Each year of Huck’s life that goes by takes with it a little more cutesy pieness, what with him aging and all, and sometimes I worry that he’s becoming such a serious young man with all his pythagorean theorems and square roots and DNA that the two of us won’t have anything to talk about.  He’s got Troy working on constructing his periodic table of the elements Halloween costume in between rigorous study on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube with massive amounts of instructions and 5:40AM sessions.  Fun for him means sitting down with the American Heritage Dictionary and writing words using the International Phoenetic Alphabet, and though he’s only seven he’s currently experiencing an internal struggle between his belief in God and his belief in science, two large parts of his identity.  This is some heavy stuff for a kid who just a few years ago was full of baby fat and slobber and said “lello” for yellow.

But as most of you with older kids already know, there’s still a whole lot of adorable hilarity left.

For instance, he loves to make people scream by turning his eyelids inside out or showing off his horrible double jointed wrists or turning his tongue into a three leaf clover.  He also loves to dance wildly to awful pop songs, especially if it involves sticking his butt out.  All people who visit our home are subjected to his earnest and quite lengthy jazz choir medleys and must sign their name on his awkward Members & Visitors Sign-In poster in his bedroom.  Whenever he’s home he wears the same pajama combination, which is my orange Harvest Festival ladies t-shirt from 2010 and his old-man brown plaid bottoms.  One of his favorite games is pretending the two of us are mother & baby snails talking with snail-lisps, which is truly awful.  Recently we were talking about his girlfriends at school and he indicated he may be having some trouble with his main one and after badgering him for answers he finally stated: “Relationships are complicated.  I thought you knew that by now.” And though he considers himself a serious scholar, the other day he sat at the kitchen table working hard on something that doesn’t come easy for him: handwriting.  He had to make an interesting sentence out of five specific words and this is what he finally came up with: “Here is a sentence that if your friend says it does count as meaning that they are not nice and here it is: I can’t be kind ’cause I pick on peoples backs.”

I smiled to myself, finally assured that there were still many more years of top secret laughs to come.