D.J. seems to be mellowing a bit, but he still takes himself a little more seriously than necessary. It’s been a slow process, getting him to laugh at himself, but we’re getting there. Today Suzanne and I took him out to lunch. It’s hard to listen to him talk for an hour straight without cracking a smile (or cracking a joke, if you’re so inclined).

When the two of them got to my house, he was purring. He’s a cheetah these days, you know, and he wanted us to know he was happy. He gave us a sample of his growl, just in case he needed to let us know if he got angry. In the car he showed me his new book. It’s about cheetahs. Everything is about cheetahs right now. Who knows why.

For some reason, once we got to the restaurant and he had a coloring book and crayons in front of him, the topic of supreme interest changed from cheetahs to spiders. Maybe it was the Halloween theme of the coloring book; I think Casper was on the cover, and there was a word puzzle with holiday-oriented words. He had no trouble finding “trick” and “treat.” Suzanne said, “I see ‘candy,’ and his head whipped around, looking for candy. “In the puzzle,” she told him. He said he wanted to find it himself, and he did. Nobody wanted to rain on his fun.

Anyway, he started planning a spider party, with fly pie. Believe it or not. He said there were going to be games and balloons and a piñata and a band. When I suggested that if a band cost too much they could hire a DJ, he said, “I’m not available.” So obviously, it’s not that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. That’s not what I mean when I say he can take himself too seriously.

On the way home he was babbling about something that made us chuckle. Believe me, even if I remembered it, it wouldn’t be funny. You literally had to be there. He waited patiently, in the middle of another cheetah story (I think it was about the silent “h” at the end), until we were through making jokes at his expense. “Now that you’ve had your little laugh,” he said, “I’ll finish.”

Ooh. He won’t even be a teenager for another seven years.

When Suzanne and I planned to go to lunch today, we didn’t know we’d have D.J. with us. It was just one of those things, and we didn’t mind. But now we need to plan another lunch, so we can talk. You know, just the two of us, in an adult conversation. Not that our adult conversations always make a lot more sense than purring cheetahs and dancing spiders, but there are things you can’t say with a six-year-old around, even if he seems not to be listening.