Tag Archives: parenting

To have loved and lost in the mall play area

It was a hot summer night, probably. Inside the mall, it was a static 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

A one-year-old boy was carried by his daddy. The boy pointed at the children’s play area, saying, “Uuuuuuh!” into his father’s ear at a volume equal to a toddler’s thrill of discovery.

At this time and place, and in the language of one-year-olds, “Uuuuuuh!” meant “Father, if it so pleases you, I would quite enjoy a visit to the enclosed area in which the children are kept.”

“You want to go to the play area?” the plodding father asked.

The boy pointed again and elaborated. “Üuuuuuh!”

“Üuuuuuh!” sounds different from “Uuuuuuh!” by virtue of its umlaut and the fact that it generally proclaimed more passionately. In this context, “Üuuuuuh!” meant “Yes, please.”

Inside the play area, the little boy crawled on the colorful carpet, navigating around squishy airplanes, trucks, and an incongruous, foam bank vault.

Money slide

A foam bank vault with a money slide. It’s not as fun once you figure out the money’s not real.

The boy was perfectly content picking up nasty germs from the communal carpet when she toddled into his life. She was one of those classy girls, who doesn’t show too much diaper. She had dark eyes to match her wavy hair. She wore a cute, flower pattern dress and pink socks.

He knew there was something special about her the moment she stepped on his hand. He wasn’t a very good walker yet, not like she was. Still, he proudly stood himself up, because the one thing he could do handsomely was balance, as long as he didn’t have to move his feet.

She showed him her best moves, taking three steps forward, and three steps back. The backward stuff was tricky though, and she toppled at the third step. She fell right down on her bottom, but she didn’t cry. He liked that about her, so he grinned at her with both dimples. She smiled back at him, showing off her chubby cheeks.

He’d been standing for a long time; rather than push his luck, he got down upon his knees. They crawled toward one another. She reached out for him, pressing her thumb against his nose. He giggled. She laughed too. It was a moment filled with potential.

Ah, what might have been!

Her parents collected her. Her father carried her out into the mall crowd. The boy watched them in stunned silence. He had to run after her, except he didn’t know how to run yet. He did what he could. He crawled. He crawled after her as fast as his two knees, and associated hands, could go. He crawled right out the entrance to the play land.

Five feet beyond the entrance, his daddy picked him up. The boy searched the distance over his father’s shoulder, reaching out his hand after her. “Aaaaaaaa!” he called out in desperation.

“Aaaaaaaa!” defies direct interpretation. It could mean “Pretty girl!” Perhaps it was a proper noun, like “Isabella!” Though worlds removed from Stanley Kowalski, the anguish in the boy’s voice made his plea sound most like the name: “Stella!”

The exact meaning is lost, and so was she – lost in the turning of the mall wing.

magic wheel

“Oh, play land wheel of fortune, tell me, will I ever see her again?”

The sad little boy was taken home, to be cheered by playing with his cat. When the cat ran away, the boy called after it: “Aaaaaaaa!”

We take our Stellas where we find them.

Dad, can I have a Sugar Mama?

When I talk to my son, I try not to give him stereotypical parent-speak in reply to his questions. My hope is that he will learn to put thought into his words rather than repeat the things he hears most often, just to keep his voice prominent in conversations. This is the goal, but sometimes it is difficult to avoid backsliding. Sometimes, I find myself uttering phrases to him that are so hackneyed they could have been written in Hollywood.

We had a few people visiting our house. They were all unmarried, young adults. Our guests discussed among themselves the topic of whom they each were, or were not, dating. Since my son and I had little to add, we played while the grown-ups were talking. I didn’t think my son was paying any attention to the discussion, which means he drank in every word of it.

The next day, we had to drop my wife off at the home of one of our erstwhile visitors. After my wife exited the car, my son asked me, “Who lives here?”

“Jill.”

“Who’s Jill?”

“Remember the blonde-haired lady who was at our house yesterday?”

“Oh. That’s Jill?” There was short pause, followed by, “Daddy, do you think I should date her?”

After picking my jaw out of my lap and replacing it onto my face, I told him, “No.”

“Why not?”

This was my fatherly moment of truth. I could have used it to have an intelligent discussion with my son. I might even have taught him something. Let’s examine the options.

Intelligent thing #1 I could have said, but didn’t:

“Do you know what it means to date someone?”

This might have produced a meaningful discussion about relationships. Once he learned that dating has been known to lead to kissing, he would have thrown himself into reverse.

Intelligent thing #2 I could have said, but didn’t:

“Because four-year-olds, even if they are four-and-a-half, don’t date anyone.”

This would have allowed me to explain that, at his age, playing in the dirt is so much more fun than dating would be. Moreover, even as an adult, he would have dates when he wished he could just walk out and go fling himself into a dirt hole.

Mud puddle crew

“Wha’d’ya say fellas? Should we go back to our dates or fling ourselves into this hole?” (Image: John Vachon/U.S. Farm Security Administration)

And the winner is . . . . .

Trite thing I blurted out without thinking:

“Because she’s old enough to be your mother.”

Every grown woman on Earth is old enough to be his mother. That doesn’t concern him because the boy has no idea what age has to do with dating. He doesn’t know the difference between dating and saying hello. I might as well have told him not to say hello to Jill because she’s old enough to be his mother.

It made that much sense, and yet I said it.

And he accepted it.

“Who should I date then?” he asked.

“Someone your own age, when you’re much, much, much older,” I said.

And we left it at that.

Mending pants

Don’t get tangled up with an experienced woman. She’ll only string you along.

Baby’s first television theme song

Our one-year-old loves music. He’ll ride in the car and sing along to the radio in his baby way. You can’t understand any of what he’s saying, but you get the idea that he’s attempting to express himself musically. To my 45-year-old ears, that makes it a lot like Hip-Hop.

Music has been useful in soothing both of our children. When he was a baby, the big boy used to respond well to the soulful blues of Luther Allison. Somehow, my wife supplanted Luther with Robin Thicke this time around. I’m not thrilled at this development, but if it keeps the baby happy, so be it. The Wiggles will probably take precedence over everything in a few months anyway.

Babies are geniuses at mimicry. This explains why the baby loves to sing. I mentioned previously that we have a new cuckoo clock. They baby loves to mimic this too. He points at the clock and says, “Uh-oh, uh-oh,” which is not exactly “cuc-koo, cuc-koo,” but he has the inflection down perfectly. The baby’s impersonation is that of a cuckoo who has spilled his juice all over the carpet precisely at two o’clock. “Uh-oh, uh-oh!”

Uh-oh, uh-oh.

“Oh no, I spilled my juice! By the way, it’s two o’clock, if anybody cares.”

Mimicking simple sounds is standard fare for babies. When they put enough sounds together, it can blow your mind. The other day, the baby was sitting on the floor playing with some toy, or maybe it was a strand of cat fur – who can tell with babies? What mattered was that he was quiet and content.

I was working on the computer. From somewhere behind me came the soft melody of the theme to the 1960s Batman TV show. I turned very slowly as my mind ruled out possible sources of this music: the TV was off; the big boy and his mother were out; the cuckoo only knows two notes, and he was nailed to the wall in the other room anyway; and the cat can’t carry a tune to save his life.

I steeled myself to face a cheesy-TV-show-loving housebreaker, but there was no one there. There was no one except an unusually self-contented 14-month-old. The baby looked up at me and crooned, “Soba soba soba soba sot, YAN YAN!”

Okay, the vocals weren’t all that discernible, but he’s a child of his musical era. The melody was dead on.

Batman gets his goat

Just imagine how many evil-doing goats he’d be able to apprehend, now that he has a baby brother to sing his theme song.

His big brother likes to watch old Batman reruns on Saturday nights, so it’s not a mystery where he got the tune. The thing that blew my mind was that we had missed the last couple of Saturdays. It had been nearly three weeks since we’d heard that theme. The baby sat on those notes all that time so he could pull them out of his diaper weeks later and give Daddy a good shock.

Since then, we constantly goad him into singing the Batman theme for the amusement and amazement of our friends and acquaintances, because, to the best of our knowledge, that’s how parents are supposed to garner attention by exploiting the talents of their children.

Eavesdropping on the class of 2026

Kids have the best conversations. If you ever fall into the habit of eavesdropping on kids when they discuss the world with each other, you will discover vast storehouses of knowledge. Between them, kids having a conversation know nearly everything, even if much of that knowledge is manufactured on the spot by their collective imaginations. There is only one thing kids in conversation will never know, and that is just how funny their conversation is.

The other day, I spent the afternoon with my four-year-old son and his five-year-old friend. We were driving home from the museum when we passed our local university’s beef cattle research facility.

5YO: “That’s the place where they butcher cows for meat.”

4YO: “Wait a minute. I thought we get milk from cows.”

5YO: “There’s different kinds of cows. There are cows we get milk from and cows we eat.”

4YO: “And cows that wag their tails.”

5YO: “Those are horses.”

Taft's pet cow

And then there are the smart ones who go to cowlledge.

(Further reading about cowlledge here.)

Later, at a red light, my son spotted a man waiting to cross the street. The man was wearing a McDonald’s cap and a polo shirt with a McDonald’s logo on the breast. He was holding a McDonald’s bag.

4YO: “Hey, look, there’s a McDonald’s man.”

5YO: “Yeah. He works at McDonald’s. He’s carrying a McDonald’s bag too.”

4YO: “He probably got fired. Then he said, ‘Well, at least I can get some food before I have to go home.’ That’s why he’s got some hamburgers.”

5YO: “Yup, he got fired.”

Get your burgers and go.

“Your severance package is frying up as we speak.”

When we got home, the kids started playing with an army tank and a helicopter. This is the conversation the tank had with the chopper.

TANK: “Hey, Buddy, you wanna go out to lunch?”

CHOPPER: “Okay, where should we go?”

TANK: “We can go to Wendy’s.”

CHOPPER: “Yeah! And we can have [soda] pop!”

TANK: “Actually, I don’t know if I can eat anything. I don’t really have a mouth, just some guns.”

Tank and helicopter make lunch plans.

“I’d love to have lunch with you but I have a problem. You see, I’m orally challenged.”

I only wish I could remember some of the other entertaining exchanges between them. I’m tempted to follow them around with a tape recorder, except that when I play it back I’d have to fast forward through all the fake fart noises and ensuing hysterical laughter. That would take way too much time.