Day 738 - Crazy for Cars

Andrew is obsessed with cars or anything with wheels. You name it: trucks, sedans, skateboards, and even elderly people on scooters. Andrew loves them all.

We never encouraged him to play with cars. There's a shelf full of miscellaneous toys for the kids to play with. It has everything from blocks to dolls to rattles to matches to syringes to cars. And for some stereotypical reason, Andrew took a liking to cars.

At first it was pretty cute. Andrew would walk around the house with one of his plastic cars or a book about cars. Or if we were in the car driving around town, Andrew would occasionally shout out, "Car!" Of course our friends and family noticed Andrew's gravitation towards four-wheeled things so they began buying him toys and books all about cars.

But a child's first love can also be a parent's worst nightmare. What am I talking about? Let me give you some examples:

-While stuck and stressed out on the freeway, Andrew points out all of the cars on the road passing you up. "Car!! Car! Car!!! Car!! Car! Car!!!!!"

-You're trying to get stuff done around the house, but Andrew comes up to you asking you to draw a car...with every color inside a Crayola crayon box.

-Once again, you're in the car driving with Andrew. But this time Andrew is crying and screaming because he dropped his toy car on the floor, and there's no way to pick it up until you pull over.

-Andrew pushes Emma to the ground because she was playing with one of his dozens and dozens of toy cars.

...and the examples can go on and on.

Let me clarify that Andrew is not OCD about cars, but he certainly enjoys playing with them every day. At least there are times throughout the day when we see him playing with other things that are not car-related. Yet I'd say over half his day is spent playing, reading, or talking about cars. I guess there is nothing unusual about a kid his age taking a liking towards a certain thing. When I was Andrew's age, I remember being fixated on my three Bs: blocks, boxes, and boobs.

Yet as a parent, you do tire of your kid's fixations. They want you to do the same things over and over again since kids find comfort in patterns and repetition. You draw the same thing, you read the same books, and you sing the same songs. It's like your Tivo is broken and you're seeing the same show over and over again. In our instance, it's repeating the movies Cars, The Cannonball Run, and Christine.

But what I try to remind myself is that this is just a part of your child's development, and you're only going to experience it once. Although you may become irritated and bored with your child's requests, you still end up drawing another picture of a damn car for the 1000th time because it makes your kid happy (By the way, my car drawings are becoming really good!). It's just too bad Andrew didn't become attached to something that I shared a common interest in like musical theater or cross-dressing. We really could've done some father-son bonding over A Chorus Line soundtrack and a nice summer dress.