The perfect gift, update

Matthew's wolf costume didn't arrive in time for Christmas, but I got him some new dollhouse figures -- including a black cocker spaniel that looked like the live one he and Kendall have; he opened it and said, "it's a Sadie dog!" -- which he seemed very happy with. He spent most the rest of the day shuttling them between the dollhouse and the sink, where he came periously close to flooding the kitchen more than once while giving them baths.

He is, as David promised, obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are. One of his presents was a DVD game of the book; it reads the story to you or allows you to read the story yourself, it asks you to locate various objects from the book, and answer questions based on the action. David spent no less than an hour synching up the game to my parents' DVD player, and while we were all more or less driven crazy by his efforts (the game speaks to you while you are trying, and his case failing, to set it up), when he succeeded, Matthew immediately plopped himself down in front of the television to read the story over and over, making a tent out of the under side of my father's desk (in the book Max has a tent). That present was clearly a big hit.

But so was a much more low-tech gift: a slinky. When he got ready for bed, Matthew stuck the end of it in the back of his pajamas, where it looked like a tail. Clearly, he was imitating Max, whose wolf costume consists mostly of his gray footie pajamas. A little later, though, I saw Matthew crawling on the floor with the end of the slinky in his mouth. "No, no, Matthew," I said, "don't put that in your mouth. It's yucky."

"I want to be an elephant," he said in his quiet, but precise way. And indeed, with the gray metal slinky bending this way and that, that's exactly what he did look like.