Hanging out with Max

My three year old nephew Max did not have preschool today so I got to hang out with him for the morning.  We walked his cousins down to the corner where they jump into the walking line to school and realized we were halfway to a pretty great park.  It was 9am on November 9 and surprisingly toasty out, so we decided to make an outing of it, spur of the moment.  Max was really into what he could smell or hear while we were there.  There's a lot of road construction going on just out of view of the park and every time we heard a rumble Max would stand stock still and yell, "What was that?!?"  I would say it was a truck, and he would say, "No.  I think it was a cement mixer," or some other specific piece of heavy machinery, something he knows way more about than me.  But about the smells- he had pretty unique descriptions of the things he was smelling.  One that sticks out in my mind is the wooden post that 'smelled like it had a whole bunch of bees living in it.' There were several others in that vein and then I saw him with his nose up to his sleeve.  I asked him what that smelled like and he gave me the most blank stare and said, "A jacket."  Like there was no way I should expect it to smell like anything else...
The park was populated with monsters this morning- they were flying by our space shuttle, they were hiding in the garden, they might have been on the top of the slide- but Max vanquished them all.  Then we were walking home along Randolph in the sunshine and some homeowner had a construction sign up on their fence.  For Monster Construction.  You should have seen Max jump when he caught the picture of the logo out of the corner of his eye.  I almost died laughing.  Once I assured him it was ok, of course.  But the way he jumped and shrieked is something I will chuckle about for quite a while into the future.
Back here he got me giggling over his very serious requests for me to contact Mr. Von Flugel (the aviator from Richard Scarry) to see if he could babysit Max for the afternoon.  I was to hurry, because Mr. Von Flugel was surely going to leave work soon and we didn't want to miss him.  When his real babysitter (a lovely girl-really, a young woman, damn I'm getting old- named Misha) showed up at the door he was disappointed with me for not arranging an afternoon in BusyTown for him.  But then as we were walking to the door I somehow stepped on his sock which pulled it off of his foot and he went tumbling down.  We both could not stop laughing over that one.  He walked out the door, holding Misha's hand, still giggling.  Love him.