My first
Christmas as a new parent has come and gone. My minion, my wife, and I have
gone through five versions of Christmas this year; and needless to say, I have
learned quite a bit. Christmas has changed since I was a kid. Or more likely,
my perception of what Christmas is has changed since I became a parent. Which I
think is normal for all of us who now find ourselves taking care of a new
little version of us. Here are just a few things that I have discovered about
Christmas over the past week of family gatherings.
Clothes Are Awesome!
Honestly, I
never thought this would happen in my life; I now consider clothing to be the
epitome of gifts. I know we all experienced those dreaded packages as a kid,
typically from an elder of the family who knew that practical gifts were better
than those that we as children actually enjoy. You could see it sitting there
too, under the tree, the rectangular box, shrouded in wrapping paper that
hasn’t been made since the 1980’s. You would pick it up, and it would not make
a sound, and it had a weird squishy feel to it that was reinforced with weak
department store cardboard. We all had that gift, every year, and we loathed
it.
But I’m an
adult now, and a parent. Go and ask any parent what their favorite gift is for
their kid that is under the age of 18. Know what it is? I’ve only experienced
one Christmas and I can tell you that the answer is simple. Clothes. Flat out.
No joke. 100% cotton, the fabric of our lives, clothes. That dreaded squishy
cardboard box of boredom just became the awesome squishy cardboard box of
parental delight! The reasoning behind this is simple: I don’t need to get clothing
for my minion for another 3 – 6 months! Think about it, for another 3 – 6
months I do not need to go shopping and pick-out another pink/purple/light
blue/orange/yellow/any girly color (because apparently girls can only wear
pastels) four pack of overpriced long sleeve onesies that are always “on sale”.
I have one less errand, and my minion now has a cornucopia of new garments that
she can wear until she’s a year old or more.
That makes
clothes for Christmas a parent’s best friend! AND WE GOT AN AVALANCHE OF
CLOTHES! I want more too! Clothes are the go to holiday gift for a
seven-month-old. And all the clothes are bright colors with sayings like “I
Love Daddy,” or “I may not be perfect, but Mom still thinks I’m AWESOME.” It’s
the stuff that parents of teenagers wish they could put on their kids to
embarrass them, but I get to put it on my little peanut because it’s cute and
awesome! I feel like I just won at life! But then, the real gifts started to
come in…
We Need To Move
Clothes were
only a small portion of the crazy amount of presents my little minion raked in
this year. If you have never been a parent, just think of your sixth birthday.
Remember all the toys you got? Yeah, multiply that dump truck sized haul of joy
you got by 10, imagine none of those wonderful gifts are intended for you, and
you have a small idea about the magnitude of gifts my wife and I were inundated
with for a week.
We have received so many new toys
and “educational” things, that we are actually looking at bigger houses,
because where we live right now is not equipped to handle the spatial demands all
the new toys have. We need an entire floor dedicated to the playthings our
minion now possesses. Which makes sense to me, because when I was growing up,
our entire basement was kid central. All these damn bouncers, play houses, play
mats, play tables, music players, walkers, cause-and-effect thingys, blocks,
balls, and stuffed animals take up more space than what we have available. The
only way to keep them all in one place is to have an entire wing/floor of your
house just focused on keeping the chaos in check.
With the massive influx of toys, I
have come to believe that all the infant and toddler toy manufacturers also own
real estate and housing developments. Not just where I live, but around the
country. My reasoning is simple; new parents get flooded with toys for their
kid at a minimum of twice per year (birthdays and Christmas), and if they live
in a smaller house/townhome/apartment, they need to upgrade to larger living
quarters to accommodate the new demand for space that their current dwelling
can no longer provide. We keep talking about conspiracy theories with the
Government, but what about this one! Toy companies and real estate companies
are in cahoots! This could be my generations The Jungle type of revelation that makes people aware of how
corrupt our toy business is here in the US! I’m not going to do it because I
have a kid…but someone needs to take the reins on this and run with it.
I Am Now An Engineer
With the
toys, gizmos, and noise-makers (that all seem to be straight from a Dr. Seuss
book) that my little minion has gotten this Christmas, it has fallen to me,
Daddy dearest, to construct said toys into their playable form. Think of these
toys as a Transformer, only not as cool. Little did I know, that the people who
design these toys expect us normal folk to be holding some type of engineering
degree and a background in manual labor.
On Christmas morning, my living
room looked like the beginning stages of a construction site on Sesame Street. There
I sat on the floor surrounded by multiple piles of different building projects
with no real sense of organization, my toolbox wide open, screws (because
apparently, every single toy now requires screws of varying sizes), bright
colored plastic pieces of every shape you can imagine, stuffed animals
everywhere, puppets propped up against the wall, an attractive woman singing
children songs (that would be my wife, and I’m assuming that’s what still happens
on Sesame Street), and a small child watching from a distance. You would be
amazed at the detail needed to complete something as simple as an activity
table with no moving parts and four legs. Don’t even try to have me explain the
intricacies of building a playhouse that is for ages 6 months – 2 years. It was
a booklet for the instructions. A BOOKLET! And it was that expensive shiny
paper with colored pictures and everything. I had Lego projects that were less
detailed than this damn playhouse.
Despite my grumblings, I have no
problem with building any of these new toys. In fact, it’s actually quite
relaxing for me. The thing I realized instantly is that a woman must have
created the instructions. Despite the fact that the directions are detailed, I
found that the explanations are simple, the order is logical, and the images
are easy to decipher. If a man had created the same directions, it would simply
be two images of the finished product from two different angles, and it would
just say, “This is what your new playhouse should look like when completed. The
images above show where every part goes, and the holes for the screws that came
with this thing are clearly marked because they will be the only holes you find
on the solid plastic pieces that fit together. So put the screws there. We
tested this with a lab monkey, and he completed it in 10 minutes without any
tools or assistance. We hope you are better than a lab monkey.” Men always
assume that you can just build something by describing how it looks rather than
with step-by-step directions. It’s one of the reasons women live longer.
It’s The Simple Things
My wife
stumbled upon a fun truth to our little minion’s first Christmas by a happy
accident. Toys are great and everything, but if you want to give a
seven-month-old the best gift ever, you need not spend any money. Tissue paper,
boxes, bows, and plastic water bottles are the most amazing gifts possible!
Between the two sides of our families, we got over 100 individual presents for
our little minion. She played with the tissue paper from her first present for
nearly the entire Christmas morning and ignored all the other gifts. Then, when
we had Christmas for my wife’s side of the family, our little minion found a
bow from one of her presents and played with that for a good hour. Now, she
doesn’t cry when you take any of her other toys away. But take away that shiny
red bow? You would think you just told her Santa wasn’t real.
The water
bottle discovery was something similar to the bow incident. I simply had an
empty plastic water bottle. The cheap, flimsy type of bottle that make you
think that you are ingesting small chunks of cancer causing plastic with every
swallow you take. But it makes that cool crinkly sound when you crush it in
your hand. Well, my minion thought that sound was the best thing that she had
ever heard in her entire life. So, the day after Christmas, my little one held
on to my empty water bottle for hours. I would carry her around the house and
she would be holding on to that bottle like it was a part of her, constantly crushing
it with her little fingers, and she would just be entranced by the new sounds
that she was hearing. Even when she dropped it on the floor, I would just
pretend to be a crane and lower her down and she would clamp back onto her
beloved bottle and the fascination would continue.
I learned
that it is not going to be the newest toys, or the latest and greatest things
that my daughter gets that will get her interest. Nope! It’s the basic,
everyday items that I take for granted that she finds to be the most enjoyable
playthings. When she’s older I’m saving every box we get so we can build a big
cardboard castle and she can slay the dragon. My daughter will not be
pretending to be a “princess in distress,” she will be doing all the slaying of
monsters and saving of innocent lives in our little Daddy/Daughter adventures.
So that was
it. That was my first Christmas as a new parent. I found out that clothes are
super sweet, my family needs a bigger house because my minion now has more
stuff than my wife and me combined, I am a master engineer and builder of all
things child related, and all those toys were pointless because my minion got
as much enjoyment out of a water bottle as she did out of her new miniature
piano. Oh, the joys of being a parent will never end. Merry Christmas all, and
have a great New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment