Tomorrow morning I don’t have to haul my lazy butt out of bed and take Jonas to speech. We had his final IEP meeting today with Miss Carla, his speech teacher, and he officially graduated. The kid talks. In fact, he talks nonstop, and usually at full volume. He isn’t always easy to understand, what with a propensity to make up words and to talk so fast that it all becomes a garbled blur (Iwacerealriiiighnaaaaaw), but it is talking enough. I’m proud of him, and also a little uneasy.

Jonas has been going to speech twice a week for 18 months now. It’s such a part of his routine and of my routine that it will be weird to suddenly be done. Jonas doesn’t understand that he is all done, even though I’ve tried very hard to explain that he is a big boy now who uses his words. He still asks when “Miss Carla School” is and when he is going to see his friends there. I wonder how long it will take to adjust.

With Chris gone, a part of me looks at every adjustment to his schedule as a personal affront, even when it is a positive change. I feel like he’s dealing with enough confusion and uncertainty over Daddy, and doesn’t need anymore stress. I was worried about his new Sunday School teacher, worried about the kids moving out of his preschool class and worried about the constant changing up of the regular volunteers there. Enough with the changes! Maggie and I are the only constants, and frankly, Maggie is growing and learning so fast, I’m not sure she counts. I don’t think Jonas thinks so. He has been regularly petitioning for not one, but two baby brothers. We need more kids, he says. Boy babies. Two of them. He is very specific.

I have been trying to keep our routine solid over the past month, and also trying to do extra little fun things to add a little zest. The other day we went to the bookstore and I told Jonas he could choose a book. I was totally expecting a rhyming, brightly colored kid book featuring some trademarked character, but instead, Jonas stumbled across a stack of anatomy books. He flipped through one book with tons of drawings of bodies and body parts, some with skin, some without. He announced that the skinless man was the bad guy, because he was scary and no skin is pretty freaky looking. I got his logic, but I did try to explain the concept to him. He flipped the no skin man page to a picture of a man with a flaccid penis.
“What’s that!” he asked with a disgusted look.
“That’s a penis. You have one of those.” As the words left my mouth I felt every eye in the children’s section lock onto me.
“No I don’t!”
“Yes, you do. It’s what you pee with.”
“Hmph.” He muttered, disgruntled with my explanation, yet unable to disagree. The other parents tittered nervously and some rushed to remove their children from the presence of this uncouth mother who used the word penis, out loud, in front of their innocent babes ears.

He picked up another anatomy book, this one, where each page includes a model of the body part that is the topic of the page. “What are those?” He asked, pointing to a small plastic replica of kidneys and a bladder.
“That’s the urinary tract. Those are the kidneys and that’s the bladder.” The pee goes through those and gets filtered out and then goes to the bladder and then you go pee.”
“I don’t have a bladder.”
“Yes, you do. Everyone has a bladder.”
“Oh.” He flips a few pages. He pokes the little plastic brain. “This is a bad guy head.”
“Honey, that’s a brain. You think with your brain; it’s inside your head.
“I do NOT have a BRAIN!” He announces, totally repulsed.
“Everybody has a brain, Jonas. Mommy has a brain, Maggie has a brain, you have a brain.”
“Daddy has a brain too?”
“Yes, Daddy too.”
“It’s time to pick a book, Jonas, we need to go.”
“I want this one.” He hold up The Human Body. “I want the bad guy book.”
“It’s the human body, Jonas, not a bad guy. That’s what we look like under our skin. Are you sure you don’t want to pick one of those books?” I gesture toward the rest of the children’s section, full of books about teddy bears and Elmo and cows that type.
“I want this one. I want the bad g-“ He corrects himself. “ The Human Body book.”

Ok. There’s no changing his mind. We start to walk out and head past the bargain book section, where, lo and behold, there is a coffee table book all about anatomy and surgery. He is absolutely gleeful. He plops down on the floor and fingers the skinless face on the cover. He starts flipping pages and stops in awe when he finds a picture of a baby, sans skin.

“Look mom! A baby! A baby with NO SKIN! Wow!” The elderly gentleman browsing near us looks at Jonas incredulously, and then glances at me, clearly anticipating something equally off the wall. I just shrug and think, “Maybe he’ll be a doctor.”

Life with Jonas. It is never predictable.