Play-Doh and Crayons

Kaleb, my tow-headed grandson spent part of Saturday with us along with his "liddle brudder Todey". Of course, Kaleb's little brother's birth certificate renders "Codey" but Kaleb's version is far more precious.

I can say without equivocation that child-rearing is a game for the young. Kaleb is as busy a child as you will ever meet. In between making sweet statements about the scariness of a particular video, he motors from one mess making opportunity to another. Play-doh activity, 16 minutes, 8 seconds. Sticker activity, 14 minutes, 35 seconds. Coloring activity 17 minutes 28 seconds. My wife may dispute even these figures as impossibly long but she discounts the toddler time-dilation effect, in that the time it takes you to clean the last activity exceeds the time spent on the latest activity. Hawking did a paper on this.

Actually, the coloring activity is probably misnamed. Kaleb seems to actually do some modeling with the Play-Doh, using cookie cutters to make impressions in colorful rolled-out sheets of material. However, coloring consists of six to 32 seconds of scribbling and the balance of time is spent breaking and peeling the crayons.

Pat Brady's delightful cartoon strip Rose is Rose detailed this phenomena, with wee Pasquale amusing himself snapping crayons. When I see Kaleb first snapping a fresh crayon, then carefully stripping the paper, I think of Brady's cartoon. This is how Kaleb was able to distract himself during the long service when his liddle brudder was christened (I always imagine breaking a champagne bottle over an infant's head, then letting the little tot slide out to sea. It is therefore important that I not be allowed to explain Christian traditions without proper oversight).

This weekend Gemey purchased a number of items for our collection of tot occupation systems, hoping to fall upon an item to break the 20 minute barrier. I thought we had a winner in a Tootsietoy bubble gun. It looks like a weapon from the 1970s Star Trek cartoon. You screw a bottle of bubbles into a cylindrical well, just like you might load a hand-held flame-thrower with jellied gasoline.

The device required two AA batteries, which went into a compartment in the handle. The battery compartment, perhaps anticipating the sale of the toy to litigious idiots, was secured by a tiny screw which I had to work loose with a small Swiss Army knife. Gemey scolded me for leaving the tool out and accessible. This made me wonder if any children have been maimed by poking themselves with a small Phillips screwdriver left out while installing batteries in a child-proof compartment. Better to just make edible batteries if you ask me.

PeePaw (that's me) finally got it to work, and handed it over to Kaleb in breathless anticipation of a truly mesmerizing summertime gizmo.

No soap, if you pardon the pun. Kaleb played with it for an aggregate of less than ten minutes, no better than the twigs he picked up - twigs he snapped in twain, no less.

Tim McNabb