RJ is prone to buying things from guys who wander down Hidden Court with things to sell. This past spring, he bought a driveway from a very polite man driving an asphalt truck. It's a very nice driveway, and it's all black and asphalt-y, but he literally bought it off the back of a truck. But that's a whole other story entirely. This story has only marginal ties to this, but I promise I'll bring it all together in a minute.
So, anyway, when the same polite asphalt-y guys came back and offered to seal our nice new driveway (only $250!! what a deal!!), of course RJ took them up on it. What that meant for us was that we had to park on the street, because you can't drive on a freshly sealed driveway (or walk on one, for that matter, but I didn't know that until it was too late and there were little asphalt-y footprints all over the garage floor).
Whatever.
The point of all that is that we were parked on the street, and it was cold. Cold enough to frost the cars over. Which means that I was outside at 6am scraping frost off the car before I went to work. This is unusual, and it was unusually noisy, too.
Another important thing to note is that zj's bedroom faces the street, and he has windows that look out over said street, and said frosty cars that were being scraped of frost at 6am. Which is before RJ gets up.
I'm bringing it home, I promise.
So...
I get a call on my cellphone a little after 6am from RJ.
He's calling to tell me that zj saw me out the window, then decided to CHASE MY CAR DOWN THE STREET, all the time yelling "Mama, don't go to work today!"
When RJ caught up with him, they were pretty far from our house. Neither one had any shoes on. Or pants. It was 32 degrees. It was 6am. It would have been funny if it weren't so terrifying.
My stomach dropped all the way out of my body. Then I threw up in my mouth.
The possibilities of what could have been ran through my mind all day. When I picked zj up that afternoon from the sitter, I hugged him as hard and tight and long as he would let me.
On the drive home, I asked him questions about his early morning jaunt. I told him how worried I was and how scared it made me when Daddy told me what had happened. He had no concept about why, and said so. I told him someone could have seen him and taken him. His response: "W-w-w-w-well (he stutters a little bit when he's excited), I would have told them to stop and to Yeave Me Ayone (we have some "l" issues, too)." Ok, I needed a different approach. So I told him he could have been hit by a car. His response? "W-w-w-w-w-w-well, I would have just gone under it."
Of course he would have.
Never mind that I have made more ER visits with him than I have for myself, RJ and everyone else I know COMBINED. Never mind that he managed to BREAK HIS LEG at age 2, which according to aforementioned ER is nearly impossible. "Their little bones aren't hard enough to break" the doctor said to me. Yeah, right.
He would have just told the bad guys to yeave him ayone and gone under the car.
And he probably would have, too.
This creature, this thing that is part of me, this firstborn child of mine, is so foreign to me it's hard to describe. He is so not like me, and so like me in so many ways. He's stubborn, maybe even my rival in that category. He's fearless, something I admire, and am not, and it scares me to death that he's so much like that. He's totally convinced that he's invincible.
Sometimes I think he might be.
