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  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

Thank you all for the fascinating, illuminating, and completely civil conversation on that last post. I often feel like I’ve found one of the rare corners of the Internet that hasn’t been tied down and cornholed to death with a hot beef injection of Crazy, and I’m so grateful for it.

You know what’s sort of funny about the whole topic, is that I brought it up in the first place because Riley had his best school friend over (with her parents) a couple weeks ago and after her mom emailed me about setting up another playdate the Gun Thing suddenly (belatedly) popped into my brain. I’d been hemming and hawing over whether I should go ahead and bring it up and worrying about how to address it and whether or not it was even necessary and all the stuff that got mentioned in the comments, really, and after reading through everything you guys had to say and doing a lot of thinking on it, I was like, all right, I’m going to work up the nerve to talk with the mom about it, let’s DO this thing. And then JB was like, uhh I totally pointed out our safe when I was demonstrating the safety locks on our power tools.

Huh. Okay then. (Ha ha ha, and you guys were worried about the guns. LET’S ALL PLAY BYE BYE FINGERS WITH THE CIRCULAR SAW!) (Oh my god, I’m just kidding, we don’t let visiting kids play in the shop.)

On a different subject, it randomly occurred to me recently that Dylan is officially older than Riley was when I brought Riley on a cross-country trip to Washington D.C. and while my time there with Riley was utterly wonderful and exceeded my expectations in nearly every way, I don’t think there’s any way in hell I’d do something similar with my second son.

This realization speaks volumes about the differences between the two in a way that’s brand new to me, because my memory is so faulty it’s been virtually impossible for me to compare Dylan to what Riley was like at the same age over the last few years (excepting certain things like how one kid slept through the night like a champ and the other woke me up for three solid years, not that, ahem, I’m holding a grudge or anything).

The main difference, I think, is that Dylan has a much shorter attention span than Riley did when he was 3.5-4 years old. For instance, Dylan won’t veg out in front of the TV, while Riley will sit saucer-eyed for hours in front of anything—like, even golf—if you let him. I don’t have any faith that I could keep Dylan entertained on a 7-hour flight, no matter how many distractions I packed on board, whereas I have blog documentation that Riley watched about 937 back-to-back Curious George episodes on the way there and back.

Dylan is also virtually impossible to get from point A to point B. I know I bought a travel stroller for Riley, but that was really less about containment and more about my concern that he’d get worn out walking for long distances. When we weren’t using it, he walked beside me through the airport like a normal, if pint-sized, human being. In comparison, I can barely herd Dylan through a grocery store aisle without wanting to commit seppuku—he wanders, he dashes in random directions, he walks right into people, he stops and touches things, he steps on my feet, he randomly bursts out singing, he loudly exclaims over every single thing he deems newsworthy (“HEY THAT MAN HAS A HAT LIKE A COWBOY DO YOU THINK HE HAS A HORSE MOM?”).

I do remember that out of all the travel logistics with Riley, the only thing that went haywire was the following incident:

We had arrived back in Seattle, rode the little train over towards baggage claim, and were just approaching the escalator when Riley dashed in front of me and hopped on. I think he must have thought it was going to be like the flat people-mover he had so enjoyed in the DC airport, and as he ascended and the steps pulled apart he completely lost his shit. He was clinging to the steps and howling and I pulled him to his feet, begged him to stay put, and in the meantime I managed to leave the stroller back at the bottom of the escalator, so I told him to stand still and I began sprinting back down the up steps, which I thought was going to be easy but ha ha ha HAAAA, NO, I was running like an idiot with my heavy-ass backpack pounding against me and my flip-flops making comical splatting noises against my feet but I was making no progress, like some sort of giant stupid hamster on a wheel, and Riley was screaming “MOMMMMMY!” and stretching a pathetic little arm out to me and people at the top of the escalator turned to see what horrible parent had abandoned their child who was probably going to get sucked under the sucker-inner part at the end and I was like “Just a sec! Just a sec!” and finally a security guard came and grabbed the stroller and got on the escalator and gave it to me, THE END.

I am absolutely 100% convinced that if I took Dylan on a similar trip, I’d have at least 83 different stories like that, only much, much worse. It’s funny, I would never have said Dylan is harder than Riley was, and in many ways I think he’s more lighthearted, affectionate and fun than Mr. Suspicious was during the preschool years, but there is no freaking way I’d get on a plane with him. Bless his adorable, mischievous, totally unique heart.

I have a question for you. Well, first I have a statement: we own guns. Like, more than one. JB is an avid shooter and let’s just say when the zombies come we are totally prepared as far as weaponry is considered.

Every gun we own is stored in a safe. One safe is of the large standup variety and it has a bank-vault type lock, the other safe involves typing a code into a keypad type thing. Kidproof.

So here’s what I’m wondering: now that Riley’s old enough to start having school friends over, is our gun ownership (and storage details) something I should be responsible for bringing up with their parents prior to any sort of playdate? In my mind I’ve thought of this subject sort of like a food allergy—in that if your visiting kid has one, I expect you to approach me ahead of time with your concerns and requirements—but I wonder if I’m off base with that.

What do you think?

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