Introducing Dash, and some new superheroes

Monkey - no, I think it's time for an upgrade: Dash. His new name is Dash. Monkey isn't really "him" any more, and in my travels on the Internet I have noticed that far too many other bloggers, in a fit of originality, have dubbed their offspring Monkey. I will try not to make this too confusing for you.

Dash, then, has never shown any great artistic talent. This is not terribly surprising: I take more after my can't-draw-a-straight-line-with-a-ruler mother than my architect and sometime watercolourist father, and B will tell you that he reached the zenith of his artistic heights with a pencil drawing of a blue-tit at the age of ten. (That's a bird. Really. Stop looking at me like that.) So while it would be nice for my kids to take after their maternal grandfather, the odds are mostly against it. But sometimes, Dash surprises me. It's not that he can't draw, it's just that most of the time he's uninspired to put pencil to paper.

The other day the bigger boys on our road told Dash he could maybe, perhaps, be in their superhero club. These boys are second-graders, seven-year-olds, and Dash dearly wants to impress them. I think his superhero knowledge is standing to him in this respect, as he can discuss Wolverine and Iron-Man and the finer points of Thor's hammer-flinging abilities with the best of them. Immediately after the ensuing battle involving a light saber, a Captain America shield, and possibly some sticks - I didn't step in because at least everyone was still wearing their bike helmets, which I think is an excellent spin-off of all this safety-consciousness we have these days - Dash rushed indoors (dashed, even - see how good this name is?) and sat at the desk, demanding a clean piece of paper and rooting for a pencil.

In the next couple of minutes, and again later on, he came up with the following four new superheroes to show "The Boys". (I'll translate for you, because it's possible you can't read his writing.)

 Slick shot. He, um, shoots things. Slickly?

 Slurp Buzz. He has snakes' tongues coming out of his hands.

LightningBoltGrip. His hands are lightning bolts. Obviously.

And Blast-Four. You can probably read that yourself.

It's been a while since I subjected you to a sample of his artwork. You can really see how he's come along. Okay, so the humanoids aren't exactly DaVinci-esque, and I'm not sure why so many of them are cloven-hoofed, but what I really love about these are the names, and the fact that he sat down and so industriously and dedicatedly came up with them, and asked me how to spell the words and wrote them so well with very little input from me.

This is just one more of those times. The ones when your child acts like every other child, but because you've been there all along, seen him from the days when all he could do was suck and burp, watched him crawl and walk and stumble along the way and keep going - because you've been watching the whole time, it just seems amazing.