At dinner tonight Sava and I somehow got to talking about school buses. He has observed school buses on the street, and we have talked about how children, when they grow up, often take the bus to school. He also knows that I teach in a school for big boys and girls, and that some day, when he grows up, he might go to the school where I teach; that seems to give him a great deal of comfort, since he already has anxiety about the prospect of going to a big kid school. When the topic of school buses came up tonight, he told me that some day he and I would go on the bus to school. I told him that school buses are only for children, and that if he goes to a school that has a school bus (which mine does not; instead, sixteen year-olds drive BMWs to school), he will have to go on the bus alone. He said he wanted me to go with him, but I told him that adults are not allowed. He then said that he wanted to go in the car, but I told him that if there was a bus, he probably would have to take the bus. After some quick serious thought, prompted by obvious discomfort at the thought of his going somewhere without me, he then declared: "I'll go in the bus. You'll go in the car. I'll meet you there." Seriously??? 2 years 9 months 10 days old?

In that same vein, a couple of anecdotes from the weeks before Christmas 2008 should not go unrecorded. In early December we finally started the dreaded potty training process, and on the second day of my trying to put underpants on him, Sava looked at me seriously, and said: "Mommy, if I wear underpants, I need to wear diapers under the underpants." Around the same time, we woke up one day enveloped in the type of fog that is much more characteristic of San Francisco than the Peninsula, and Sava, as soon as he saw it, glued himself to the glass door, exclaiming: "Wow, the sky is falling down! I can't see the trees!"

We take books from the Mtn View public library on pretty much weekly basis, and around mid-December Sava was obsessed with one called "Fire Engines," in which a little dalmatian dog talks about his love for fire engines and concludes by saying that when he grows up, he wants to be a fire fighter and drive a real fire engine; in the book, the dalmatian has a toy fire truck that he rides around the house, which Sava loves to fantasize about; when I finished the book one day, with the words about the dog wanting to be a fire fighter, I said, "He is just like you. You want to grow up and be a fire fighter and drive a real fire engine, don't you?", to which he gave two seconds of thought, and then replied, in the most earnest voice imaginable, "No, mommy, I just want a small toy fire engine for my birthday. My birthday is on Tuesday."