Professional Aspirations in the House of Pooch

A lady from Ian's "Lego League" stopped Amy to tell her about an exchange she had had with Ian. The backdrop to the story is the fact that Ian is perceived to be the best truck-builder in his group, so this lady was making a vocational suggestion to the lad, based on his demonstrated talent in this area:

Lego Lady: Ian, you know, when you grow up, you could design trucks for a living.

Ian: Well, actually, I'm thinking about selling dogs.

Ian and I had almost the exact-same conversation about a week or two ago. He had built a beautiful, elaborate train track across the livingroom, and was showing it off to me, and I told him he could design that kind of thing for a living when he grew up, and he told me that he was thinking of selling dogs for a living.

Amy and I have been trying to figure out what the appeal of Petco would be for Ian, and my best guess is that he loves dogs, and you want to work with what you love, and the kind of work people normally do with dogs (aside from grooming, training, etc.) is to sell them, so for a dog-love such as himself, dog-sales would be a natural profession.

As for where the dog-enthusiasm comes from, I can only point to Benji. Benji is now his most-beloved entity in the realm of child-entertainment, surpassing Short-Circuit, Wall-E, the boy in the movie "Up", and, before all of them, The Wiggles. One ongoing area of dramatic play for actually all three of the children is the dog theme; they get up on the shoe-cubby-shelf in the closet, claiming to be dogs, and have me "buy" them and take them home, with breed varying from child to child as time passes. Sometimes Ian is a terrier, but sometimes he is just "a stray." Even Madeleine, at the tender age of one-and-a-half, says "Arf" (sometimes out of context) and likes to pant, with her tongue hanging out.

My sister says we come by it honestly: before the children came along, the population of our family, not counting rodents in cages, was 50% canine. The children just learned to fit in with their peers, much like Romulus and Remus. In fact, when Ian was born, based on some starry-eyed advice someone had handed out to us (I don't remember who), we had the dogs meet us outside the house, as we came home from the hospital, so that they could sniff Baby Ian, to get familiar with him, and understand that he's now one of us... then we all went into the house, as a single "pack".



(December 10, 2009)