CKT has been asking me if he can wash dishes. I’ve said that he is too young to do them, which only made him want to wash dishes even more. Today I “gave in” and let him rinse the plates and spoons while I filled the dishwasher. If this keeps up, he’ll be doing all of our dishes by the end of the week.

He had a pretty poor evening. He was playing with his LEGOs in the playroom with EJT right before bed. EJT did something to the LEGOs CKT didn’t like, though, and he got upset. I recommended that CKT move his LEGOs to his room so he could play with them alone. (I tell him this a lot.) He put on his pajamas and came back into the playroom to read with me before going to bed, and he told me he was upset because he was thinking about how his life would be better if EJT was not around. About an hour later, after he had been asleep for about thirty minutes, AMKT heard him crying in his room. CKT told her he had a dream that she, his brother and I didn’t love him anymore.

It is hard to be seven-years-old. You are old enough to begin to articulate how the world works, but too young to understand it or do anything about it. It’s also hard being thirty-eight-years-old. I can feel my son’s little boy grief, but I cannot take it away.