Building Memories...and Nothing Else

Making snow forts has to be one of the coolest parts of childhood. In fact, I’d say it ranks right up there with Christmas, Halloween, and the day you realize that someone will actually pay you for losing teeth.

The best place by far to make a snow fort is in the massive piles of snow left behind by snowplows. I know this not because I’m some kind of crazy dad who uses his kids as an excuse to fulfill a childhood dream of making a snow bunker capable of withstanding a grenade, but because my kids told me it would be a good idea.

So off we went with two small plastic shovels to chisel a tunnel network through the eight-foot pile of snow at the end of our cul-de-sac. We may have been better off bringing dynamite. Five minutes and two broken shovels later, we were no closer to our goal of building the ultimate snow fort, but we were all cold and suffering various injuries from the bits of ice and shards of broken plastic that assailed us as we attempted to open a passage into the snowplow’s detritus.

On the bright side, I may have loosened a tooth in the excavation process. I wonder if anyone will still pay me for those.

All I Want for Christmas is Everything

Christmas shopping with a toddler is just like Christmas shopping with any other human being, provided that human is a raging alcoholic, and you are shopping in a liquor store. A toddler approaches any shopping experience with two rules in mind:

1. Grab everything within reach

2. Ask for everything out of reach

Given my natural propensity for making rash decisions and putting myself in impossible situations, it should not come as a surprise that I thought the best way to figure out what my toddler wanted for Christmas would be to take him to a store and have him show me what he wanted. (Experienced parents have just planted their palms firmly onto their foreheads, knowing the disaster that awaited me.) It started like any other trip to Target, with a loud fit by my toddler because the cart with the special seat for kids was gone. Why a store can have fifty-seven handicap parking spots and two Starbucks coffee shops but only one kid-approved cart can only be guessed at with elaborate conspiracy theories about security guards watching helpless parents melt down in the aisles because of a missing cart.

Once we had settled on the virtues of a normal cart, it was off to the toy aisle. It was here that I made my main mistake. (In addition to bringing a toddler on a Christmas shopping expedition, letting him sit in the bottom of the cart, not sterilizing the cart surface before he sat down, and not installing motion detectors on the edges of the cart to prevent unnoticed additions to my merchandise.) I told him we were at the store to decide what he wanted for Christmas. I failed, however, to include the following facts:

1. We would not actually be purchasing any toys on this trip

2. We do not have unlimited funds for Christmas shopping

3.  All the toys in the store had been electrified, ready to deliver a significant shock to anyone who grabbed them from the shelf without asking first

What followed was about as predictable as the French losing a World War. My son developed a sudden affinity for every item we passed, which was overpowered only by his desire for the item located next to the one he had been ogling five seconds before. His efforts to fill the cart with Lego’s, trains, and Matchbox cars were matched only by my labors at returning to items to their rightful locations.

The trip was not a complete waste, however. I did learn several valuable parenting lessons (none of which I will probably remember next Christmas).  First, toddlers really don’t have a clue what they want for Christmas. My son was equally enthused about every item he grabbed, declaring his undying loyalty to each chunk of imported plastic.  Second, toys are way cooler than when I was a kid. Remember when we actually had to imagine that our airplanes flew and our elephants trumpeted? Thanks to technology and a successful campaign by Energizer, that is no longer necessary. 

As I shuffled back to the car in defeat, with no better idea what to get my son for Christmas, he spotted the kids’ cart lodged in a corral. “Daddy, can we go again?” Maybe I should just get him the cart for Christmas.

With Great Speed Comes Great Bodily Injury

Most people think that after the age of say, twelve, you can’t go sledding anymore. This is far from the truth; a great number of teenagers can be found hanging out on sledding hills; they just don’t actually sled. I, however, have been a big fan of sledding my whole life. The rush of wind and the thrill of speed more than make up for the long, arduous climb back up the hill that it took 13 seconds to get down or the jarring in the lower spine caused by bouncing over frozen ground with only a thin piece of plastic for padding.

 Just when I thought my sledding days were over, I realized I could take my son sledding as a weak excuse to fly through the snow once again. “No,” my wife said. “You’re not taking our six-month-old sledding.” Eventually he grew to be two years old, though, a perfect age to sit in a sled in front of me and shield me from the snow flying up in my face. 

I soon discovered that sledding had changed from when I was young. At the age of ten, I would have sought out the mound of snow built up at the bottom of the hill with no other thought than “This will be cool.” Now it’s, “This will hurt. I wonder if my co-pay applies to emergency room visits. Can I use my HSA to purchase ice packs? Maybe I’ll be able to deduct my medical expenses this year.” 

And then there’s the duration of the sledding event. I have nostalgic memories of spending the better part of a day sledding, and most of that time in mid-air wondering “now what?” But now that I’m dragging myself and a thirty-pound toddler up the hill every time, I’m more interested in quality than quantity. As in quality time sitting at the top of the hill resting. But a two year old has no interest in my stalling tactic of explaining why some trees lose their leaves in winter and some do not.  “Really, you want to go again…already?” 

 I can’t help but wonder when my son will be able to pull me up the hill. 

Learning to Speak

A Bible story from thousands of years ago tells of a mighty tower that was built to touch the heavens. Seeing that man was growing brash, God decided to slow down man’s progress a bit by forcing everyone working on the Tower of Babel to speak a different language. Unable to communicate with each other, the workers went their separate ways, and the tower was left unfinished. (This curse has repercussions still today. Just try finding someone to work on your house who speaks the same language as you.) 

Parents of toddlers face a similar curse. We spend the first eighteen or so months of a child’s life being unable to understand him. Hunger, dirty diapers, thirst, exhaustion, and injury are all communicated with the same sound: crying.

Then the magical day comes: a child speaks his first word. For parents, this is an unbelievably joyful day.

He said his first word. Tomorrow he’ll add a few more. Next week he’ll be speaking in sentences. Soon after that, he can begin learning Mandarin. Medical school will surely follow. We’ll retire to that beach house yet!

Our expectations may not be entirely realistic.

My son’s first word was shoes. Once he realized that by repeating the same sound a few times he could get his parents to hold up the item in question and make complete fools of themselves, he began to seek other applications of this new skill. More words followed, and our house soon became a menagerie of concrete nouns. Then came the day he learned the word every parent hopes their child will never say…

No. It was inevitable, I guess. After more than a year of hearing things like no touching the stove, no throwing food, and no pulling the neighbor’s cat’s tale, the word was bound to surface in context. It is a harrowing day when you realize that your child can express a will contrary to yours.

Soon the word began infiltrating all manner of conversation:

Let’s go get in the car.

No!

Let’s put our coat on.

No!

Let’s eat some of our peas.

No!

Let’s skip dinner and have a dessert of ice cream covered brownies slathered in caramel.

No!

It is important to remember at times like these that language acquisition is a gift, not a curse. It’s only when your child asks to borrow the car for a cross country road trip that you’ll find yourself wishing you spoke a different language.

Trick-or-Treating with a Toddler

One of the saddest moments in a person’s life is the year they realize they can no longer go trick-or-treating. This occurs at different times for different people. Many children realize around age twelve that since their superman costume no longer fits, it’s probably time to give up tramping through the neighborhood with a pillow case begging for candy.

Other children take a bit longer. It is not uncommon to see groups of high school students roaming about on Halloween, some of them at least pretending to honor the traditions of this venerated holiday by claiming to be wearing a costume, even if it is their baseball uniform or a set of mismatched socks.

Eventually though, the dream of knocking on people’s doors and having them freely dispense candy ends for all of us. That is, until you have a toddler. I took my son trick-or-treating when he was 17 months old, deciding he was ready based on several acute observations:

1) He could walk

2) He could mumble three syllables that sounded like trick-or-treat

3) He was cute

Walking is important; if your trick-or-treater can’t walk, it might look like you are just carrying a baby around the neighborhood stumping for candy.

Coherent speech is important as well. In fact, I assert that baby-making should be planned so that the ability to walk and talk converge at the earliest possible Halloween. (Others would argue that procreation should be planned around the tax calendar, a theory that does have its own merits.)

Cuteness can not be overrated either. Let’s face it. Who’s getting more candy: the acne-speckled teenager with his hat on backward, or the toddler dressed as a skeleton saying, “Twick-uh-Tweet”?

So for now at least, I can skip staying home to pass out candy and take my own child out for a Halloween adventure. But what to do with all this candy that his pediatrician probably would not want him eating?

It's What's For Dinner

Every father fears for his child’s future. It’s easy to lose sleep at night worrying if your little boy will do well in school, make friends, or ask if he can join ballet.

But for me, one of my worst fears was almost realized before my son turned two.  He quit eating meat.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a vegetarian.  There are plenty of actors, university professors, and even real people who don’t eat meat.  I am just not one of them.

For me a balanced meal is one that includes beef, pork, and chicken.  So I was understandably dismayed when my son turned up his nose at his meat one afternoon. I grew concerned when he did it again the next day. I was severely alarmed the day after that. On day four of his self-imposed meat strike I considered calling the nurse hotline.

Surely a child whose father grills ribs in the garage in December just because he misses the charcoal taste should be more inclined to be a meat eater, shouldn’t he? It didn’t matter what kind of meat it was. Hamburgers, chicken strips, fish sticks, even hot dogs, barely identifiable as meat, were rejected.

With a two-year-old, one’s options are limited when it comes to convincing him to eat. You can pretend the spoon is an airplane, a rocket ship, maybe even a helicopter, but if the toddler isn’t into winged modes of transportation, you’ll get nowhere.

I don’t know why parents think that forks resemble airplanes. And I don’t know why we expect children to respond to this. Maybe it is a holdover from prehistoric days, when food was brought to hungry cave babies by pterodactyls. Maybe it's supposed to appeal to the inner risk-taker in a child. Certainly any kid who thinks diving headfirst off a toddler bed into a pile of freshly folded clothes can see the inherent risk in eating food delivered by a flying fork, and he should respond in excitement.

Just when I was seriously considering thinking about calling the doctor, even though my son's next checkup wasn't scheduled for six months, he returned from the dark side. After I put on a veritable air show with meat on a fork one day, my son ended his meat refusal policy.  Maybe he finally saw the error of his ways. Maybe it was the pterodactyl noises. Or maybe he just pitied me making a fool of myself.

Road Trip

People who keep track of such things tell us that the most accident-prone drivers are teenagers. But I’m not so sure. I get that it is difficult to concentrate on driving when one is simultaneously texting, changing songs on an MP3 player, fixing make-up, and checking a Facebook feed. I don’t see, however, that this level of distraction is any different than what the average parent of a toddler faces on any car trip longer than the driveway.

I try to prepare for long car tips by making my toddler as comfortable as possible. I give him a small bag of cheesy goldfish, and I present him with a pile of his favorite books. Alert and experienced parents are already shaking their heads, knowing that such efforts are in vain.

I learned this the hard way once on a trip across the Midwest with my toddler. Before leaving, I made sure he was properly nestled among Bernstein Bear books, with a full sippy cup and a bowl of raisins at his side. He even had his favorite blanket. My plan was virtually flawless. We were leaving just before nightfall, giving him a short amount of time to brush up on the virtues of familial love taught by the Bernstein Bears before drifting to sleep with a full belly and a comfortable blanket while I drove four hours through the peaceful darkness.

It was three minutes before the first raisin ricocheted off the windshield. Not wanting to disrupt the calm that was surely forthcoming, I turned briefly and gave him a mild frown. Turning my attention back to driving, I had just enough time to nudge the car back across the center line before The Bernstein Bears Love Their Neighbors plopped beside me, knocking over my Mountain Dew and spilling my bag of skittles.

Unfazed, I turned again, this time to deliver a threat. I stopped short of promising to take his books and food away, thinking this would only guarantee that he would not drop into a dreamy slumber quite as quickly.

As I refocused on the road, planting my feet firmly on the brakes to avoid developing a short-term relationship with the driver ahead, I realized almost immediately that I should have considered disarmament. A brief barrage of paperback children’s books was followed by an invasion of Croc-wielding feet slamming into the back of my seat.

With one hand replacing the lid on my soda and the other hand plucking a grape skittle off the floor, I carefully navigated a lane change with my knees while admonishing my son in the rear view mirror.

I eased into my new lane, only to be cut off by a teenage girl lost in conversation on her cell phone. Watch the road, kid, I muttered under my breath.