It's snowing today....

It snowed today. Actually it snowed yesterday afternoon, last night, this morning and this afternoon. It is supposed to snow more tonight and tomorrow. It has dumped about 15 cm. of snow on us, a fair amount but not enough to trap us in our homes and businesses. Too bad. We’re prepared. We have lots of hot chocolate, ginger cookies, pizza fixings, a couple of sleighs, a toboggan, and a couple of Jeeps. That doesn’t even include the shovels and other implements of wintery destruction.

With a population of approximately 782,439 warm souls in Edmonton, it seems like 782,000 are complaining about the snow. That seems odd you consider it has snowed here for probably the last 20,000 years. We should be at least a little prepared for it. I know we, as a species, are not great for planning ahead. Heck, morning always takes me by surprise, but collectively we have known about the coming snow since last summer. The snow tire ads on television should have been enough to alert us to the coming catastrophe. And we did have a several hours warning of this latest snow fall.

Maybe it is because I have come under the preternatural influence of a gregarious 2 year old, but I am finding snow to be a lot of fun. A small pile of snow in the back yard and away we go, sliding for the morning. Then after the morning of shoveling and playing it is time for hot chocolate and a snack. Now that our naps are done, it is time to consider the pizza party for tonight.

Tomorrow morning, it will be back outside to clear more snow, play with some cheap sleds, and then run and fall in the snow. TroubleMaker likes winter, and I can understand why. He makes it fun.

Now if someone would just dig the car out of the snow bank, I would be grateful. There is a steaming cup of hot chocolate as a reward! Any takers?

Advances in maturity

The other evening my wife was complaining about life. She wasn’t really complaining and it wasn’t about life. She was voicing a lament about TroubleMaker. And it really was less about him and more about his sense of timing. More specifically she was unsettled by how wide the always present gap between what he wants to play and what we need to accomplish is at any given time.

That morning we had been trying to change the sheets on the bed and TroubleMaker had to help. He always seems to need to help. Now I am not sure how much serious research has been done on this but to a two year old playing hide and seek under the sheets is more fun than actually making the bed. The problem lays in the fact that playing hide and seek does not get the bed made. Then there are all the things we had planned for after the bed was made.

This isn’t the first time we have run into this. Two year old children are notorious for having short attention spans and being distracted by inappropriate activities.. Additionally they do not have the sophisticated coping mechanisms we mature members of the species have developed. We are able to sidestep fun very adeptly. In fact, I am pretty sure it has become an almost instinctual reaction to life for most of us. There is after all an appropriate time and place for fun.

And this is not the first time I have run into this issue. I have lived with a dog for the last decade. Max is a schnauzer. That may seem an irrelevant fact, but the Standard Schnauzer is a working breed and it seems like every moment of every day he is ready to play. If I move towards the door, he is ready for a walk. We step outside and he tries to start some sort of game. In his eyes any movement on our part might, and probably should, lead to some sort of new excitement. But he is a dog and does not understand the pressing requirement we have to be productive.

For a time I was mildly interested in Jimmy Buffet’s life, and to a certain degree with Jimmy Buffet himself. This came from time spent reading his autobiography. I found he has an irrational need to enjoy his life. Music, airplanes and fishing, rather than productive endeavours, seem to occupy a great deal of his time.

More and more this message keeps popping up. From Magnum PI to Santa Claus, the great minds of our time keep pointing us towards a new and different way of living. Something apart from what we already know and accept, something that includes fun: a lifestyle that incorporates time for fun.

There is little flexibility built into a typical adult daily schedule to allow for playing but I have learned to make that time. We need to make time for fun, we just can’t allow ourselves too much of it, either the time or the fun.

Women are from Venus, Men are from Toys'R'Us

There are a lot of things about raising a kid I don’t know. Breast feeding and properly dressing wounds are skills I haven’t developed.

There are things I can learn. I can learn to prepare something to eat for TroubleMaker. Although it is difficult to call my creations meals, we do end up with something to nourish us. I have learned to change diapers, bath a child, kiss an ‘owie’ and clean up after he has been sick (sick all over the bed, me and the bathroom). I have learned not to get sick at the sight of someone getting sick.

There are some things I did already know and they may yet come in handy. I can eat for a week using a single pot and a spoon. I can lube the chain on a motorcycle and not get oil on my dress shirt. I can get a Jeep stuck in the mud, while wearing dress shoes, on my way home from work. And I can play. When I boil water it may take a hazardous waste disposal team to deal with the aftermath and diaper changes may ultimately lead to the dreaded poopy blowout, but I can play.

I remember what it was like as a child to be exposed to new toys and have to draw conclusions about their play worthiness. Would it do what I wanted, which should not be confused with was advertised or even what it was designed for. How would dirt affect the toy? How would water affect the toy? How about mud? A child does not just browse the Sear’s Christmas Wish Book.

I also remember the toys that were fun. They allowed us to think outside the box, or at least outside the packaging. They could withstand hours of play and usually did not give us lead poisoning. We were constrained only by our imaginations and the interfering hands of our parents.

So last year my mother-in-law gave TroubleMaker a wooden train set for his birthday. It was an inexpensive one from a local supermarket. It was inexpensive only because my mother-in-law knows how to shop, and it wasn’t branded with some expensive trade mark. We have since added an expansion pack to it and TroubleMaker gets loads of fun out of it – ‘PAY TAINS’ seems to be his favorite refrain.

We can set it up, play for a few days then tear it down. A few days later we set it up again with a completely different layout. TroubleMaker contributes his own ideas to each layout and we have loads of fun. After a while there were some unsettling incidents.

TroubleMaker is an equal opportunity playmate and will draft either my wife or I into playing trains with him. We run the trains around the layout, set up the bridges after he knocks them down, run the trains around some more, wrestle, set up the bridges again, and so on and so on and so on. One night my wife was playing with the TroubleMaker and the trains and asked if we could get some more accessories for the set. I naturally wanted to know what sort of accessories. I am very frugal, sometimes, and the thought of a train shed or turntable scared me. They are expensive. My wife wanted some buildings. Why? So when the engineers parked their trains they would have some place to go for coffee and talk. Go for coffee? Talk? This is not how boys play. Talk? Then it wouldn’t be playing it would be talking. Since when are boys supposed to talk? They yell and scream. Talk? They charge, run, and tackle. Talk? They build and destroy. We do not talk.

Clearly my beloved wife did not understand the point of trains but hours of intense play therapy on the floor with TroubleMaker have taught her how he plays and how boys play. She has even learned to design her own layouts with TroubleMaker. Still, at the end of evening, when it is time to park the trains on a siding and whisk TroubleMaker off to bed, they still call it stopping for coffee. I suppose it doesn’t really matter as long as everyone is having fun.

Maybe play at that level is not as natural for women as it is for men, or maybe I am not as far removed from childhood as I thought. I don’t think I will pose that question to my wife.