Kid Amnesiac

Right on schedule (I assume, I can’t actually find information about this), Simon has begun naming his toy “friends.” Matt and I gave Dirty Dog, Bob, Super Speedy, and much of the stuffed menagerie their names, but now he’s picking out names himself.

Over the past two days, he’s chosen the names “Tickle” and “Douglas”. The catch is that “Tickle” and “Douglas” are not stuffed animals. They are a toy car and a toy dump-truck respectively. “Tickle” comes from the book Tickle the Pig, and Douglas from Thomas and Friends, so we’re clearly re-purposing rather than inventing from whole cloth.

I’m amused, but not terribly surprised, by this development. Each night when we tuck Simon into bed, we used to make a big show of arranging his stuffed animals. He was despondent unless he had a dirty dog in each hand for comfort. These days, he goes to bed with a wooden car in each hand. Some nights it’s the two matching yellow cars, others it’s a blue car and a green car, but it’s always a car and it’s almost always two of them. They get clutched like life rafts while the stuffed animals are unceremoniously piled in a heap.

Last year about this time, Simon went off to the Itsy Bitsy class at KIP with Dirty Dog as his escort. School starts next week. Will he insist on taking a named vehicle with him? I kind of hope not! He’s already the school runner, the school ladies’ man, and the school sensitive/easily scared kid. I really don’t want to walk down the halls and be asked, “Oh, your son is the one with the car named “Tickle” right?”  I mean, there’s endearing weird, adn then there’s just plain weird, and this might just put us over the line.