rs536 ran the New York Marathon today (go congratulate her!). It made me tired just thinking about it (besides, didnt' the original marathoner die at the end?). AJ was very interested in her marathon and asked a lot of questions.

�What�s a marathon?�

�It�s a really long race.� AJ loves races.

�How long?�

�26.2 miles.�

�26.2? Is that like 100 feet?� AJ is a little unclear on which units of measure are which. He keeps asking perplexing questions like, �How far is a mile?� which I can never seem to answer to his satisfaction.

�No, it�s a lot more than that. It�s almost as far as running from our house to Grandma Dee�s.�

AJ�s jaw drops.

�She�s going to run for a bunch of hours.�

�Yup.�

�I hope she wins.�

�She�s not going to win. There are professional runners who run really, really fast for a long time who win the races.�

�How long does it take them?�

�I can�t remember. I think it�s usually somewhere between 2 and 3 hours.�

AJ thinks for a minute. �That�s like 13 miles an hour.�

�Probably not quite that fast,� I said wondering how AJ knew that half of 26 was 13 so fast.

�I�m going to practice running.�

And he was out the door and running around the house. A few minutes later he came back panting. �I don�t think I can run for a bunch of hours.� AJ looked disappointed. He wants to be a runner. He wants to be the fastest kid in the world.

�Well, you can�t run as fast as you can if you�re running a marathon. You have to start slowly enough so you can keep up your speed for a long time. There�s another kind of running called sprinting where you run as fast as you can for shorter distances.�

�I�m going to be a sprinter, then. I�m going to go practice some more.�

These days it�s getting easy to tire him out. Physically, at least. Mentally, not so much.

Increasingly, he�s really absorbing the things he reads when he�s by himself, not just the things we read together and talk over. But because he often glosses over the internal characters of words in favor of quickly grasping letter patterns and matching them to things he knows, he�s been coming up with some absolutely stellar mispronunciations that we have to try very hard not to laugh at. Yesterday he talked about consulting his �Almaniac� [Pronounced Al Maniac] in lieu of an Almanac. He also professed excitement about the upcoming holiday, �Vetarians Day,� which I�m guessing is to celebrate those who fought in foreign wars for the protection of domestic animals.

This actually sounds like a more exciting holiday for a 5-year-old to celebrate. Instead, he�s been asked to write the names of his relatives who�ve served in various branches of the armed forces on a Xeroxed American flag to post on the wall of his school. We decided to make this a family history project as well and called my mom for some information about my grandfather�s stint in the Army Air Forces (or whatever the Air Force was called before it was the Air Force). We learned that my grandfather had been kind of a daredevil and had been proclaimed a hero for bringing his crew in safely in a crash landing when the plane�s wings iced up. We also learned that the plane�s wings iced up because my grandfather had flown into a cloud formation he�d been always told to avoid just to see what would happen. We also learned he nearly died of meningitis while serving. And my father�s father apparently was in the Coast Guard. I had no idea. But we picked my mother�s father because, I think, AJ and he would have liked each other immensely. AJ, too, likes to try the forbidden to see what would happen. And both of them loved Snoopy and Charlie Brown and Calvin and Hobbes.

In other family news, we made the decision today not to travel to my mom and dad�s for Thanksgiving. The schedule was looking too grueling. I feel bad about it. My mother seems relieved � she didn�t want to worry about us traveling under those conditions and also her mother, who is consumed by the waking dream stage of Alzheimer�s, is taking up a lot of her time and attention. They have friends, a large family, who will be down there for Thanksgiving and who have invited them for dinner, so I don�t feel too much like I�ve abandoned them. The good news, though, is that I can start planning our own dinner. I always miss it when I don�t get to cook the pies at least. Good God, is it only two and a half weeks away? I'd better order the turkey.

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