"is that your kid?"

 

we go a lot of places, but mostly hang out in our home town - near home base.  its hard to go too far working between naps, and daxton is a boy who cannot get off is schedule.  however, we've recently been jumping into action as soon as dax wakes up from one nap and going downtown to raleigh on the weekends to check out various things.  two weekends ago we went to see the food truck rodeo (hoping to expose dax to even more sights, sounds, smells, and flavors than he's seen/tasted so far) and then this past weekend we headed down to go to a large city owned park. 

while we are out and about we don't normally have people comment to us about dax being (clearly) adopted, but people do tend to smile a little longer than normal, look a little more tenderly than they previously did, and to exclaim how adorable they think dax is.  while we don't normally run into conversations directly related to race, we were certainly prepared that this day would come.

scene 1

cast of characters
kid (approximate age 7)
will
dax

kid:  hey, is that your kid? (pointing to dax)
will: yes (thinking where is he going with this)
kid:  he's cute! (runs off)

scene 2

cast of characters
kid (approximate age 5)
adri
dax

kid:  what's wrong with his eye?
adri:  one of his eye lid muscles is too long so it won't lift his eyelid up like yours or mine.  when he's bigger he will have surgery to help lift it a little so it won't affect his sight.
kid:  okay (runs off)

i think both will and i were taken off guard to be having (seemingly (in our minds) heavy) conversations with these curious little minds, but also relieved that they didn't go much deeper than the visual surface.  the conversations were blunt and to the point.  the kids asked exactly what they needed to know without any hesitation. they were pure and innocent questions and had nothing behind them other than what was asked.  as kids grow they start to put two and two together and look for answers about why things are the way they are.  we were glad we could satisfy their curiosity enough that they both felt comfortable running off to continue playing with other kids, but hope that even in these brief interactions they were able to see that things and relationships being "different" are just 100% absolutely perfectly totally fine.