All posts in Kids

My old­est boy and I have been read­ing the 50th anniver­sary edi­tion of “Harold and the Pur­ple Crayon” by Crock­ett John­son for a cou­ple of nights now. It’s a nice hard­back col­lec­tion of four of the Harold sto­ries and Noah has been com­pletely enthralled by it. He’ll talk about Harold falling off of a moun­tain only to res­cue him­self by draw­ing a bal­loon so he won’t get hurt. Harold is a clever lit­tle boy who doesn’t for­get how to get out of trou­ble when he needs to and that makes the book fun and excit­ing and inge­nius because the whole thing is Harold’s imag­i­na­tion and where it can take him.

But I started notic­ing some­thing as we were read­ing through the four sto­ries that make up the col­lec­tion — it’s only Harold. There are no other humans any­where in the book. I’m prob­a­bly read­ing too much into it, as I tend to do, but Harold is just all alone in a world of his cre­ation Much like Sci­en­tol­o­gist Tom Cruise. where no one else is. The sto­ries men­tion him look­ing for his home, and him draw­ing the chair that his mother would sit in when she read, and how he remem­bers where his bed is by gaug­ing where the moon is in his win­dow, but other than that Harold is never in a real world.

Now, it could just be that he’s dream­ing and you just never see him wake up, and that’s the more-than-likely answer to the whole thing, or it could be (and I’m just hypoth­e­siz­ing here, brain­storm­ing if you will)maybe Harold is crazy and trapped in his own mind and the pur­ple crayon is some sort of enabler for him to get out of his inner insan­ity, or maybe he’s been trans­ported into a “Twilight-Zone“y place of sight and sound but no dimen­sion other than 2-D and he only has a crayon to help him escape.…

I am read­ing way too much into it. My son likes the story. That’s enough.

Being a dad I’ve hosted birth­day par­ties in the past and have often had to go to birth­day par­ties of the chil­dren of friends of ours. It’s a trade off — you buy my kid a gift and that enti­tles your child to receive a gift from my kid at your kid’s next party. Every par­ent is pay­ing off the other par­ent so that their kids can get some­thing at the birth­day party when it rolls around to being your child’s time again.

And often you’ll put a lot of effort and car­ing into choos­ing that spe­cial birth­day party gift. What does the child like? What is the age range on the gift? Does it have small parts and do they have a younger sib­ling that might choke on those parts? You want to make sure that you don’t get some­thing that the kid won’t play with because more and more stores aren’t let­ting you return, or even exchange for that mat­ter, toys that don’t have a receipt with them. You end up putting a lot of research into deter­min­ing just what kind of present you’re going to buy.

But lately there’s a new trend that until now I hadn’t noticed — the host of the birth­day party (the birth­day partier, if you will) not open­ing their gifts that the invited got for said partier until after the party’s over and everyone’s gone home.

After your effort, aren’t you enti­tled to a lit­tle clo­sure with that present that you took care to find and wrap? What’s up with that? You take your present to the party, your child has fun, and then you leave with­out the host open­ing their gifts. It’s like watch­ing all the way up until the end of Star Wars and not see­ing if the Rebels destroy the Death Star.

Any­way, I’m sound­ing the klaxon that this is a com­pletely uncool trend. Let it end now, par­ents of would-be present non-openers. Don’t even try it, muthas.

One night Noah was hav­ing a pretty hard time try­ing to go to sleep — he was cry­ing, yelling, whin­ing, gen­eral dis­cord. He was up and down, out of bed, back to bed, out of bed again, so on, so on, so on. It was get­ting old, because by the time that the fol­low­ing exchange and sit­u­a­tion hap­pened he’d got­ten up from bed about 20+ times.

So he came into our room again and said this time “Peepee on the potty.”

Now Noah is a bright kid and he knows ways to get us to pay atten­tion to him, and we’ve got a stand­ing rule that if he tells us he needs to pee at night, we’ll help him out, since he still has a semi-hard time get­ting onto the toi­let by him­self. So I got up and took him into the bath­room, sit him down, and he starts the grunt­ing, mean­ing that he’s got to poop. He does his busi­ness and then I start clean­ing him up. All the while he’s cry­ing, yelling, whin­ing, gen­eral dischord, like I said earlier.

I get his under­wear and pj pants back on and we start head­ing back to bed, but he doesn’t want to go. I see I left the wipes open and start to close them, but he yells out -

“No!”

”No what?”

”Not the wipes!”

”What? You don’t want me to close the wipes?”

”Don’t leave the wipes.”

”Don’t leave the wipes?”

”No.”

So I took the wipes with us, and he got in bed, and he ended up sleep­ing with the box of wipes. He was cud­dling them the next morn­ing, too.