Small Hands

His hand still feels so small in mine. We walk through the museum together and my heart is so full with this not yet fully formed person. I still get to have days like this walking around the art museum with my little man. He pulls at me to look at an art display and the heart that I thought could get no larger grows so large it can barely fit in my chest. I’m not dragging him through the museum; he’s excitedly pulling me towards some Inuit artifacts. He says, “Read this one.” I could not be any more proud than I am in this moment. We drift from item to item, and I get to fill his little brain with the culture of the art and the purposes of each item. And he admires them in his little seven year old mind. We look at a beautiful and intricately carved jade mountain scene he asks, “What do you think happens when they make a mistake?” We talk about artists and carvings and time and patience and changing a mistake into an opportunity. Next he says, “If I could live any where in this museum I would live there, it looks so quiet.” We talk about the delicate features of the scene, and he points out the slight lines carved into the stone for the “water,” to make it look like it’s flowing. We float further into the museum, and I bring him to an extraordinarily carved sarcophagus. I begin to say, “This is a sarcophagus. A sarcophagus is a…” but he interrupts me to say, “I know what it is. After someone dies the coffin goes in there.” How does he know this? He turns to look at some more art, and we discuss the next case one piece at a time.

The part I came to see, the Chinese Warriors, he has a little less interest in. Perhaps it’s because I tried too hard. I rented the audio to go with it. It’s a lot of listening for him. When eventually I note the wasted money and give up on the audio and we float through this section just talking and admiring the pieces together he’s back with me. We take a moment to listen to a museum curator talk about the pieces. I ask a few questions, for one because I have questions but also to model asking questions of folks like this. It’s good to have questions, wait your turn to ask, be interested in the question, and appreciate the knowledge of others. I hope there’s a social behavior lesson in there. Then we step over to one of the warriors and I show him the artist’s signature and he says to me “it must have taken the artist a long to do all that work.” He gets it, I think! He was at the end of a long day and was losing steam, but we got in a lot of conversation about the Emperor of China and the amount of work it took to build this afterworld collection. We just got to talk and spend a few hours together his hand in mine, watching how he’s growing and taking in his world and soaking in all of the knowledge that’s around him. I’m so grateful for my education that I can explain things to him and that he asks questions.

Today, he came running out of his room excitedly spitting out, “Did you know that The Current is supported by that museum we went to?”

“The Minneapolis Institute of Arts,” I ask.

“Yes. And they were talking about those warriors we saw.” I think he felt that was so validating that he got to see something that they were talking about (in The Current’s 20 second sponsorship ad) on the radio. (Oh, and yes he listens to The Current in his room on his own… we’re sorry world we’re raising one of the world’s biggest Nerds (but we’re kinda proud too)).