tick tock

When I was a youngun', I remember hearing that there were some adults in the world that didn't like kids. I became obsessed with this notion and was simply appalled. But they were kids once too! It doesn't make sense! Well, now I am officially an ad...adul...whatever, and I don't really like kids. They scream, they cry, they need constant attention, I can't seem to connect with them the way other adults can and it makes me feel inadequate, and anyway puppies are cuter. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'll have some someday and I will love them, but they simply will not be allowed to have more than one friend over at a time. Unless I'm rich and have a very large house with soundproof walls. Anyway, I must be ovulating because I thought this story about Mimi Smartypants' 2-year-old daughter was just the cutest thing ever, and a concise illustration of the neat way kids learn to think.

NUGGETS OF NORA

Harold, my beloved "transitional object" from childhood, the stuffed panda bear that I slept with for an embarrassingly long time, is so old that his fabric skin began to disintegrate like the Shroud of Turin around the time I went to college. It was no longer a matter of patching or sewing up holes; Harold was simply wearing out. At that point, my mother and I discussed how best to preserve him. We thought about unstuffing Harold and pressing his empty skin into a picture frame, but frankly I wasn't ready for something that drastic. Eventually, Harold was put into a large Mason jar like a laboratory specimen, with the hope that a lessened exposure to oxygen would decrease the rate of his crumbling demise.

Nora is fascinated with Harold, who resides in his glass-walled world on top of a living-room bookshelf. She likes to talk about how that's Mommy's bear, and how he's analogous to her Purple Dog, and how Mommy used to be a little baby. Sometimes I take Harold down and let her look closer, and occasionally I even open the jar, with the constant caveat that we have to be careful with Harold because "he's very old."

The other thing in the house that gets called "old" is our cat. We use this concept to explain why the cat sleeps nearly all the time, why she get crabby and bites when Nora just wants to play, and so forth.

I think you can see where this is going.

Nora: Our cat is old.
Me: Yes, our cat is very old.
Nora: Cat...go in jar?

LT and I think that this is a perfect excuse to not have to explain death to our child. When the cat does expire, we will just get her preserved in formaldehyde and put her on display. You get too old, you end up in a jar! Problem solved! Now we just have to convince all of our family members to be cremated, and we'll be all set.