Somehow it’s been weeks since I’ve posted anything here, and months since I’ve had any consistency. I’d like to say that I’m back to stay, that you can count on something witty and insightful on a daily basis, but you’d probably see through my optimism. So instead I’ll promise nothing and hope for the best...
Let’s start with last weekend. It was one of those weekends. You know, the kind where you realize that you really won’t mind paying tens of thousands of dollars of college tuition some day because it will mean that you’ll finally be able to take naps during the day, take your wife to dinner in the evening, and sleep in the next morning.
Also, you probably won’t have to make regular trips to the emergency room. On Friday night I was holding Baby Kate’s hand as we walked through a parking lot. Kate didn’t want to walk, so she let her body go completely limp in protest of the forced march. As her feet lifted up from the pavement I felt something pop in her arm, and her whining turned into screams of pain. Lovely.
We drove straight to a late-night clinic near our house where she was diagnosed with a case of "nursemaid’s elbow." It’s apparently fairly common. After the doctor pops the elbow back into place, the child typically recovers completely within about twenty-four hours. Kate, however, has a rather over-developed sense of drama, so she took forty-eight.
So even though that was probably the worst part of the weekend, there was a close second. Henry’s basketball team had its holiday party on Saturday afternoon, and there was a gift exchange -- each boy had arrived with a fifteen dollar gift. Easy, right? Well, when it came time to trade gifts, Henry ended up with the smallest one. As all the other boys were gleefully ripping open their presents to find dinosaurs and Lego sets and Hot Wheels contraptions, Henry opened his to find a wallet-sized package of fruit chews.
Fruit.
Chews.
I was about ready to tip over the buffet table, but then he turned the package over to reveal a Toys’R’Us gift card taped to the back. Now, in theory this might be a good idea. You give the kid a gift card and he can pick any gift he wants, right? Sounds nice, but what five-year-old boy knows what a gift card is? What five-year-old boy has the patience to eat fruit chews in the middle of ten other five-year-old boys who are showing off closet-door basketball hoops and remote control cars? And here’s the biggest question of all -- what parent wouldn’t anticipate that scene? What parent wouldn’t know that a gift card would be only a small step above a stockingful of coal?
Thankfully, Henry took the whole thing pretty well. He was certainly disappointed, but he cheered up when we told him we’d take him to Toys’R’Us directly after the party. (By the way, Toys’R’Us on December 15th is not a good place to be.)
So Henry used his fifteen dollar gift card (and if you had been inconsiderate enough to give a child a gift card, don’t you think you would’ve at least pushed past the fifteen dollar limit?) to buy a knock-off brand Lego pirate ship. You should’ve seen how excited he was as he stared at the box, imagining hours and hours of fun. You should’ve seen how excited I was, as I stared at the label on the box (OVER 450 PIECES!) imagining hours and hours of assembly time...
As it often turns out, I was right and Henry was wrong. I finished putting the ship together at 1:30 AM Sunday night/Monday morning, and even as I clicked the last few bricks into place, snapped the plastic swords into the tiny hands of the plastic pirates, and ran the string through the sails and around the mast, I knew one thing for sure: this ship would not last more than an hour. With that in mind, I was sure to take pictures. Here are a couple taken in the wee hours:
And here’s Henry on Monday morning. His first words to me when he opened his eyes were not “Good Morning,” but “Did you finish my pirate ship?” Doesn’t he look excited to play for hours and hours?
Unfortunately hours and hours turned to minutes and minutes. Henry and his sisters destroyed the ship before breakfast.
No worries, though. Santa has already arranged to give Henry a sturdier ship to replace this one.
If I get around to it I’ll put the ship back together and put it up somewhere out of reach. Until then, it’s just a pile of plastic. So what’s the moral of the story? It’s quite simple really. Little girls’ elbows and generic Lego pirate ships should be handled with care. And never, under any circumstances, give gift cards to five-year-olds.
Kate is our third child, and she is a walking, talking reminder that the third year is a magical time. (Sure, all the whining, fussing, kicking, and sassing can get tiresome, but we like to focus on the magical stuff.) The world is a wondrous place full of mysteries and discoveries, and a three-year-old's vocabulary has usually developed enough to explore everything around her. And so it is with Kate.
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