Daddy's Fish BowlA Clear View Of A Father's Family Experiences

The Insurmountable Object

I’m going to throw out a few adjectives to describe a person and I want you to try and guess who I’m talking about.  Would you like to play along?  Sure you do, why else would you be here if you didn’t.  Okay, ready, here we go: tricky, sneaky, deceptive, and let’s see, one more, uh, devious, yeah that’ll work.  So based on those four adjectives, who am I talking about?  Could it be a criminal, your local con-artist, your significant other?  Those are all good guesses but they’re wrong.  Those words describe non other than my 19 month old baby boy, Tre!

To be so young, the little rascal (ah, remember that show?) has more tricks up his sleeve than a magician.  It’s quite entertaining to watch him try to get away with things because he has no clue that he isn’t fooling anyone.  Let me give you an example: he has a “Learn & Groove table”, which we will be reviewing tomorrow for Tre’s Thursday Toy Review, (oh wow, a plug for one of my articles, within one of my articles, didn’t know I could do that).  Sorry, I got off track, okay back to the story; so this table, he loves playing with it, he enjoys imitating the sounds and dancing to the music.  Well recently he has been trying to climb on the table as if he was about to play a few rounds of “King of the Hill”.  We constantly tell him to stop and get down, typically he complies and all is well.  A few days ago, this was not the case, the little gears in his mind started grinding and he decided that he would fool Mommy & Daddy.

He began by playing with the table normally as it is intended to be used; but sure enough, that got boring really quick so he went into Spiderman mode and began his climbing adventure.  For some reason, he was extremely persistent in his attempts to reach the top.  We had watched “King Kong” a while back, so maybe he was just trying to re-enact the movie.  After about three times of telling him to get down, I finally said “if you climb up there again, I’m going to take it” surprisingly, he understood this threat and willfully agreed to a cease & desist order.  At least I thought he did.  Tre sits next to the table for a few minutes with a strange look on his face; I thought that his feelings were hurt since I had yelled at him.  Little did I know he was performing a scene from the cartoon “Pinky & the Brain” and devising his plan to take over the world! Well not so much the world, but at least our living room.

After the blueprints were drawn, it was time to put his plan in motion.  He started off by pushing the table back and forth through the living room a few times.  This was very smart, as he does this from time to time and it has now become a normal part of play, nothing suspicious at all.  So after he has thrown the “heat” off by acting normal, he pushes the table to the side of the couch.  This action was a bit irregular, but we just figured, hey, he’s exploring new areas, since he was already going back and forth anyway.  Unbeknownst to us, it was all a diversion so that he could once again attempt to attain glory by reaching the top of “Mount Learn & Groove”.

Once we didn’t hear the table moving anymore, we started to pay attention to the little mastermind.  Upon further inspection, what do we notice, none other than Tre growing slowly taller as he began climbing the table.  All I could do was laugh; it was so funny because in his mind, as long as we couldn’t see the table, then we wouldn’t know what he was up too.  While he was doing it, he was looking at us with the most self-satisfying smile ever, as if to say, “I’m getting away with this right under your noses & you have no clue”; it was a very smug smile.  It never occurred to him that if we continually saw his head rising, that it might set off a red flag.  I just couldn’t bring myself to burst his bubble by informing him that the world’s greatest crime had not been pulled off today, so I just let him climb and bask in the glory.