And Will said, “Talk to the hand, Michelle,” to me.

I took Will to Target on Wednesday. He wasn’t thrilled to be there because we looked at things he wasn’t interested in. Lately he’s taken more interest in what he wears. I used to put him in clothes and he’d wear (well, usually not wear) whatever I choose. Now he has definite preferences; which leads to him wearing shirts that are too small -- shirts that I’ve pulled from his drawer to give away. But I let him wear them anyway even though his teachers at school probably think we’re too poor to afford clothes for him.

He has now developed a new skill, a precocious teenage skill, that of saying, “Yeah, whatever, anything to get me out of here.” We were standing in the boy’s clothing section of Target. I showed him shirts and asked, “Do you like this one?” When I turned back around with a new shirt to show him, I happily noticed that he had taken off his shirt and was trying to squeeze into a Sponge Bob tee-shirt several sizes too small. “Will that shirt is too small. Do you like it? Do you want one? Put your shirt back on! It’s not your shirt.” I alternatively asked, pleaded and demanded as we tussled over it.

But I’d ruined everything and he said yes to everything just to get us out of there. But the next morning when I tried to get him to put on some of the new shirts I’d bought for him; he looked me square in the eye and sternly said, “All done!”