The Next Michael Jackson Trend Has Started

Micah has been acting out movies most of his life. He's getting quite a flair for the dramatic, and can imitate every dance scene in every movie he's ever watched. He also knows every movie line from well over 2 dozen movies. He has his favorite characters in each one, and identifies himself as this person. He assigns roles to others that he likes. His friends are other characters, his siblings sometimes get to be in his reenactments (in his mind; not really reenacting with him) and very, very rarely will the good old parents ever get featured in his imaginative play scenes.

He started wearing gloves to act out these movies. I'm not sure what spurred this trend, or why he does it, but it's a standard thing with him now. He waves his gloved hands in sweeping gestures, narrating whatever movie he's remembering line for line.

This glove thing has become a small problem. The boy has about 5 pair of gloves, because he tends to not put them away and we lose them. I get the stretchy one-size-fits-most for him, and he prefers the ones with the skeleton hands printed on the back. All 5ish of those pairs were misplaced before December. We were at my parents' cabin at Thanksgiving, and Micah stole my dad's work gloves. They're the super cheap jersey knit type. We figured since Micah liked those, we'd buy him 2 bulk packs. It would take him a while to work his way through 20 pair of gloves, right?

He refused to wear them. Pap's pair was far superior to new gloves. We gave one pack to Pap to make up for the one pair Micah stole.

As we randomly stumble across a pair of Micah's misplaced gloves, we'll put them back in his bin. Despite the fact that he has more gloves than the rest of the large family put together, he has taken to stealing our gloves. There's no answer as to why, but the frustration among family members is rather high over this. The worst part is that he will only wear one glove, most of the time, leaving everyone's glove bin with right hand gloves only, because he takes all the left hand ones.

The boy kicked it up a notch over the holidays when we were at the in-laws for a New Year's party. Micah went home with the right glove of a guest. It was a gorgeous leather one that was very out of place at our home of jersey knits and fleeces. It was returned a few days later, of course.

His new favorite glove is a stretched out and faded jersey work glove,with a ginormous hole in the palm. He wears it on his left hand everywhere he goes. It has taken the place of Woody. The glove goes to school, church, anywhere Micah goes. I think, someday, I'll miss this stage. It's kinda cute.