Second only to Boudreaux's Butt Paste for awesome product names!
So here I am, my inaugural post on Life of Dad. I’ve decided to blatantly rip off one of my favorite TV shows for my post titles, so for other fans of Chuck these titles are for you! I’ll do my best to keep you interested, but just as a blanket disclaimer if any of my blogs seem a tad short, it’s could be because my son is in the midst of carrying out a nefarious plot to destroy something in the house, and I must go thwart his efforts. He actually owned a shirt that he has long grown out of that said “I’m why we can’t have nice things”… my wife and I are considering ordering a number of duplicate shirts in various “grown spurt” size ranges.
The workings of a young toddler’s mind and the thought process of a computer engineer are an interesting mix. Before I had a little boy of my own, if someone came up to me and asked how I’d go about wiping the runny nose of an almost two year old, I wouldn’t give it much of a second thought. Tissue…meet nose. Done, right? Until you have to actually do it, however, there’s no anticipating a toddler’s superhuman ability to simply turn his head from side to side repeatedly and flail his arms around and consistently best the attempts of someone over thirty years older than him and six times his body weight. Two or three mostly shredded tissues and about five minutes later, we return to our respective corners and he gets to revel in the notion that Daddy has accepted the “well, I got most of it” outcome as a victory.
I find myself enjoying this game of trying to get inside the head of my little youngster. He’s 21 months old now… if I say “almost 22 months” even one day before he’s ACTUALLY 22 months, I’m accused of making him grow up too quick. I see the gears turning now, as he starts working things out on his own, and it’s really a fascinating thing to observe. I can determine with a fairly high degree of accuracy which toys he’s going to enjoy most just by factoring in which toy will make the loudest noise when tossed across the kitchen floor regardless of what the toy’s actual function is. Thinking this to be incredibly amusing at first (and daydreaming about what a fantastic pitcher or quarterback this clearly indicates he’ll be), admittedly I did not think ahead to just what sorts of things could come from throwing loud (and usually fairly hard) things across the kitchen, as the fresh dent in my refrigerator will attest to.
Food has been the latest chess match. In the beginning, he would eat every single thing my wife and I put in front of him. This was great! No worries about him being a finicky eater, or so we thought. Then came the day where he really started to observe what was going on that miniature fork that we’d hand him before putting it in his mouth. First he started handing back the forkfuls of pasta that contain a little broccoli stowaway as if those forkfuls were defective. Then came his new method of taste testing, where he’d bring a piece of food to his mouth, put it on the tip of his tongue, and then we’d wait with held breath to see whether it’d go down the hatch or be carefully placed back down on his tray again with a face that says “Daddy, I’ve trained you better than this.” Always thinking like an engineer, I’ve become convinced in recent weeks that I can defeat any and all “picky eating” habits if I can simply devise a way to shape all of my son’s food to LOOK like chicken nuggets. It’s going to take a little bit of extra ingenuity and possibly defying some laws of physics to make yogurt behave that way, but I’ll find a way to make it happen!