Magnetic Fields

I never realized how early likes and dislikes begin with children until recently.  Last weekend at a children's birthday party we discovered that Molly shares my childhood fear of men with moustaches.  As a child I couldn't handle being anywhere near men with moustaches and didn't get over this until I was around 3 years old.* 

Earlier this week Chris introduced the children to a new, potentially dangerous, but favourite game.  About two years ago The Rogers Centre began to offer their beer in new fangled fancy magnet cups that fill from the bottom and are sealed with a magnet.**  Chris loves baseball and beer and attended 20-25 games a year with his father pre-babygeddon and currently goes to about 15 games a year.***  So, we have a lot of beer magnets sitting on our fridge.  Beer magnets that have, until this week been stored on the highest possible section of the fridge to prevent baby choking.

A few nights ago, I came down to the kitchen to the sound of intense uproarious laughter, the low husky contagious laugh of Jack.  He and Chris were sitting on the floor throwing beer magnets at the fridge.  Like most Jack centric games, the adult tries to build something and he acts like King Kong and tears it down, while he laughs - a lot.   So essentially, the object of the game is to throw magnets at the fridge and then slide or pull them off the fridge, and repeat: ad nauseum.

And that's not even half of the beer magnets.

"These are big enough that they can't swallow them right?" Chris asked me.

As if on queue, Molly jammed a round magnet into her mouth in attempt to consume it.

So the magnets went back up to the upper regions of the freezer and we moved the kids onto another activity.

The following night I had forgotten a recent and important development in the minions, their memories span longer than the life of a fruit fly now.  Jack and I were playing in the living room when he crawled away, on a mission.  We waited a minute and then followed him because the typical silence coming from the kitchen signalled that he was up to something that he shouldn't be.  Jack had torn down some raw "artwork" that Molly had made at daycare from off of the fridge**** releasing 2 beer magnets and allowing him to play his new favourite game - the magnet game.  Apparently we can add problem solving to the list of Jack's accomplishments and my son now shares a hobby with Charlie Day of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.*****   

Molly's outsider "art"

So the score this week is Magnets 1, Moustaches 0, Toronto Blue Jays -42




*This was particularly difficult with it being the 1970s and moustaches were everywhere: going outside was like a stroll through Dante's Inferno to me.  I guess the same could be said today for Molly with the recent outbreak of hipsters.
**They are pretty neat, but a horrible option for a fiddler and label peeler such as myself and would likely result in a lap full of beer.  This is why my baseball drink of choice is slushies.
***We try to blame the minions for the reduction in number of games attended, but another, larger factor is the level of epic suckage from the Blue Jays this year.
****See outsider art: defined loosely as rough art produced by babies or insane-asylum inmates.
**** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxszvrUeluE