I Am Man, Hear Me Roar

Oh my god, I just realized that my son is a typical man. Not that it's a bad thing, honestly i think men are great. special. unique. necessary. but to find out that my son is just like the rest of them sort of stings.

The realization about my poor baby and his unfortunate fate recently hit me hard (literally) after he gave me high five filled with so much force that it caused my hand to bang into the desk, which REALLY hurt quite badly and was completely unnecessary.

All of his high fives are this powerful. If for some reason, he feels he hasn't hit hard enough he makes me high five him again until I say ouch. Only then can be be satisfied with the manly powers his little hand contains.

The sting made me remember gymnastics, (yes he takes gymnastics, he's only 5) where he and his best friend are in constant competition to see who can do everything FASTER. Not better, just faster.

Gymnastics made me remember the computer lab at his school, where all the boys in his class compete to see who can do the puzzle with the most pieces (They go to this website and do puzzles on the computer www.jigzone.com). Now in reality as kindegarteners, they probably can't complete a puzzle with more than 20 pieces but they were like:

"Grunt, grunt, I can do 100 pieces!"

"Yeah well, grunt, grunt, I can do 240 pieces!"

"Yeah well, I can do, grunt, 1 million and 80 pieces! Grunt!" (This was my son)

None of them were able to do that many pieces of course, but they sure liked to pretend they could and point out to each other all the puzzle pieces staring off their respective screens. In fact, in tune with the true nature of being man, none of them actually even attempted to complete the 1 million and 80 piece puzzles, just stood around and bragged about how they COULD do them if they wanted to.

Grunt.

(Sadly, on the other hand, the girls in the class were all insisting they couldn't do more than 6 piece puzzles which was ridiculous since they could all easily do at least 12 or 20. But the underachievement of the average girl is another issue for another time I suppose.)

Anyways, as I'm yelling at him for hitting me so hard that he left a red mark on my palm and a bruise on the back of my hand and lecturing him on how

"Harder and faster doesn't necessarily mean better buddy!!! HARDER AND FASTER DOESN'T MEAN BETTER!!!!!!",

I realize how similar this conversation is to the one I have in bed with man-friend so often.

Ah men.