Category Archives: Random Toy Box

Posts on the general topic of family.

Dessert: a good eater’s just deserts

Our four-year-old has recently made a subtle but useful discovery. The revelation he has come to is that the word dessert is far more handy to a boy than are the words ice cream, cookie, or candy. Ice cream and cookies are unearned treats, things parents are uneasy about handing out freely.

Dessert, on the other hand, is a word full of positive implications. It implies that a good dinner has been fully consumed, or at least those portions not spilled upon table, lap, chair, and floor have been fully consumed. Dessert is earned by good children who have done nothing to turn dinnertime into a headache of remonstrations about the vegetables being part of the meal too.

Dessert is granted far more often than mere cookies and ice cream are. Dessert is earned; it makes the parents feel better about doling out a little sugar. And the best thing of all about dessert, the secret that the boy guards from his parents with silent delight, is that, for all practical purposes, dessert is exactly the same thing as ice cream, candy, or cookies. Cha-Ching!

Cookies, candy and ice cream

These things may have specific names, but if you’re a wily kid, you’ll call them all dessert.

“Daddy, can I have my dessert now?”

“Why, of course! Anything for such a dutiful cleaner of plates!”

But, there are times when even dessert is not the entire utopia it should be. We bought a couple of boxes of ice cream treats – smaller ones for the boy and larger ones for the parents (because the parents occasionally behave well at dinner too).

One night, when the boy asked for dessert, I gave him one of the little ice cream treats. “Can I have one of the big ice creams?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Why not? Are they all gone?”

“Just about,” I said. Actually there were two left, one for Daddy and one for Mommy, but I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion about my distribution plan.

He seemed a little disappointed, but appeared to accept this as a reasonable answer – a much-coveted rarity with him. I went into the kitchen, quietly congratulating myself on the quick thinking that allowed me to escape further debate without resorting to an outright lie.

I was still basking in the light of my own genius, about 30 seconds later, when he appeared in the doorway. He was holding his ice cream treat out ahead him to show that it had not been touched by his mouth. This pristine ice cream, his un-cashed check, proved that our dessert arrangements had not yet been consummated. He looked at me, his eyes filled with that young cynicism I’ve grown to love. “What does just about mean?” he asked.

bowl full of candy

After Halloween, a good dad will step up and help his children work through the excess stockpiles of dessert lying around the house.

Name that tune – the home edition

One of the toys that has been passed down from the first son to the second is a baby activity exersaucer. You lower the baby down into the cockpit in the middle of this toy. He can then turn himself around and play with any of the myriad interesting toys on the circular, outer ledge.

baby playing in exersaucer

Multitasking: picking out some music to enjoy with Mr. Sunshine.

I like this toy. It can buy a busy parent up to 15 minutes of baby-free, two-handed productivity. In 15 minutes, the baby will realize that the outer ring of toys is not really that interesting after all. The baby will begin to wail his head off for someone to come extract him from a device he now considers little more than a psychological prison.

But that 15 minutes is golden.

baby biting Mr. Sunshine

Lunging to give Mr. Sunshine a kiss – or bite him. With that new tooth running the show, you never know what that little mouth is going to do.

One of the toys on the outer ring of our saucer is a group of large buttons with an image of an animal on each. Every time one of these buttons is pushed, the device says a word, or makes a noise, associated with the pictured animal. If the baby is successful in pushing one of the buttons four times in succession, he is rewarded with a snippet of classical music. The one exception to this is the cow button, which plays Old MacDonald, as if the designers could not find a fifth piece of classical music in the public domain.

baby wailing on music

That blur in the middle is the baby’s arm beating on the music player in a fit of classical music dance fever.

The baby, like is brother before him, really enjoys hearing the music. He smiles and swings his arms. The selections are quite lively and melodic, excepting, of course, the insipid Old MacDonald. In fact, the whole family enjoys these bits of music, especially Big Brother, to whom, it seems, they bring back the pleasant memories of his own distant youth.

One day, the baby was pounding away on the cat button when we were all rewarded with the inspired notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Big Brother’s eyes lit up. “I know that music!” he shouted with glee.

It warmed a father’s heart to know that this timeless melody had stayed with him through the years. Maybe he would develop an aptitude for music. Maybe he would become a great musician himself – our own little prodigy.

“That’s the Judge Judy song!” he declared.

And so it is.

You’re wasting everybody’s time, Daddy

When you turn four, life picks up the pace on you. Suddenly, you have a preschool commitment. All the clothes you wore when you were three are now too small or too unfit for your level of sophistication. You’ve got to run around town to find the right blue jeans, a backpack, and even a lunch bag. You’re a busy man when you’re four.

That’s why it’s important to still make time to play. And when you do play, you can’t let grown-ups slow you down with a lot of red tape. You know what needs to get done, play-wise, and you can’t afford to suffer a bunch of time-wasting questions from adults.

I was playing trucks with my son the other day. He had a car transporter truck and a car that rides on it. I was in charge of the car while he drove the truck. He would unload the car for me, I would drive it around for bit, then he would come back with the truck to pick it up again. It was all a very smooth cycle until I started throwing monkey wrenches into the process.

One time, he backed up the truck and set down the ramp for me to drive up. “How do I know you’re the right truck?” I asked.

Toy truck with car on top

Foreground: my hand, holding the stack of paperwork the truck driver gave me to look through. Background: my expensive car, about to be taken away on what might be the wrong truck!

“Because I have a number one on the front,” replied.

“That’s fine, but do you have any paperwork I could look at?” I persisted.

He rolled his eyes at the delay, but took out his imaginary paperwork and handed it over.

I looked through the manifest. “It doesn’t say you’re the right truck anywhere in here,” I told him.

“Okay,” he sighed. “I’ll go ask my boss.” He drove the truck across the carpet to the area where his supposed boss hung out. I didn’t see any boss, but it was six feet away, and with my aging eyesight, I could have missed him. The boy backed the truck up to my car again. “Yup, my boss says I’m the right truck.”

“Okay, well, if your boss says so.” I drove up onto the truck with some reluctance.

boy with toy truck

Getting my car onto the truck, quickly, efficiently, and free of paperwork.

A minute later, the truck came back and dropped off my new car. I was delighted. I drove it around the floor with great excitement.

The truck traveled across the room and back again, backing up in the telltale way that indicated it was here to pick up my car again.

“Are you the right truck?” I asked the driver.

“Yes. And I don’t have any paperwork, so just get on!” he replied.

That’s the way business gets done.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t know everything

My son has come to the conclusion that I know the answer to every question. I have mixed feelings about this development. It is much better than having him conclude that I am ignorant in all things and not worth the time of his curious mind. Yet, it is a tad disheartening to know that I am being thought a liar every time I answer a question with, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know.” is not an acceptable answer. The boy knows that I do know. Of course I know. I know everything. If I say I don’t know, it’s because I’m too lazy to explain the complex workings of the world or I am part of some adult conspiracy to keep kids in the dark concerning the most important facts about life.

And the facts he yearns to know are vitally important to his life. One of the questions that nags at him most often is, “Who sings this song?” when we are listening to the radio. Sometimes, I can answer him; sometimes I can’t. Whenever I have to tell him that I don’t know who sings this song, his face becomes clouded with suspicion. His gut tells him there is some reason why I am holding this information from him, some special reason why grown-ups are so secretive about this particular song. “Won’t you please tell me?” he begs, hoping that by using a nice word and some emphasis he will find the key to unlock my stingy omnipotence.

Lately, he has fashioned a new phrase to combat my withholding of knowledge from him. “Won’t you tell me the whole truth?” he says whenever I answer a question with “I don’t know.” There’s a hint of accusation in this, which is, I suspect, a deliberate tactic by my little Perry Mason to let me know that he is on to my deceit and that I have only a short time to make my confession before he traps me within my own web of lies.

One day, we were riding in the car when we had to pull over to let an ambulance go by. “Follow the ambulance,” the boy commanded from his back-seat throne. “I want to see who’s dead.”

Of course, I couldn’t follow a speeding ambulance and it soon disappeared. Later, the ambulance passed us again, going in the opposite direction. “They must be taking somebody to the hospital,” I said.

“Who’s dead?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Won’t you please tell me?”

“How could I possibly know? I’ve been here with you the whole time.”

“Daddy, won’t you tell me the whole truth?”

“Okay,” I relented cracking the code of silence mandated by the secret circle of adulthood. “Old Joe Tootinbutt is dead,” I ad-libbed. “They’re taking him to the cemetery right now.”

The boy seemed satisfied. The conspiracy continues. . .

Scene in a crowded courtroom.

“You expect me to believe that you have no idea who killed Mr. Boddy in the library with the candlestick? Come now, Colonel Mustard, won’t you tell me the whole truth?” (Artist: James E. Taylor)