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.]

Life During Naptime: Tiny Art Director

While I promise to always concentrate on the kids’ entertainment that’s the nominal focus of this blog, from time to time I see something aimed at a parental audience that I can’t resist typing about. The first such entry is a humor book for parents that came out a couple of months ago: Bill Zeman’s Tiny Art Director: A Toddler and Her Vision.

I was at a nexus of parenting and graphic design for nearly four years at Cookie magazine, so it’s sort of shocking I’d never run across the blog from which this book is drawn. In it, artist Zeman has been relating his (largely unsuccessful) attempts to fulfill the drawing requests of his young daughter, Rosie. (She was two years old when he started; now she’s five.) On the other hand, I’m now sort of glad I hadn’t found it earlier, because I think I had the chance to appreciate the book, a collection of some of Zeman’s best and funniest entries, all the more.

From all other indications, Rosie seems a lovely little girl, but in her assignments to her poor father and her reactions to his “submissions,” she is a true tyrant, of the kind every artist on assignment must dread: She changes her mind midstream. She flatly contradicts herself on precise details of her original requests, denying she ever made them. She completely forgets what she’s asked for seconds after she’s asked for it. She yells and demeans his talent.

Having now gone back to see the original blog, I also have to say the book’s format, if anything, makes things  funnier. Each spread contains “the brief” (Rosie’s original request) and the drawing Zeman has created from it on the left-hand side, and the “critique” (her reaction to the finished work), along with a stamp of approval or rejection, on the right. (I’d say the rejected-to-approved ratio approaches 20 to 1.) And while Rosie’s behavior is perfectly familiar to parents who’ve lived with kids this age, the “art director” frame has the wonderful effect of making her seem borderline insane—similar to the supremely wacked-out bosses on some sitcoms. The cumulative effect is laugh-out-loud funny, and pretty irresistible.

A typical example: Given the brief “A ‘C,’ an ‘H,’ and a dinosaur mouth”—for which, Zeman notes, requests for any further clarification from Tiny Art Director were denied—the artist pens a green T. rex in profile, with the two letters in his open jaws. Tiny Art Director’s critique: “NO!!!! CH and a mouth! I hate the mouth and the teeth.” An artist’s statement follows: “I never did find out what the heck this was all about.” Below, another:

Postscript: Tiny Art Director is clearly aimed at adults, but my five-year-old got curious about it while I was checking it out, and soon became fascinated himself—though on a different level, it seemed. He wasn’t laughing at the humor, just checking out the drawings. I was wondering whether he was getting the concept at all when he walked over to me with the book and, pointing to one of Zeman’s rare approved drawings, said with a beaming smile, “Look! She liked one!”

[Photos: Whitney Webster]