Kissing kids goodnight in the dark can be a perilous activity indeed. Kids’ Rooms’ floors are often strewn with all sorts of spiked toys and other implements of parental torture. These synthetic artifacts – primarily from McDonald’s Corporation and overly affectionate grandparents - are played with for the requisite 5 minutes and then promptly cast aside to serve as perfect parental land mines.
This is particularly true with overly permissive parents like myself. I am little better at setting an example for and raising my own kids than your average house-trained pet. That is, I know where I should eat and go to the bathroom, but other subtleties of hygiene and normal social living somehow escape me.
So after many years of this goodnight-kissing activity, I think I have “stumbled” upon one of the more painful things to step on – a Thomas the Tank Engine Matchbox Car. I don’t exactly know why this is true – a fortuitous combination of size, density, and prickliness perhaps – but it is so.
Speaking of cabon-based child units, while baking (i.e. accidentally burning) some cookies for my kids the other day, my youngest daughter informed me that these {burnt cookies} “taste exactly like pencil lead” – and I felt quite sure that she knows quite precisely from personal experience exactly what pencil lead tastes like.
I imagined my youngest daughter going about her day and exploring her world – grabbing and sampling everything in sight: pencils? how do they taste? bad – got to remember that one – chapstick? tastes great – but don’t put it on the dogs’ lips though they “just lick it off” (another recent direct quote).
Far from being repelled – I was envious. God, I wish I still had that spirit of curiosity and adventure. By the way, this keyboard and monitor tastes horrible – but the mouse wheel is not bad…
