Yesterday, Jack and I were working on an elaborate lego project when he broke from our format.  The format is this: I sort the legos by color and hand him the pieces required for each page.  He puts them together.  It’s kind of tortuous and unsatisfying, but we like our together time.  When it came to the lego guys, he just went crazy and put on a bunch of heads without putting the backpacks between the heads and the bodies.   The heads can be hard to seperate so after one attempt he tilted hid head towards the heavens and moaned, “AGONY!”  I thought, “that sounds vaguely familiar.”  He tried to get the head off again and said, “Actually, it’s more like this…” and this time he pretended to rip his shirt off and sang, “Agony…!”  I thought, “is he doing that Chris Pine scene from Into the Woods?” 

We saw Into the Woods during Christmas break last year, and after the movie our collective family review consisted of a shrug and a “huh” and a “I guess I didn’t know that was a musical.” And then we never spoke of it again.

As I was thinking back to the movie almost a year ago, Jack was removing the globe and some other various toys from the chair in his room so he could put one foot up on it and do a deep lunge and really belt it out, “Actually it’s more like this… AGONY!!!!!”

In the meantime I had removed the lego heads so he was free to get back to building.  But since we had had this bonding time, (that I subsequently mined for blog material, and because I don’t want to forget this afternoon) time had passed and I needed to make dinner.  I went upstairs and started cooking and when dinner was ready, Jack brought his lego project upstairs and major progress had been made.  I said, “How did you get all that done?!?!?!”  He said, “I followed the instructions? You didn’t know that I could do that?”

No, I did not.

So it should come as no surprise that this morning I said, “Remember when I threatened to not micromanage you all morning and if you get to school late, you will just have to get a tardy?  Today’s the day.  Get ready and we will leave when you are ready to go.  Good luck.”

He was ready on time with no micromanaging.

On the way to school I said, “Why do you let me do so much for you if you are capable of doing it yourself?”

He said, “Because I’m lazy?”  (To the tune of Agony.)

Sigh, I can’t blame him because I have been making his promise to always be my baby for the last five years.  But it seems like my baby is all grown up.

AGONY!