I realized recently that the little guy and I make quite the complementary pair, something physically manifest in the wooden train sets we bought him for his birthday (and no doubt will supplement come Christmas). So far it seems like his favorite way to play with them is to tear up whatever configuration they’ve been laid out in on his play table; he does this with appropriately explodey mouth sound effects that do my heart proud. Whereas my favorite way to play with his train sets (and make absolutely no mistake about it, they ended up in our house just as much because of my interest in them as the little guy’s) is to set them up in various configurations. So I lay out convoluted track routes, and the little guy busts them up, and I lay them out again, and he demolishes them, and both of us are pretty happy. It’s actually my turn to build a track again right now, which would first require that I clear off the train table which has been conveniently bearing the weight of a lot of the inherent chaos in the playroom recently, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to do that over the weekend.
But speaking of destruction, we were driving down the highway yesterday morning, all three of us (my wife, my little guy, and me) and the little guy was pointing out trucks in other lanes, as is his wont. His expressions these days tend to take one of three forms: “See that!” as an imperative, often with the ‘that’ more explicitly named; “What’s that guy doing?” often with ‘guy’ replaced with the afore-referenced explicit name; and “What’s that?” which is actually word for word because he’s genuinely unfamiliar and curious. Anyway, at one point we were passing a landscaping truck towing a woodchipper trailer, and in my mind I was readying myself for the little guy to ask what it was. And I swear, the first thing that sprang into my skull was something along the lines of “That’s a woodchipper and it’s VERY DANGEROUS” because, you know, who wouldn’t want to seize the opportunity to discourage their child from playing with woodchippers? As it happened, the little guy must not have seen it (or didn’t feel moved to ask about it) so I mulled it over a bit more and I started to wonder if that kind of attitude might not be a wee bit overzealous. The odds of my little guy getting anywhere near a woodchipper are reasonably remote. And it’s not that it’s untrue that they’re dangerous, but I don’t know, maybe if I always stridently point out that dangerous things are dangerous I might create a certain amount of disproportionate anxiety in my child? I have no interest in raising a child who thinks the world is first and foremost a lethally scary place where destruction and doom lurk around every corner. I also don’t want to have any regrets about blithely assuming he was born with an unerring sense of what’s all right to be curious about and what’s better left alone. It’s a heck of a balancing act.
You may very well be asking yourself what in the world my wife, my little guy and I were doing cruising down the highway mid-morning on a random Thursday, and that’s a fair question although I think close to 100% of the audience here has at least an inkling. But on the off chance there’s a random reader I don’t know about, I’ll dispense with being coy. We were driving to the hospital, because we had an ultrasound appointment, because my wife is pregnant with our second child and it was time to peek in for some developmental measurements that can test for chromosomal abnormalities (which, we breathe a sigh of relief, were all normal). I’m not going to add a “pre-natal stuff” tag to the blog so from here on out “baby stuff” will refer to the little one on the way. My wife and I are in agreement with all the usual clichés about not caring if it’s a boy or girl as long as s/he’s healthy, but in benevolent-genies-granting-wishes terms I’m hoping for a girl, which certainly would make it easier to continue referring to my son as the little guy and start referring to my daughter as … something else? I’ve got until mid-April or so to figure it out, or come up with two good online differentiators if we emerge from the pregnancy as a family with two little boys. Either way, exciting times ahead!
No comments:
Post a Comment