We have far too many toys. Soft toys, plastic toys, educational toys, wooden toys, buggy toys, car toys, teatime toys, you name it. Choose a time of day, a place and an activity and we’ve got a toy to accompany it.
Last week the Christine Cagney moment finally arrived and we admitted we had a problem.
We figured that by the time of Tom’s second birthday one of five things will have to happen:
1. We move to a bigger house
2. I get rid of all my stuff
3. Jane gets rid of all my stuff
4. Tom breaks all my stuff and Jane gets rid of it or…
5. We have a clear out of Tom’s old toys.
The most attractive option for me would be 5, but each and every time we get out a few choice items that Tom just doesn’t need anymore he spies them, plays with them and they instantly become his favourite toy ever. In the Universe. Luckily, therefore, he is ruining most of my things (which consist almost exclusively of books, dvds and cds) by biting/drooling/standing/chewing on them. Some lucky items get the upstairs treatment. These are lucky in much the same way that virgins selected for ritual torture and death used to be lucky in Mayan times.
You see Tom has discovered cause and effect. He causes a ‘daditem’ to be pushed through the bars of the upstairs banister and the effect is that gravity grabs it and smashes it into the floor twenty foot away. Sometimes he will even go through the rigmarole of struggling all the way down 15 stairs to fetch it and try again. This normally does the trick. Both Jane and I have been very strict with him on this and it has had a further effect; he now laughs when he does it. Alright, so it isn’t necessarily the effect we were looking for but it’s an emotional response.
On Tuesday as I sat at the top of the stairs guarding the gaps we realised how silly we’d been in allowing our feelings to stand in the way of systematically binning his toys as Tom sat with me sticking, resticking and reresticking a small yellow plunger to the wall. Due to inequalities on the plaster the plunger never quite held and generally fell off as he reached out for it, a source of massive hilarity moving to amusement then interest and finally puzzlement for the whole length of a Pink Floyd song. About 5.3 days. I actually lost the will to live. This is not a metaphor and I would probably have passed away 2/3rds of the way through the song (just under 3 days) if Tom hadn’t saved his old dad by judiciously grabbing the plunger and plunging it repeatedly onto my face. The best I could muster was ‘Look, he’s squealshch going to squealshch be a squealshch plumber when he squealshch grows up.’
I’m not sure if I’m doing this right, by the way. I’m as fervently over-ambitious as the next Dummiedaddy but whenever I listen to others it’s always ‘Oh, he’s so clever, he’s going to be a doctor/lawyer/astronaut/Congolese dictator when he grows up.’ With me I inevitably end up with ‘Doorman (he loves ’em) shelf stacker (he’s very helpful), dustman (he hates mess) or cat torturer’, most of which are admirable enough occupations, but a step backwards for a boy with such sparkling genes.
At least he’ll be the best dressed dead-thing-scooper-upperer on the M4 for during the last month or so something dangerous has happened: Jane has twigged that first-hand clothes bought from nice, expensive, middle-class shops are smarter than those pulled from huge unwieldy bags of rags bought from Ebay for 67p. In truth many of those bags held several items which were worthwhile. This always made Jane beam even as she sorted the fifty seven remaining t-shirts featuring what appeared to be a series of decomposing Osmonds on the front. But now, now, just as my part-time wage is starting to bite, she has re-discovered shops only to find that toddlers clothes are lovely and cute and thoroughly suited to our gorgeous child. I tried pointing out that Tom could put on a golden crown at 7.15 and stain it by 7.17 but it fell on deaf ears. Well, not deaf, but you know those little birds who sit atop rhinos and peck nits off them whilst the rhino carries on regardless? Guess which one’s me.?
I must admit, fancypants clothes do make him look more grown up, and boy is he growing up! A key fact in this assessment was the state of his room one late afternoon at the end of his daily two hour nap. The books had been tidied away, the soft toys were stacked neatly, his clothes hung up, the cushions plumped and angled, his chair righted. And yet. It stank with the strength of a thousand puffers. He had been in his cot for 120 minutes. In the bizarre absence of anything solid we worked out that he must have expelled over 43 cubic meters of fluff for the downstairs plants to wilt quite so furiously the moment we opened his door. Jane was nearly physically sick and I had a scary flashback to my own student accommodation circa 1988. I would regularly open my window in the morning and have to return later in the day in order to peel the dead squirrels from the windowsill, like some sort of evil Snow White. Well done lad, I muttered, but through a mouth that was clenched firmly shut.
12 March 2007
Dave Fouracre
Dave Fouracre aka "Dave the Dad" is a regular feature writer here at thebabywebsite.com.
Read more about his hilarious experiences as a Dad. |
Dave The Dad 35 - 15 weeks and Counting
