Wine, Woman and Song - Part Deux

I don’t know where and how to begin part deux. Partly because, the realization that Chip likes pretty girls came slowly and shockingly. I have been racking my brain to get the earliest memory of Chip’s inclinations and this one comes up again and again.

It happened about a year ago. At the mall (yes, we are mall rats). BigGeek was away at school, it was cold to do anything outside, so Chip and I headed to the mall on a sunny, icy cold Saturday morning to ride the escalators and eat ice cream. After shrillion rides in the elevator and escalators, after eating a pizza and licking an ice cream cone, we were ready to go home. By we, I meant it was me. Chip wanted to stay back. He tugged at my coat and whined and ran away when I tried to stuff him in his bulky winter jacket. Finally I tackled him and pinned him down on a chair by the food court while I struggled to bend his unbending arms into the jacket, when, suddenly all resistance dissolved. Surprised, I looked up.

Chip was beaming at two pretty twenty-something girls sitting on a stool behind a sandwich shop, eating a sandwich. They waved to him and Chip blushingly waved back. They laughed and he smiled cheekily. I went back to zipping up Chip and helping him down. We started walking towards the exit. Chip followed me, but he had his eyes on the girls. He waved to them, said Hi, went to the glass window and squished his nose at them. The girls were enjoying it too and were laughing and encouraging him. I was amused and called to Chip who was glued to the window. I threatened to leave him at the mall and that worked. Keeping both his eyes on the girls, he started to follow me. And encountered a huge pillar and smacked his head on it. Right on. The girls and I burst into uncontainable laughter. Chip didn’t cry but he was so embarrassed and mortified that he ran to me and buried his tiny face into my coat and pushed me out the door.

Or take the time last summer when we went to lots of musems. Chip was about 15 mo at the time. Being summer, most women and girls were dressed in shorts or short skirts. We were standing in an ice cream line (jeez, we do eat a lot of ice cream?) with some of our friends, when the woman in front of us shrieked. She looked down, shivering, only to see little Chip’s hand up her short, short skirt. She was relived that it was not a man or some strange animal or a bug and laughed it off.

I didn’t think much of these incidences at the time, but a pattern began to emerge. At the grocery store, at the mall, at the tot lot, in the parking lot. Take the tot lot at the mall for instance. Chip will willingly share his space/rides with a pretty girl. Pretty being the operative word. If it is a guy, even a bigger guy, turf battle ensues, verbally or physically. It’s *any* girl, he is usually not physical, but may express verbally. If it’s a pretty girl, he will not only share the space but will shamelessly flirt by saying “hi” or smiling at her and in one instance even giving her a hug at which point I intervened and told him he had to keep his hands and feet to himself and he could not go around hugging people.

BigGeek is amused by all this. He once told me his first crush was in the second standard. Second standard? At the ripe age of 7? She was very pretty he tried to tell me. Now I know where Chip gets his “crushy” genes from. But until Chip is old enough to go about on his own, I have to endure as he dutifully turns his head as a pretty, age-no-bar, girl walks by.