Parental Suicide?

Like many parents, Whitney and I have a great fear and loathing of noisy toys. There are the ones that play the same annoying tune in a horrible synth-y tone over and over again. There are also the talking toys, usually branded (Thomas the train, characters from Pixar movies), that repeat a catchphrase endlessly, and inevitably start going off on their own as their batteries die out, scaring the crap out of us by suddenly informing us how useful we are in a pitch-black room at 1 a.m. (Before we became parents, we were warned that this would happen by a hilarious Denis Leary routine, but we ended up purchasing the talking toys just the same. We just don't listen....)

But we'd noticed that our younger son, Griffin, who was about to turn two, seemed to love maracas and drums and all things rhythmic, and my wife suggested we get him a little drum pad from the great series of realistic (and surprisingly affordable, given that realism) musical instruments from First Act Discovery. And strangely, my first reaction was not "Are you crazy? We'll regret that from the moment he turns It on!" (To be fair, that may have been my second reaction.)

We did pause to think it over: Would we find ourselves holding our heads in pain daily, seriously considering making our son's prized birthday gift "disappear," tragically, overnight? (Or more long-term, would we rue the day we encouraged our son to embrace drumming?)

Well, maybe we will. But such considerations, in the end, don't have a prayer against the unbeatable counterargument: Think of his face when he sees it, and sees what it does. He's going to go crazy for this.

And since he did indeed, we're feeling pretty good about the whole thing right now, though we know it's early yet. Most of me is still hoping this doesn't lead to a real drum kit in the basement in a few years, but you know what? Part of me hopes it does. Weird.

[Photo courtesy of First Act Discovery.]