Jack asks often to go to one of three places-"fish" (The Academy of Sciences), "zoo" or "park". sometimes "beach" but usually he wants the beach to come to us. For a while I had to explain to him that the beach won't fit anywhere but where it lives. Now he usually follows up his requests for the "beach....come!" with "no fit."Jack has started noticing the artwork and other objects we have hanging on the wall. This required us to remove my Dia de los Muertos sculpture collection from his room. At first he thought they were just "funny man" but eventually he started to get pretty upset and wanted them to go away. We also had to take down a mask I had hanging above his door. He actually started bursting out crying a couple times when he would go look in the hallway. It took us a while to figure out what was bothering him so much, and once we did we showed him the back side of the mask and explained it was just wood, which consoled him until we turned it around and showed him the painted side again. Now we have a picture hanging there of him smiling that his Cousin Annie took. On a happier note, Jack likes the picture we have of the kid in an urban projects area doing a vertical flip on an abandoned mattress and he also likes pictures of his friends and family. It took him a while to understand why we hung his drawings up around the house and he wanted to take them down because they are his, but eventually he got that we all like to look at them because they are such nice drawings. So a couple days ago he finished drawing a picture and asked for tape to put it on the wall.
The cow skull in the kitchen doesn't bother him, he thinks it's a sheep and since he likes dogs so much he was happy to hear that the skull in the bathroom is a dog.
The poster of Obama above the kitchen table is still cause for much discussion. He also recognizes one of my paintings in our bedroom as "Mama" (made it).
