Andrew Stories

1. For the boys’ birthdays my parents sent a HUGE box of beach gear: towels, water shoes and LOTS of sand toys. When the Johnstons came over last week everyone was very excited about the shovels in particular. At one point, four of the kids (Joseph, Margaret, Andrew and William) were in our tiny bathroom with the lights off. Joseph was wearing a headlamp and they were shoveling for gold with the sand shovels. They did this for a long time with minimal squabbles and lots of cooperation. Joseph was leading the play by directing the work (I think he’s reading a book about mining for gold right now and knew the juicy facts) and the others, especially Andrew, happily went along with it.

After they left Andrew wanted to keep shoveling for gold in the bathroom. He was so excited about this new game. He first took Dave in the bathroom, had him wear the headlamp and watch as Andrew shoveled. It was sort of clear that Andrew didn’t entirely understand all of what the Johnstons were trying to do. There were details he was acting out that didn’t really make sense to me…or to him for that matter….but he was having a GREAT time. When he took me in the bathroom for my turn the first instruction he gave me was this, “ok, Mommy. The first thing you have to do, is pretend. There isn’t really gold.” I am VERY glad he cleared that up right away. I was getting pretty excited about the prospects of really finding gold in the bathroom of our second floor Brooklyn apartment. Too bad, really.

2. Andrew recently learned about the number googol-plex. A mathematician coined “Googol” as the number that represents 1 with 100 zeros after it. “Googol-Plex” is the number 1 with googol zeros after it. We read that if you spent your whole life, one hundred years, just writing zeros you still would not have written enough zeros to write googol-plex.

Andrew LOVED this trivia. He was so excited about it that he started bouncing around the living room wondering how there could ever be PAPER enough to write all those zeros! He chattered on about the trees needed and the paper machine and he was making lots of whirring and whizzing noises as he pretended to make enough paper…but he should have been getting dressed for school, so I had to reign in the googol-plex love to remind him to put clean underwear on. Moms with their annoying practicality.

He’s been telling me though, that he loves me googol-plex percent. I ask him if that much love hurts and he assures me that it doesn’t.

Andrew also recently told me that his favorite snack to bring to school is muffins. And since he melted my heart with his declaration of goggol-plex percent love for mama, I’ve been on a total muffin kick. These ones are almond poppy seed and I hope that when he opens his little snack box and sees a muffin in there with his grapes, that he understands that I love him goggol-plex percent too.

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