Walking home from preschool, we passed a restaurant that specializes in roast chicken. The smell wafting out of the open door was garlicky, roasty, almost carmelized — great comfort food for a rainy afternoon.

I stopped and said, “Elan, do you smell that chicken? Doesn’t it smell good?”

“Mama, stop doin’ that!”

“What?”

“Telling me what it smells like all the time.”

Is it possible that, at four years old, he’s already finding me embarrassing?

And then last night, I dreamt that Elan had a book report due, and I had forgotten all about it and was trying to figure out how I was going to cram it into the morning routine — when I could finish reading the book to him and how long it would take to write the report, given that he can’t really write yet. I mean, he’s got “E” down pretty well (though sometimes he forgets how many horizontal lines go with the vertical line), “L” is a piece of cake, “A” is coming along nicely, but “N” is considered too tricky and he will hardly consent to practice it.

His still-evolving abilities around writing letters and numbers haven’t diminished his love for them, though, as evidenced by one of our latest art projects.
Number 4, since he’s 4 years old

My idea was that we could make Elan a shirt like Mikhail’s soccer shirt that he loves so much, with the last name and the number on the back. But Elan didn’t see it that way. He wanted his first name on the front, and then he wanted all the other letters on the front too. I told him we could do letter mosaic on another shirt, but Mikhail was on implementation duty and decided that a little creative letter-adding might spice things up.

I AM ELAN. Or maybe it’s elan.i.am. He’s probably that cool already.