Yesterday, Cavanaugh and I stumbled on a new and very sweet game. He was sitting in my lap while we ate lunch and I said, “I like it when you sit in my lap.”

He said, “I like it when you kiss me.”

“I’m liking this pizza.”

“You like your coffee too. I like chocolate milk.”

“You do like chocolate milk.”

“Now you say, you like it when.”

“I like it when…”

“No you say, I like it when.”

“Oh, you like it when we dig in the garden.”

“I like to drive my bus in the mud. All the people inside like to see the bugs and the worms.”

“Did you like that snake we found in the garden?”

“I did like that snake.”

“It kind of scared me when I saw it. I said, ‘Ooohp,’ but then I realized it was just little and I wasn’t scared.”

“I wasn’t scared. I liked that snake.”

“You liked it when it wiggled through the mud.”

“The worm likes mud. I liked that worm”

I could go on, as our conversation did, for another ten minutes or so. You’d think since I spend almost every waking minute with this boy, I’d know everything about him, but games like this one end up revealing what’s happening in his head. We travel from the mundane likes to how he feels.

When he said, “I didn’t like it when you go to the store because I was scared,” it let us talk about how he feels when I leave, how even if he waves goodbye and plays happily while I’m gone, sometimes he still needs the reassurance that when I go, “Mama always comes back.”

I didn’t think of it until we were halfway through, but we were enacting one of our favorite books from when Cavanaugh was 15 months old or so: I Like It When . . . by Mary Murphy. A parent and child penguin go through the actions of the day: cleaning up, eating new things, bedtimey saying, “I like it when we….”

I’ve got a new addition for our list. “I like it when we play I Like It When.