he has one, maybe everyone else does, too. “Mama, these your phalanges?” he asks, touching my hand.
“Yep,” I say.
Naming things is a toddler parlor trick. I’m proud that he is learning things, but I love the curiosity underneath. I hope he keeps that, that he never tires of asking what something is, what it does and how he can use it.
“What your phalanges do?” he asks.
“They tickle!”
• Mommy Talk is an online parenting blog written by Racine, Wis. Journal Times reporters Janine Anderson and Marci Laehr Tenuta. Find it online at www.journaltimes.com/mom.
