Eccentricity!?!

"Am I eccentric?" asked my 9.5 year old yesterday afternoon as we were walking together.

His question gave me pause. Thoughts were rushing through my mind and out came my "concerned mother" questions... one by one.

"Who said that you're eccentric?" (nobody, actually)

"Do you even know what this word mean?"

It turns out he does and he says he's known it for years (he's a voracious reader after all, who reads at 7th grade level). "Strange, a little weird," he said, after my weaker, more "positive" take on it ("peculiar").

"Why are you even asking this question? Do you think that you are eccentric?"

He evaded that one and kept pressing me for an answer. I didn't really know what to say because I wanted to try to know more about where the question came from. I finally started to answer with an emphatic, "No! Of course you're not eccentric! You're just unique, like everyone else in the world is... and, of course, we all know you're geeky!"

Later on he elaborated a bit more upon his opinion that he is "crazy" (in a good way, I suppose, and he's proud of that).

I almost turned things really sour when I asked him (while we were shopping at Target) with bad phrasing whether I could blog about his eccentricity or something... and he took that as a sign that "Yes, I am eccentric, you said so!" (Sigh... can I be more careful about what I say the next time?). Obviously I explained that I didn't mean he was, I was just asking whether I could talk about his question and stuff here in the blog (he obviously granted permission, or you wouldn't be reading this!) and thankfully he understood.

We had fun telling daddy about these conversations in the car and dad was emphatic in saying that no, he was NOT eccentric!

At bedtime, when I confirmed again with him about blogging this, I taught him another couple of words I love: idiosyncrasy and idiosyncratic (that mean peculiar way[s] of a person), and he had a good laugh over them. We ended up laughing together and I also asked whether he minded me saying to other people (in his presence) that he is "geeky." I told him that his dad and I are total "geeks" (used the cat names as a classic example) and that he's probably taken after us.

"No, I don't mind you calling me geeky, mom," he said.

"Yeah, that's why we call you iKelvin."

"That's my commercial name!" he jokingly answered.

And we laughed and laughed about that one. Geeky, Apple fanatic and many other fun things? Yes. Eccentric? Nah!... :)