Things I’ve learned from my children include the following valuable life lessons:
I’ve noticed my children aren’t very adept at relating cause and effect, and when they get their feet stuck in a railing or grab the prickly cactus, they tend to keep doing it, whining the whole time. This inability to connect the dots is very useful in a wide variety of real-life situations, most notably football. Football is an absolutely idiotic pastime by any rational standards. You’re running into other people as hard as you can, you get frequent muscle strains and ligament tears, and the protective padding really doesn’t do all that much to absorb the blunt trauma. The morning after every game in which there’s any sort of contact, you wake up feeling like a car ran over you, backed up, and ran over you again, after which a throng of midgets jumped out and started beating you with hockey sticks. Honestly, whoever came up with this idea should have been flogged and left outside for the saber-toothed tigers. No one’s made us stop yet, though, so I guess we’ll keep doing it.
This is a scientific fact and cannot be argued with. Anytime something needs zazzing up (zazzing up is a technical term meaning “making something so unbelievably awesome, your child will have no other desire but to pay attention to the object of zazzification with rapt wide-eyed wonder”), all you have to do is introduce a dinosaur. “ ‘And then Peter Rabbit made his way through the radish and carrot patches until he found the little gate in the corner of the garden, whereupon he crept out AND WAS IMMEDIATELY SET UPON BY A VELOCIRAPTOR WHO PROCEEDED TO EVISCERATE THE POOR HELPLESS BUNNY WITH A GREAT WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH BECAUSE HE STAYED UP TOO LATE AND KEPT SNEAKING INTO HIS PARENTS’ ROOM AND WAKING THEM UP.’ The end, go to sleep.”
My kids tend to fall over occasionally, as is most children’s wont, and whenever they do, a most peculiar thing occurs. They’ll hit the ground with a thud, splat, or crunch, depending on the kind of surface and which toys are strewn about, and then they’ll immediately look around. The key here is for you to avoid making eye contact while watching them from the corner of your peripherals, because the instant they think someone is paying attention, the sob factory kicks into high gear, and it’s all hands to the pumps before the room floods. If everyone ignores them, they’ll brush the dirt/Legos/Frosted Flakes/antique-vase shards off and continue on their way with nary a care in the world, because it’s really not that big a deal when you stop and think about it. Most grownups do the same thing until they discover Facebook.
That doesn’t stop them from trying it, though.
Give kids something that leaves a legible trail, and they’ll be occupied for the rest of the day. Markers, paint, chalk, mud—if they can draw with it, they’ll use any surface available to put down whatever’s on their minds (usually massively incoherent scrawls of vaguely wandering scribbles and smeared handprints, but perhaps as an adult, I’m just incapable of discerning the higher-order mathematics hidden within the chaos). And when I say any surface, I mean literally any surface. Walls, carpets, kitchen appliances, tables, chairs, dogs, counters, pant legs, swimming pools (a very transient medium), breakfast-cereal boxes, laptop screens—if there’s a possibility, however slim, that whatever they’re holding in their hands could transfer to whatever they see in front of them, it’s Mona Lisa time, as they artistically render all their hopes and dreams and frustrations (which I’m assuming are mainly about pooping and eating, as that’s generally all they seem to do). As logical, sane, healthy adults, we naturally bottle all those feelings up and bury them underneath five hundred mental tons of concrete because repainting the walls all the time is a complete pain in the ass and really ruins a Saturday afternoon. Besides, therapists need to make a living too.
Seriously, try eating something new. I know it’s not what you had before, and you don’t know what it will taste like, but you’ll never find out unless you try it. No, I’m not giving you tiger cereal. You need to take your fork, pick up your food, put it in your mouth, and eat your dinner. Yes, I know it’s green and looks kind of mushy; that’s the way it’s supposed to look. No, I’m not going to cut it up more for you, it’s already cut up enough. All you have to do is take one bite and then you can eat your chicken. No, that doesn’t count as a bite, you stuck your tongue out and then immediately dropped it back onto your plate. I saw you do it. Crying won’t make it disappear from the table; you need to calm down and try a piece. Yes, just one piece and then I’ll eat the rest of it if you don’t want it. There you go, very good, way to be brave, here comes the dinosaur chicken—rawr. I guess I’ll take the rest of—you don’t want me to have it? It’s actually yummy? Okay, if you say so.
Try it sometime. You’d be surprised.