Love is in the Air!

Children with a good sense of humor are such fun to joke around with! One of my favorites is a freckle-faced blond first grader who has an adorable cowlick and reminds me of my brother Robert. Each time he visits me, we review what we talked about the last time he came in order to refresh our memories. We have an ongoing light-hearted conversation that we usually get to, which is the little boy's crush on a curly-haired brunette in his class. He always claims that she loves him but that he doesn't love her back, but his ear-to-ear grin causes me to HIGHLY doubt his denial! To begin our session, we talk about good news and bad news from the previous week, covering the areas of school, family, and friends. I typically draw a happy face and a sad face on a paper and write the child's news under the corresponding expression. This particular child often takes my pen and draws a third face, one with a straight mouth, to depict "okay" news. One day this week, he came into my office talking about his girlfriend. Once again, he smilingly said that she still loved him but that he didn't feel the same way about her. As I always do, I teased him about the big grin that kept me from believing him and then sent him to my mirror to see what I was talking about. While he giggled and blushed, I said playfully, "I see your face, and I KNOW how you feel about her. You've got pink and red hearts floating in the air around your head. Oh look, I see a PURPLE one, and it's throbbing with love!" Ducking his head and laughingly protesting, he came and sat down, and we got down to the business of discussing his current good news and bad news. After talking about several topics, the little boy took my pen, saying that he wanted to draw one more face. Expecting it to be the straight-mouth face, I cracked up with surprise when I saw what he had drawn. Near the bottom of the paper, this little imp had drawn a face with a huge smile and a mass of HEARTS in the air above it. Ha ha! The boy has been bitten by the love bug big-time!