Front Yard Rickshaw

Daniel likes me to dress him and carry him around.  He'll be seven very soon, and this clinginess may seem a bit out-of-synch with his age.  But I have this idea - probably an overwhelmingly "minority" opinion, in the world of child-rearing, that if people have unusual dependencies, it's probably because they need to work it out of their system, and if this is true, the worst thing you can do is bark at them to "grow up,' or "do it yourself."

So when he asks me to carry him into the house, from the car, I humor him.  This is a routine phenomenon, especially at night, and I'm quite sure that if I weren't carrying Madeleine, this would not be an issue.  But Madeleine sits way up in a maximum-security car-seat, strapped in Houdini-style, in a mini-van, and she has to get out of a car at night - often a cold night, since this is northern New England - and carrying her into the house makes sense.  But Daniel always  yelps, "Daddy, will you carry me?!" and so I always tell him, "Yes, after I carry Madeleine."  [Need before neurosis..]

But it's not enough for Daniel to be carried from the mini-van into the house.  No - he has to expand the itinerary as long as possible. So he orders me to pick up him, and take him to the very farthest corner of the front-yard (he supplies explicit directions, to avoid ambiguity) and then carry him across the yard and the driveway, and into the house.

And it doesn't always end there:  sometimes Daniel will have me carry him up to his room and put him on his bed, with no intention whatsoever of going to sleep, much of the time.

But now there's a new twist to our protocol.  For awhile, Daniel would direct me to the extreme polar end of the yard by turning my head as I walked; if your head turns right, the entire beast of burden should turn right, if the head turns left, then left...  I didn't really like that one.  There's something awkward about having a six-year-old on your shoulder jerking your head in various directions at random impulses.

But the other night, he perfect the art of Daddy-navigation.  Perched on my shoulders, he held his Batman umbrella, bound up into a neat "pointer," and used it to show me whether I should turn right or left, or perhaps somewhere-over-there.  But that wasn't it:  he also had a non-verbal system to queue me when I wasn't following proper directions.  If he turned left, and I turned right, or didn't turn, or turned insufficiently-left, then he would let out a hissing-like noise, by pronouncing the letter F repeatedly.  The Batman umbrella points right, but I don't quite turn to the the right, and it's "Fffffff!  Ffffff!"  The umbrella points me back toward the opposite direction, but I don't turn,and once again, "Fffff!  Fffff!"  Although there's no vowel in the sound, he somehow managed to make it, at once, menacing and sing-song.

Our house "works" because everybody knows their place.  My place is to turn left when the Batman umbrella tells me so, and to pay better attention when the "Fffff!" of correction whirs in the background.

Of course, I'm starting to wonder when this working-out-of-the-system effect might kick in; it seems like the art form is developing, rather than fading into the background...

(September, 2012)