When I arrived at Tammy and David’s for Survivor night yesterday (and by the way, great season; if you skipped it because of the race thing, you made a mistake), Kylie wasn’t sure about me. So I gave her her space, until she got more comfortable with my presence. If there’s anything I understand, it’s boundaries. Before long she was stomping delicately around the house, teasing me a little with that shy smile of hers.

Space is not a problem for Aiden. He may be tiny, but he seems to be everywhere at once. When I got there, he told me exactly where to sit, on the floor behind the couch, which he then ran around and around at breakneck speed about five times before plopping down on the floor beside me. And that was just the beginning.

He wanted to read, so he kept bringing me books. Sometimes he would let me read them from start to finish, and other times he would skip around, finding his favorite pages. Whatever the book, once was never enough. “Read it again” is one of his favorite phrases.

At one point he brought out the big alphabet book. I was talking with Tammy at the time, and I told him I’d read it in a minute. He waited for pretty close to a minute, nudging me a little every so often. Then he took the book out of my hands and marched back to his room with it, muttering, “You’re not going to read this book.” Well, okay then. Sorr-ree.

Later he brought out a handful of wooden blocks and we stacked them. It’s a little hard to get them very high when you’re stacking them on a plush carpet, so he stacked them wide, four across and going up from there. He informed me that we were building a dam. Then he laid them end-to-end, but he couldn’t decide if it was a train or a snake. At one point he said it was a snake chugging to the snake station. It’s a little hard to keep up with him sometimes.

That’s pretty much how it went, nonstop the whole time I was there, until he ran out of gas. The party ended about as suddenly as it had begun. He was very tired when I left, but protesting quite loudly at the prospect of going to bed. It’s really hard to slow down when you’re carrying that much momentum. But he’s two, and even a tank that runs on rocket fuel has to be replenished.

D.J. was on the phone when I got to the house, and shortly after that he went to bed, but not before I had a chance to ask him how he was doing. “Okay,” he told me. Then he added, “Sometimes okay, sometimes not okay.” I didn’t want to tell him that it would probably stay that way for the next fifty years or so. We have to hope the okay days outbalance the not okay ones.

As for Dakota, he was fascinated with the wooden airplanes, and he sat quietly and talked to them. Jay Jay and Tracy, if you want to know. He must not have been sure I understood, because he looked up at me and said, “It’s not a movie.” There is a movie with Jay Jay and Tracy, and in fact I think it was playing in Aiden’s room at the time, but this wasn’t it. Glad to have that cleared up.