Since the day Ryan learned how to propel his fat little baby body forward in some approximation of a crawl, he has been a perpetual motion machine. This is not a child content to sit his ass down and draw a picture or read a book or put together a puzzle, no sir. This is a man of action. In fact, one day when he was four years old I implored him to take a break and play on his iPad — begged! Pleaded! — and he said, appalled: “but Mom, that’s not active!”
From the moment he wakes up til the glorious conclusion of what is always an excruciatingly protracted bedtime routine, he’s got shit to do. He needs to ride his bike. Flips must be performed on the trampoline. There’s a bucket of wiffle balls just begging to be hit over neighbors’ fences. Oooooh wait! He’s going to play with Legos like one of those nice quiet kids I’ve heard about! Hahahaha just kidding, he’s building a giant block with 200 pieces, wrapping it in duct tape, and seeing if it can survive a drop from the second story window1.
He is, as the hip youths say, extra.
Simply preventing him from breaking bones or getting lost in public is a truly daunting task. God bless us all when we leave the house:
He is an objectively exhausting child to keep up with. I have lost track of him in public at least a dozen times. There are no fewer than three items in my home right now that are broken on account of wayward baseballs. And do you want to know how many times I’ve been asked to record a slow motion video of him hitting a water balloon with a baseball bat? Unfortunately I cannot tell you, because it is not possible for human beings to count that high.
This is who he is, though, and the truth is that it’s all in good fun; he suffers not from bad behavior or poor impulse control but rather…excessive enthusiasm. I’ve learned to accept my fate and simply not buy too many breakable items. At times I’ve even smugly considered myself to be some kind of paragon of composure in the face of insanity: behold this child and admire my patience and tolerance for his energy and heart attack-inducing antics! I’M INCREDIBLE!
But then Graffin brought me back to earth by developing a personality absolutely nothing like Ryan’s and yet somehow requiring more patience in a single hour than his brother does in a week.
Graffin is not a tree climber, nor a trampoline flipper, nor a person incapable of resisting the urge to pick up a large stick while on a walk and whack every tree we subsequently pass (ahem). He likes books! And board games! He could spend hours playing video games! He’s creative and independent and never lacks ideas or the ambition to bring them to fruition. He’s amazing. He’s brilliant! He’s…fucking exhausting.
Nothing with this kid is straightforward or expeditious. There’s no such thing as a “quick game of Candy Land” or a “mindless hour of video games.” Everything is “big picture” with Graffin. You have to organize game pieces into themed teams. Every possible setting and option on a video game must be explored and tested prior to playing. Each and every piece of a Lego construction has a specific purpose and possibly its own personality, and no you cannot simply substitute this brick for that one. Yes, we can play pirates but first we need to don costumes and transform our living room into an authentic 17th century trading vessel!
He may be the only person in history to seek out and read the credits for a video game. I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW VIDEO GAMES HAD CREDITS.
It’s like he’s operating on a different level than the rest of us idiots – we’re over here pushing checkers around the board, and he’s the only one with access to the real rule book which apparently contains 500 pages of additional instructions that makes the game twice as complicated and way less boring.
Ryan may forever be running four blocks ahead of me trying to simultaneously chase a bird, pick up an interesting-looking rock, and land a perfect cartwheel, but Graffin’s intensity is unrivaled. It’s not even close.
Last month we took a red eye to New York2 for a little vacation, and when Ryan and I collapsed into bed at the hotel for a desperately needed nap many hours later, Graffin stayed up by himself and built a store. There were toys on display. Price tags (where did he even get paper?!). A snack section. An employee wearing a mask; very conscientious. Shopping bags were even available for your convenience.
I woke up to a paper “credit card” being shoved into my hand so I could “shop”. NO STONE UNTURNED.
This is what I’m dealing with, and I’d be lying if I claimed to love every second of it. It’s one thing to agree to play a good old fashioned game of Life, quite another to discover you’ve inadvertently committed to a two hour exercise in method acting as all players are now required to really live the game. Think long and hard about which job to pick, and make sure you give your tiny plastic babies great names!3
It’s easy to be impatient in these situations, and I was, for a long time. That hard-won patience I’d honed watching Ryan turn my home into a Ninja Warrior course was no match for this kid. I can’t tell you how many times I encouraged Graffin to “move things along,” with varying degrees of annoyance creeping into my voice, feeling awful as I said it because let’s face it, it’s not like I had anything better to do, it’s just that Graffin’s way of doing things really is a lot of work.
And then one day, as we reached the twentieth minute of a detailed demonstration of every special ability of every character (of which there were approximately 50) of a video game he was ostensibly teaching me how to play, I said it again: “Bud, can we please move this along?”
To which he replied, justifiably frustrated: “I’m just trying to give you all the information or you won’t have as much fun!”
It was a lightbulb moment for me. All the extra steps, all of the elaborate setup and immersion into everything he does, big and small…he really is operating on a different level. It’s not just that he’s a detail-oriented individual, or that he likes things to be “complete,” although those things may be true as well. He just wants to have the full experience, no matter what he’s doing. There’s all this information available and he’d be selling himself short to ignore it and just mash buttons on a game controller blindly or set up Lego figures with mismatching pants. Why go halfway when you can use the information and maximize your enjoyment?!
So I learned all the moves. And then I spent ten minutes creating an avatar that looked just like me. And then I played in “practice mode” while he gave me tips to improve my skills. And THEN we played the game, and it was pretty goddamn amazing, even though I lost miserably.
I’ve vowed to banish “move this along” from my vocabulary. Just as I have accepted Ryan’s zest for action, I’m embracing Graffin’s unique appreciation for the big picture. Who wouldn’t want to live life with all the information at hand?!
BONUS: please note the missing picture frame on the shelf, a victim of one of the aforementioned wayward baseballs.
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Footnotes:
1It survived that as well as 24 other methods of destruction. In other news, I have a lot of smashed legos embedded in my lawn.
2Perhaps don’t come to me for “traveling with kids” tips.
3In fairness, I should confess that my cousin and I played Life like this as kids and it really is a blast. Don’t buy the Victorian house, it’s falling apart!!
The Baby Is Fine 