The things they like

I started cleaning up the basement today.  Since the TV broke last year... I haven't been going down there much except to make a run to the beer shelves and to change the litter box.

But cleaning almost anywhere in the house puts my mind into "do I really need this s**t?" mode, and when dealing with the kids stuff it's way easier to say No than when I'm dealing with my own stuff.  I've had my stuff forever!  These kids... they've only had this toy for 5 years!

Not the point of my post, though... what really struck me today was sometimes how bad I was at meeting the kids where they are.  I have a basement full of reminders that my kids are the people they are and they like the things that they like.  They are not the mini-me's maybe sometimes I imagined they would be.  Perhaps this has taken me way too long to figure out.  OTOH, at least I'm coming to terms with it.

Example #1 - Jacob is not a big fan of Lego.  This is glaringly evident by the three unopened Lego kits sitting on the table in the basement.  I think this one is particularly painful because Brian and I both like Lego's and waited patiently until he was the "right" age to dive right into Lego-making.  And while Jacob does like a few elements of Lego (one - the architecture kits that he collects in his room; and two - playing with the Star Wars ships and Lego people once they have been dutifully built by his parents and friends), he doesn't like to sit and follow the directions to assemble them.  So, we've quit buying him new kits (except the buildings.... if anyone needs a Christmas gift idea for him, apparently there is now an Eiffel Tower) and I've let go of the mental image of us sitting around the dining room table together at night, assembling Lego kits as quality family time (which sounds a little corny except that this image really did begin to form during the countless mind-numbing hours spent pushing Thomas trains around in a circle and I would comfort myself knowing that someday we would progress to Lego.  Sigh).

Example #2 - Allison likes toys that are literally what they are supposed to be.  When Allison was younger we bought her a dollhouse.  This dollhouse is still in our basement.  We did a lot of dollhouse shopping and ended up with (what we thought was) a super-cool dollhouse made of wood with all kinds of sets that could fill the largely undecorated interior.  We were then stymied when she showed very little interest in playing with it... ever.  She liked dollhouses, she played with them elsewhere.  Why was she not playing with this one?  The answer has revealed itself over time, but boils down to the fact that she needs toys that are exactly that thing.  All the dollhouses she liked were the plastic ones with the stickers on the walls that looked like windows and the roof pre-molded to look like singles.  What we gave her had no walls and required a lot of mental imaging to play with... too much mental imaging it turns out.


I know we're not the only people who have kids with different interests than our own.  I also take comfort in knowing that this "hopeful shopping" is not limited to things that I buy the kids but also sometimes manifests itself in things we buy for ourselves (I'm looking at you - box of cross-stitch projects that looked so cool on the shelf).

So, it's not me sitting around and wanting the kids to be different people than they are.  It's me sitting around befuddled by the fact that they don't like the things I like.  And the net result is that the basement has come to house the toys that I'd thought the children would enjoy and the toys that I still hold onto with the (fading) hope that someday they will.