So it's no secret that I, I should say, we, love Finding Nemo, and its sequel, Finding Dory. A little while after we saw the new movie (which is stellar), Mommy got us a plushie baby Dory, Destiny the Whale Shark, and Bailey the Beluga Whale.
We were walking through Wal-Mart shopping for something else entirely when we saw Destiny, and with an almost audible pop, my littler self mako-kun came rushing to the surface. He grabbed Destiny, and had this piteously needy expression on his face. (My face? Dissociation makes things confusing sometimes.) Mommy not only got Destiny for him, but found those other two right away.
A while goes by, and I forget where we first saw it, but we heard that there was actually Finding Dory cereal! Mako-kun wanted this with the white hot fury of a thousand suns. At first, I wasn't inclined to go get it, because sugared cereal, blah blah blah, grown up bullshit talk, etc etc.
But it became like this thing with him. Often when he and I are communicating, he "speaks" to me nonverbally, showing me a cascade of images one after another, or one image, very sharply. That became, you guessed it, the box of Finding Dory cereal we saw on the internet. It's a placeholder as a symbol for a bunch of different things, including:
- Stop. Listen to me.
- This is serious.
- You're not paying attention to what I want/need/would really like to have since you love me so much.
- I don't ask for much.
- PLEASE
Along the way this little internal dialogue caught Mommy's notice, and my Auntie Squee's notice too. This was not hard, because hints of it were everywhere.
Yesterday I went out on errands, which included among other things, grocery shopping. I went out of my way looking for the cereal, but couldn't find it.
I did get this other Krave cereal, which had a thing on it to get these Finding Dory points so you could save up and send away for a cool projection lamp. But mako-kun was crushed. I promised him the next time I went shopping I would go looking.
Then we came home, and found that MOMMY HAD ALREADY GOT SOME WHILE SHE WAS OUT TOO. She found it at a Walgreen's. We exercised restraint and didn't tear the box open. Actually, it wasn't that hard, we wanted to really savor the cereal, really take our time. So we waited until after I had got back from my run this morning, ad we could really eat it slowly, mindfully.
We opened the box. We got out our favorite shark cereal bowl. We carefully measured out a portion (1 cup of cereal, and 1/2 a cup of whole milk.) We noticed the little Dory marshmallows (and Nemo ones too.) We got a giggle or two out of "finding" Nemo and Dory, several times. We realized that all of the makoish things there are to eat, and mako-kunish things, that this cereal is probably the most mako-kunish thing there is, hands down, ever, period.
Then we ate it.
OH MY GOODNESS IT IS GOOD.
We have the best Mommy in the whole world.