From
the time they take their first steps to the time you send them off on
the preschool bus, your life with a toddler is a trip through the
looking glass. And just like Alice, you will be confused and confounded
by something new every day. If you’ve never been totally in charge of a
2-year-old demon spawn from the pits of hell, you might find this
amusing, if a bit incredible. If you’ve actually raised a child through
the toddler phase, you will laugh uncontrollably at how spot-on this
list really is.
2. THEIR RULES ARE LABYRINTHINE AND INEXPLICABLE
Watching
a toddler is like watching an alien creature build some kind of
extraterrestrial machine. It’s like watching ritually-peculiar Druid
magic, or the interpretive dance of a sentient spam-bot. Our boy-human
will put on an Indiana Jones hat and start calling himself “Nemo.” He’ll
hand you things and then demand you hold them and if you try to give
them back you’ve broken some ancient changeling contract. He’ll require a
very particular truck and if you hand him one that is 95% the same
truck, he’ll actually hate you — like, maybe literally hate you — for at
least two minutes. (Then he’ll forget.) He’ll place things around the
room or perform a sequence of events that, for all you know, is meant to
unlock some kind of apocalypse. It’s methodical and maddening, like a
bird building a nest out of watch parts. Other times? He’s not like that
at all.
3. THE WOLVERINE TORNADO
Take a bunch of
wolverines. Throw them into a roaring F5 tornado. That’s a toddler.
It’ll tear through your home, shrieking and whirling about, scooping
things up and depositing them elsewhere. It’ll lose things. It’ll
destroy other things. It’ll change direction in the hair’s breadth of a
moment — “I’m doing this no now I’m doing this other thing wait what’s
that over there.”
Chuck Wendig’s observations as a father
include a part about toddlers being “proto-teenagers.” As the parent of
several teenagers, I look forward to his analogies when his child
reaches that stage of life. And I will laugh then, too.
From
the time they take their first steps to the time you send them off on
the preschool bus, your life with a toddler is a trip through the
looking glass. And just like Alice, you will be confused and confounded
by something new every day. If you’ve never been totally in charge of a
2-year-old demon spawn from the pits of hell, you might find this
amusing, if a bit incredible. If you’ve actually raised a child through
the toddler phase, you will laugh uncontrollably at how spot-on this
list really is.
No comments:
Post a Comment