The riggors of childhood

The downside of having a mom with a blog is that she always wants to catch those cute moments with her camera. In the midst of those embarrassing, awful moments where most moms would just help you up and out of your predicament, she wants to find her camera and take a photo.

Like yesterday. Ryan likes to play with these pots and pans from my kitchen. He carries them around, puts things in them (oh! We’re having plastic horse for dinner…) and generally strews them about the house. Yesterday he decided to use one of them as a chair (just the right height, I guess). But instead of sitting on the bottom of the pot, he ended up easing himself onto the top, his rear end sinking to the bottom and his little feet dangling over the edge.

He looked at me with shocked eyes “What has happened?!” and instead of going over and helping him out, I ran to get a camera, unable to stifle my laughs. I returned moments later, but by the time I had the camera on and focused, he was already working on an exit strategy. This was the only picture I was able to get to chronicle the event.

And the whole thing (including the slight bit of guilt I felt at not immediately helping him out) reminded me of this past Halloween.

When children are 4 and they want to be Spiderman or a fairy princess, they are delighted when you can turn them into such a character- if only for one day. As kids get older, they learn to create their own fictional character, adding to the fun.

But when your son is 19 months old and you wrangle him into a bee costume, it is for no other reason than you want to see him in a bee costume, and you want pictures of him in a bee costume. Sure, I stood him in front of the mirror, talked to him and tried to impart on him the idea that he was pretending to be this flying creature...but it was to no avail.

And when you are purchasing a costume for a child this age, with the full knowledge that they could care less what they are going to be, you search for three things - price, convenience, and cuteness factor. In your parental simplicity you forget to think like a child, through all of the ramifications of certain costumes. When I picked out the bee costume, and put it on Ryan the morning of the church "trick or treating" party, I had no idea that the three year olds would make a game out of running from the bee....you know, because it stings?


So when the Butterfly Princess and Woody and Mary's Little Lamb ran squealing past me down the hall, it took me a minute to put it all together. "The bee is coming! The bee is coming!" Ahh...I thought...kids are too creative for their own good. Slower and more stumbly, Ryan ran after them, not grasping the point of the game and only looking to play with his buddies. Smiling, he was having a blast. Thankful that he didn’t understand the kids were running from him, I was quickly reminded of what it feels like to grow up. I didn't realize I would have to work with a backward learning curve, here. Iwill have to get past my naiveté before preschool, I’m afraid!