Before

Before the snow, before we lost power, Noah announced that he wanted to draw some pictures.

This...was news to me, as Noah does not particularly like to draw. It frustrates him. His fine-motor delays clash with his perfectionist nature. He favors his left hand but is more skilled with his right, he has difficulty getting all of his fingers to do what he wants, he sees Pixar in his head but scribbles on the paper, and within minutes he's pushing the crayon at me, asking me to please recreate the Paradise Falls tableau from Up, complete with the House, Balloons, Carl, Russell, The Snipe, The Mean Dogs and Also Russell's Lost GPS Unit Right Over There, NO, NOT THERE. THERE. All of which are also way beyond my own limited skills with an unsharpened Crayola, but whatever. They please him more than his own creations, apparently.

So anyway, this request came out of the blue, as if he'd randomly asked for a bowl of Brussels sprouts. But we quickly supplied the crayons and paper and he got to work.

After he was done, he asked for a toy airplane.

 

This is the airplane outside our house.

 

This is the house in Jamaica. It is smaller than our house.

This is the plane flying to Jamaica. The red parts are trees. There were more trees in Jamaica than outside our house, you see.

 

And there were, in fact, trees with very red bark in Jamaica, which delighted him. Soon after we arrived, he declared Jamaica to be Oz. The path down to the beach was the Yellow Brick Road; the wall of tropical greenery around the pool was the Emerald City. He stood on the steps and conversed with an imaginary doorman about the broken bell; he stood by a tree stump in the backyard asking for his oil can; he was incapable of going indoors without attempting to whip everyone into a frenzy about "IT'S A TWISTER! IT'S A TWISTER!"

At the airport, on the way home, he skipped down a stationary moving sidewalk and sang every word of "We're Off To See The Wizard" at the top of his lungs. Any irritation our fellow travelers had about the mechanical problem vanished about halfway through the song, as they all smiled and laughed as he unselfconsciously butchered the phrasing of "a wiz of a wiz if ever a wiz there was."

His hands might not be able to keep up with everything going on in his head just yet, but you know, I'm not too worried.