A day on the town with Kid A.

It's a blessed woman who has a ten-year-old boy, which is just my funny curly way of saying that I love my oldest son. 

We went out on a mother/son date about a week ago, on the scooter, off through the jungle, south to Panjim, the capital of Goa. Our destination was a bookstore that has a lot of kids books, to buy him book three and four of the Percy Jackson series. (He then inhaled them in one day. Sigh. I can't keep the kid in clothes or books.)

All the way, he entertained me with his personal, Kid A form of love: random trivia delivered from the back of the scooter. Things about planets, Greek mythology, and micro organisms. When he starts telling me these things, I know he's feeling well, that he's feeling a lot of love, and that this is how he tells me he loves me. I bask in it. "Really?" I say. "I didn't know that."

(I truly didn't, most of the time. He can carry a whole world of facts in his head, just like his father.)

I took him on some of my own errands, too. To the art store. I was looking for quality watercolors, but decided I couldn't quite afford the Winsor and Newton ones, and I bought a new set of Camel Artist Watercolors. The Indian brand. Not too bad, if you haven't worked too much with high quality watercolors, which I haven't.

He posed in his father's sunglasses, borrowed for the journey. A man walking by said, "James Bond."

A kinder, gentler, less womanizing James Bond, perhaps. (Younger, blacker, cuter.)

We then went to my favorite fish curry rice restaurant for lunch. Except that we didn't make it for our lunch time, we made it for Indian lunch time-- 2:00, and the restaurant was packed with people waiting for seats. People who weren't about to wait patiently in queues. Once I saw a few people saunter by me while we waited in line, I decided to do a little reconnaisance. We scooted to the back of the room and waited nearby two people who were nearly done with their food.

It's a dirty job, but sometimes it's the only way to get food.

The fish thali (in Goa called fish curry rice, as in: fish, curry (prawn coconut) and rice, and about three other vegetable dishes and clams) was everything I'd been dreaming of, and Kid A had a plate of golden fried calamari all to himself. (A splurge, at $3.)

Then we went to Mapusa to buy flowers for the devotion circle and drink a coconut because we were so thirsty from all that driving in the sun. Mapusa was crazy because it was just before Diwali and everyone was out preparing by buying tinselly things.

I may have to start a photo series called "Kid A drinking things." His face is so awesome.

Mine is rather splotchy with my lovely pregnancy mask. Lately I get hyper pigmentation in pregnancy, which I wouldn't mind if it was only evenly distributed, and not concentrated on my forehead and upper lip. But ahhh, who can complain, with all these excellent sons and years ahead of James Bondish riding on scooters, buying books, and drinking sweet lassis? Not me, that's for sure.

(This answers Leaf's question in the comments on the last post. To answer Eleanor's? Wellllll... we've been to the little banyan tree in the coconut grove beside our house, but we haven't been to the big banyan tree that we show in all our pictures. Not yet, anyways.)