Warren McBuffet at Target

Ian was telling me this evening how he and Daniel ended up with these rather intricate gizmos - basically a toy helicopter-on-a-stick - the helicopter itself whirls and makes a nifty whirring sound when you press a button - with some kind of powdered candy stored at the very bottom of the wand, which actually twists off the rest of the toy like some kind of escape-hatch so that you can get to the candy inside. Of course, by the time I saw the Acquisition - Daniels, to be particular - the powdered candy was gone, although Daniel still routinely asked me to remove the bottom part of it for him as I was driving. There's also some flashlight effect - Ian seemed to have a special battery-generated luminosity in his face in the back seat tonight, as the copter spun and made its very busy, very motory little noise. The boys insisted on having them in hand for the duration of our drive.

Unsurprisingly, getting these compound contraptions turned out to be something of a coup. Ian explained to me how he and Daniel wanted them, and had extensive negotiations with Mommy at Target around whether they were getting them or some other indispensable item, and it sounded like she had been reluctant to invest in the candy-helicopter-flashlight whir-a-gigs, but at the last moment, she relented.

Reflecting on the ultimate outcome of the struggle, Ian apparently realized, all too late, that the window of opportunity had been rife with potential, and that he hadn't quite tested the limits of that windfall to their fullest potential. He concluded the whole thing by saying, "Maybe I should have tried bidding for a car." [Apparently a car is better than a flashlight-helicopter-powdered-candy-cache, and probably more expensive. In any case, I was quite impressed with his use of the word "bid" to characterize the process of trying to get the best possible loot from Mommy at the store.]

Daniel's angle on the whole thing was a bit refreshing, reflecting an entirely different level of sophistication and mastery of the subject matter. As soon as Ian said, "Maybe I should have tried bidding for a car," Daniel piped in, "'Bidding' means 'biting'."

I'm quite sure he wasn't offering a caustic metaphor for Ian's self-aggrandizement at Mommy's expense. I think the whole point of his contribution was to offer some insight into the meaning of the word "bidding", as Samuel Webster might have done if he had been in the car at the time.

At a time when the six-year-old is talking about toys at the department store as if they were some hostile takeover on Wall Street, there's something especially welcome about the four-year-old's spontaneous lesson in vocabulary-of-the-absurd.

(February 23, 2010)