I May or May Not Spy

Since the beginning of the year, Jen and I have been working at the same school. This gives us a chance to ride into work with the boys 2 days a week. The rides in the morning are normally not terribly eventful as all of us are barely awake, and the only excitement comes when Mr. Sun comes out from behind the clouds and blinds the driver causing unknown damage to his/her retinas and forcing the rest of the family to scream “Watch the CAR! OHMIGOD You almost hit that car!” This normally doesn’t happen, but when it does, we are wired for a little while, let me tell you.

Anyway, while the trips in the morning are relatively boring, the trips home can be a little more happening. We sometimes play a game called “I Spy” in which the instigator, normally Ryan, starts off by saying “I spy with my monkey eye, something that is…” followed by a descriptor. This descriptor can be anything – color, size, location – and most often they are fairly simple. For example, he might say “I spy with my monkey eye something that is white,” and we have to guess that it is the white stripe on the road. On the other hand, sometimes he tells us that he is going to come up with something really hard in which case what he is spying is normally a single bird in a flock a thousand strong, or an individual blade of grass.

The other night he outdid even himself. He started off with his typical “This one is going to be tough,” and stated that he spied something white. We began guessing.

“Is it the line on the road,” I asked.

“Nope,” he replied, smiling.

“Is it the white car over there,” Jen asked pointing.

“Nope.”

“Is it the bird way over there?”

“Nope. Keep guessing!”

And so we did. After about five minutes of the “Is it the…” followed by laughter and “Nope!” I figure that he is just messing with us and I decided on a different tack.

“Is it a squid?”

He paused for a moment. “Huh? A squid? No…not a squid.”

“How about an albino squirrel?”

“What’s albino mean?”

“It is a genetic mutation that causes animals to be all white. Never mind.” Whoops. I forget that he is only 4 sometimes. “Is it a jellyfish?”

“No jellyfish in this game.”

“Perhaps a white whale?” (Thar she blows!)

“No, dad,” Ryan said with all the contempt a 4 year old could muster. “Nothing from the sea and no weird all-white other animals either.”

Well that kinda killed all of my other guesses. Surely he couldn’t really mean what he just said about things from the sea. I pressed on. “Is it a white starfish?”

I heard a tiny sigh from the backseat. “Yes. It is a white starfish. You win.”

“Yea!” I exclaim, relishing the victory. “But wait. Where do you see a white starfish?”

“I don’t see one. It is imaginary.”

“But this game is supposed to be ‘I Spy’, not ‘I Imagine’,” I said.

“I know, but you were never going to guess my thing anyway.”

“We might have. Give your parents some credit. Tell me your thing and we’ll see if mom and I would have ever guessed it.”

“That flake of snow on the sign back there.”

As it turns out, he was right. We never would have guessed that.