I Love to Laugh

Peter and I had a sweet moment that I want to make sure I remember. He finally went back to school today, only to call halfway through saying his cough was getting worse and could he come home. I gathered up Cooper and Phoebe and we retrieved Peter from school.

When he called I asked him to tell his teacher he was leaving (he had left from PE, I think the running they were doing exacerbated his cough) and to get the homework he had missed from the rest of the week. He spent the better part of the afternoon with homework in front of him. I spent the better part of the afternoon telling him to actually DO the work and not just hold it in his hand.

We were still working on it after the others went to sleep for the night. One of his assignments included a job for me. Peter was to write what I consider his first paper, including a topic sentence, and I needed to instruct him on the requirements, then proofread and have him make needed spelling, capitalization, and punctuation corrections. He came home with the first sentence written. It took an hour for him to do it. The first thirty minutes included several reminders from me to stop talking and write, repeated requests from Peter that I just "tell me what to write and I'll write it," which were followed closely by "No"s from me. I'm one of those parents that won't do my child's homework for them, even though it would often make life more pleasant.

I said we had a sweet moment, are you wondering when it will come?

I wanted to set the stage that this writing business was getting tense. We were both frustrated. He finally started writing (though he never did stop talking) and my turn came. I pointed out spelling errors and had him read through the paper again himself until he found each of them. One was the word chocolate, which he had spelled "choclet." I wrote out the word and, because I knew that he had learned a song in Spanish about chocolate in his music class, said it in Spanish so he could hear each sound.

This prompted him to sing the song. I don't know it myself, but what Peter sang went:

Uno, dos, tres, Cho!
Uno, dos, tres, La!
Uno, dos, tres, Co!
Uno, dos, tres, La!
Uno, dos, tres, Te!

I caught the mistake as soon as he sang it, but didn't say anything. He was almost done with the song when he stopped, looked at me, and asked, "What did I just say?" We both busted up laughing. It wasn't that I was laughing at him, or that he was laughing out of embarrassment, we were just laughing because at that moment the thought of "Cholacolate" was hilarious.

Those few minutes of laughter carried me through. Peter finally finished his homework and fell into his bed at 10 PM. That's a whole two and a half hours past his bedtime. I usually would have been stressed out by that point, in need of my own quiet time. But tonight? Tonight, after sharing that laughter with Peter, I was content to sit near him and wait. I was happy to tuck him in, even with the required reminders to "stop talking" and "stop wiggling."

I'm still feeling the sweetness of it.