"...‘Peed... I am ‘peed..."
When he’s not singing himself to sleep with the isolated lines he knows from the 2 dominant songs off the Cars movie soundtrack (Real Gone by Sheryl Crow, and Rascal Flatts’ unfortunate cover of Tom Cochrane’s Life Is A Highway), my 2.5-year-old is reciting lines from actual movie scenes in the dark solitude of his bedroom. His use of the /sp/ blend (ex: spin, spill) is still spotty at best, so Lightning McQueen’s infamous first words on screen ("Speed. I am speed") sound like an admission of incontinence, rather than an exercise in self-visualization. When my toddler then goes on to end the recitation with, “Oh yeah…Lightning’s ready!” using the exact intonation of the character, there’s an awkward creepiness about it—like he just fast-forwarded to age 13 and I should probably shut his door for privacy’s sake before we’re all scarred for life.
In June 2006, I’d been a married woman for just 4 months. I spent that first month of summer hosting hockey parties with my new husband and watching the Hurricanes win the Stanley Cup from the basement of our old split-level. Elsewhere in the world, Pixar was debuting Cars, a piece of computer-animated cinema that would one day innervate my waking hours like the autonomic nervous system--governing every breath, heartbeat, and digestive process my future children would have between the ages of 2 and 4. While I was none the wiser, having beer and snacks with all my fellow childless friends nearly a decade ago, this children’s film phenomenon was in theaters nationwide, setting in motion what I can only assume is a perpetual money-making machine. With its premiere, the ground must have split apart with a mighty quaking, allowing the images of Lightning McQueen and Mater to emerge from the center of the earth in cones of light, while dollar bills rained like manna from the heavens. The children’s children of anyone who got in on the ground floor of that franchise will surely be going to the college of their choice for generations to come on the proceeds from all the merchandise I alone have purchased—not to mention the rest of the universe.
While I’ve come to realize that people, young and old, from all walks of life are obsessed with this movie--the genetic switch for the onset of full-blown Cars mania seems to have been 2 years old on the dot in this family. My older son, being our first, introduced us to this most sacred of all contemporary children’s movies, forcing us through the fierceness of his addiction to commit to memory both Cars I and Cars II, and to accumulate a sprawling collection of die-cast characters-- most of which were awarded as prizes during the potty-training days for successfully defecating in the toilet. During the height of his Cars hysteria, Santa also brought my older son a plastic placemat with a color depiction of each major character from both movies. Some nights he could scarcely begin eating before going through the litany of character names…Raoul Ca Roule…Carla Veloso…Guido…Luigi…which is how the face of Miguel Camino became the golden rule for where to safely place one’s cup so as not to spill.
From the Cars comforter on his bed, to the decals on his wall, to the night light projecting scenes from Cars II onto his ceiling, my older son was heavily steeped in the over-arching aura of Cars’ majesty for a pretty intense 2 year period. Now at four, like he is slowly waking from a stupor, his interests are beginning to drift ever so gradually to other things…super heroes, dinosaurs, Blaze and the Monster Machines. He will still watch Cars and play with all the associated swag from time to time, but the spell has clearly been broken. The names of less prominent characters…Max Schnell, Shu Todoroki…once part of his nightly quiz for mom and dad, are beginning to escape him, having been replaced by the necessary vernacular required to apply fresh intensity to his newer obsessions. He recently uttered the word "Minecraft" for the first time, knowing next to nothing about it except that the kids in his class with older siblings think it's cool. Nevertheless, the countdown to onset of the next developmental addiction is officially on.
Meanwhile, sometime between the age of 18 months and 2 years, his younger brother experienced the figurative Cars equivalent of a grand mal seizure. That same switch was effectively thrown and he has been in an altered state of consciousness ever since. The minute his eyes open in the morning, he starts asking for the song from the soundtrack he calls "left from right, have a big mouth, see sumpin I don't like, I gonna say it, slow down, gonna crash, Lighting-a-queen have a blast blast blast", according to all the words as he hears them in the tune that's actually entitled "Real Gone". He sings it to himself so often that his obligatory pause for dramatic emphasis after "see sumpin I don't like" has an almost Pavlovian effect for me, causing me to subsequently blurt out "I gonna say it" from wherever I might be in the house. I'm immediately chastised by his "NO, MOMMY!" in response--like I'm interrupting Sheldon Cooper's knock-knock-knock-"Penny", forcing him to start all over again.
In contrast with my older son, younger brother has limited interest in Cars II and prefers to stim-out on the original. He is a fervent fan of Mack the truck, a fairly secondary character--but he might as well be the "Elvis" of my son's toddler-hood for the level of adoration he inspires. My younger son luckily inherited an existing Mack from his brother. Nevertheless, the very first major potty prize of my younger son's tenure was his "New Mack", which opens into a playset and bears on each side of its rig, pictures and writing identical to the character in the movie. These details are an improvement on his predecessor--who was clearly not up to spec, making him a shadow of an excuse for my son's fave of all faves. Thanks to "New Mack", along with Wingo (passed down from big brother) and the 3 other "Tuner" characters earned by subsequent potty success, he can now authentically re-enact the scene where Mack is run off the road, causing Lightning to slide out of the rig and get left sleeping amid oncoming traffic. The first "Tuner" he requested was DJ, whom he refers to as "Eh-yo-DJ", according to the line DJ’s friend uses to get his attention in the movie. Next, came "Snotrod", whose name is an adorable play on the term "hot rod" that emphasizes this character's tendency to sneeze frequently. Last, but not least was Boost, whose acquisition was met with a celebration similar to a ribbon-cutting ceremony or opening night at the theater. The foursome of "Tuners" was at long last complete.
Oh yes—my younger son is a stickler for detail and exercises his fandom on a level far beyond what his brother ever endeavored to achieve. Of the no less than 7 versions we have of Lightning McQueen, he obsesses over one in particular and will tear the house apart to find it--simply because it bears white writing on the tires, thus making it more like the real thing. Nearly every day begins with him assembling his cars on the ledge behind the loveseat in the living room--and happiness, for him, is those rare days or nights when it’s just the two of us and he can eat pasta while watching Cars I from beginning to end without complaint from the rest of the house.
As both boys have made the progression through Cars fever, rudimentary approximations like ka-keen and light-neen-a-queen for Lightning McQueen have given way to meticulously accurate articulation of Francesco Bernouli and "life is a highway, I wanna drive it all night long". If the second son is anything like the first, the growth in the sophistication of language skills will prove inversely proportional to the gradual fade of Cars’ influence—and that will be a sad milestone indeed, for Ray and I. We’ve studied the names of all the characters, committed to memory the dialogue from 2 movies, scoured the aisles of every Target and Walmart in search of paraphernalia ranging from rare to ubiquitous, and sought out every spin-off--from digital shorts to 5-minute music video montages to random YouTube clips where Lightning McQueen has been superimposed in to a video game alongside Spiderman, Mickey Mouse, and Elsa from Frozen. Our son, like his brother, will just grow out of this phase and move on. But for us, the parents—it’s never that easy.
Like when a relative continues to give you Barbie Dolls a few birthdays too long, what seems like 2 lifetimes ago to our kids is recent past for us. Our still-vivid memories resist letting any other image rest on top without colors from the underlying picture mixing and muddling our perception of anything that comes after it. As parents we are in a constant state of letting go of whatever littler person once was—or just was—just 6 months to one year ago. Along with those habits we can’t wait to forget—the crapping in one’s pants not 2 minutes after the fifth reminder to go sit on the potty—goes the singing, the excitement, the endearing mispronunciations. At this point, I feel like I could rest easy for the remainder of my life, never having to listen to a single second of Real Gone ever again. But I’m sure, one day, it’ll come on in the car as we’re flipping stations—and I’ll gesture to my younger son excitedly in the rearview mirror, saying, “Remember?!? Remember how much you loved this song?” And my son will likely shrug and grunt in response, not even pretending to really listen before returning to Minecraft, Grand-theft Auto, World of Warcraft--or whatever monstrosity of a gaming experience has, by then, caught the interest of his generation of device-wielding zombies. Meanwhile, I’ll probably soak in every note--in spite of my former self, singing along to the forgotten soundtrack of his toddler-hood—and undoubtedly embarrassing my son to within an inch of his existence.
It seems entirely possible at this point that my younger son may be a Cars super-fan for life—but more than likely, this too shall pass for him, as it did for his brother. Until then, that Cars placemat remains a fixture on the table. It has migrated from the older to the younger son’s spot with the passage of time and it’s beginning to peel apart into two separate layers at the bottom right corner. My younger son can now “hide” the head of his spoon in the resulting crevice—a crevice that is surely a breeding ground for any number of childhood viruses and flesh-eating bacteria. When I ask him for the millionth time to put his spoon on his plate before he contracts dysentery from his placemat—he’ll tell me the disease-infested flap is “a tunnel, Mommy” and that his spoon is trying to “win the race” through the smear of yogurt snaking away from the placemat. Maybe this time, I’ll take a picture--of his face, of this mess, of his brother encouraging him despite my pleas to the contrary. Because one day that placemat will be in the garbage—or at best, deeply sanitized and sealed in a storage container. And if I have the good fortune to come across that mat 20 years from now, I know I’ll yearn to see these faces again alongside of it, just as they are now, before they forgot this set of things that they loved and moved on to embrace whatever came next.
But...sometimes I get ahead of myself emotionally when it comes to the kids. Just last weekend, the younger one woke up in the middle of the night because he'd kicked off his blankets--and then lay awake in his bed for the next hour and a half, periodically calling out to me with subsequent issues he refers to as "ploblems". On my fourth and final trip to his room, I asked him what he needed. "I wanna watch 'Left from right, have a big mouth, say sumpin I don't like...'", he began to respond before I cut him off with a whisper-yell. "Tomorrow..,now good NIGHT."
And just the other day, the older son fashioned this on the floor of his room during quiet time (the mandatory period of solitary play gently enforced each day during the hour his brother still naps):
When he’s not singing himself to sleep with the isolated lines he knows from the 2 dominant songs off the Cars movie soundtrack (Real Gone by Sheryl Crow, and Rascal Flatts’ unfortunate cover of Tom Cochrane’s Life Is A Highway), my 2.5-year-old is reciting lines from actual movie scenes in the dark solitude of his bedroom. His use of the /sp/ blend (ex: spin, spill) is still spotty at best, so Lightning McQueen’s infamous first words on screen ("Speed. I am speed") sound like an admission of incontinence, rather than an exercise in self-visualization. When my toddler then goes on to end the recitation with, “Oh yeah…Lightning’s ready!” using the exact intonation of the character, there’s an awkward creepiness about it—like he just fast-forwarded to age 13 and I should probably shut his door for privacy’s sake before we’re all scarred for life.
In June 2006, I’d been a married woman for just 4 months. I spent that first month of summer hosting hockey parties with my new husband and watching the Hurricanes win the Stanley Cup from the basement of our old split-level. Elsewhere in the world, Pixar was debuting Cars, a piece of computer-animated cinema that would one day innervate my waking hours like the autonomic nervous system--governing every breath, heartbeat, and digestive process my future children would have between the ages of 2 and 4. While I was none the wiser, having beer and snacks with all my fellow childless friends nearly a decade ago, this children’s film phenomenon was in theaters nationwide, setting in motion what I can only assume is a perpetual money-making machine. With its premiere, the ground must have split apart with a mighty quaking, allowing the images of Lightning McQueen and Mater to emerge from the center of the earth in cones of light, while dollar bills rained like manna from the heavens. The children’s children of anyone who got in on the ground floor of that franchise will surely be going to the college of their choice for generations to come on the proceeds from all the merchandise I alone have purchased—not to mention the rest of the universe.
While I’ve come to realize that people, young and old, from all walks of life are obsessed with this movie--the genetic switch for the onset of full-blown Cars mania seems to have been 2 years old on the dot in this family. My older son, being our first, introduced us to this most sacred of all contemporary children’s movies, forcing us through the fierceness of his addiction to commit to memory both Cars I and Cars II, and to accumulate a sprawling collection of die-cast characters-- most of which were awarded as prizes during the potty-training days for successfully defecating in the toilet. During the height of his Cars hysteria, Santa also brought my older son a plastic placemat with a color depiction of each major character from both movies. Some nights he could scarcely begin eating before going through the litany of character names…Raoul Ca Roule…Carla Veloso…Guido…Luigi…which is how the face of Miguel Camino became the golden rule for where to safely place one’s cup so as not to spill.
From the Cars comforter on his bed, to the decals on his wall, to the night light projecting scenes from Cars II onto his ceiling, my older son was heavily steeped in the over-arching aura of Cars’ majesty for a pretty intense 2 year period. Now at four, like he is slowly waking from a stupor, his interests are beginning to drift ever so gradually to other things…super heroes, dinosaurs, Blaze and the Monster Machines. He will still watch Cars and play with all the associated swag from time to time, but the spell has clearly been broken. The names of less prominent characters…Max Schnell, Shu Todoroki…once part of his nightly quiz for mom and dad, are beginning to escape him, having been replaced by the necessary vernacular required to apply fresh intensity to his newer obsessions. He recently uttered the word "Minecraft" for the first time, knowing next to nothing about it except that the kids in his class with older siblings think it's cool. Nevertheless, the countdown to onset of the next developmental addiction is officially on.
Meanwhile, sometime between the age of 18 months and 2 years, his younger brother experienced the figurative Cars equivalent of a grand mal seizure. That same switch was effectively thrown and he has been in an altered state of consciousness ever since. The minute his eyes open in the morning, he starts asking for the song from the soundtrack he calls "left from right, have a big mouth, see sumpin I don't like, I gonna say it, slow down, gonna crash, Lighting-a-queen have a blast blast blast", according to all the words as he hears them in the tune that's actually entitled "Real Gone". He sings it to himself so often that his obligatory pause for dramatic emphasis after "see sumpin I don't like" has an almost Pavlovian effect for me, causing me to subsequently blurt out "I gonna say it" from wherever I might be in the house. I'm immediately chastised by his "NO, MOMMY!" in response--like I'm interrupting Sheldon Cooper's knock-knock-knock-"Penny", forcing him to start all over again.
In contrast with my older son, younger brother has limited interest in Cars II and prefers to stim-out on the original. He is a fervent fan of Mack the truck, a fairly secondary character--but he might as well be the "Elvis" of my son's toddler-hood for the level of adoration he inspires. My younger son luckily inherited an existing Mack from his brother. Nevertheless, the very first major potty prize of my younger son's tenure was his "New Mack", which opens into a playset and bears on each side of its rig, pictures and writing identical to the character in the movie. These details are an improvement on his predecessor--who was clearly not up to spec, making him a shadow of an excuse for my son's fave of all faves. Thanks to "New Mack", along with Wingo (passed down from big brother) and the 3 other "Tuner" characters earned by subsequent potty success, he can now authentically re-enact the scene where Mack is run off the road, causing Lightning to slide out of the rig and get left sleeping amid oncoming traffic. The first "Tuner" he requested was DJ, whom he refers to as "Eh-yo-DJ", according to the line DJ’s friend uses to get his attention in the movie. Next, came "Snotrod", whose name is an adorable play on the term "hot rod" that emphasizes this character's tendency to sneeze frequently. Last, but not least was Boost, whose acquisition was met with a celebration similar to a ribbon-cutting ceremony or opening night at the theater. The foursome of "Tuners" was at long last complete.
Oh yes—my younger son is a stickler for detail and exercises his fandom on a level far beyond what his brother ever endeavored to achieve. Of the no less than 7 versions we have of Lightning McQueen, he obsesses over one in particular and will tear the house apart to find it--simply because it bears white writing on the tires, thus making it more like the real thing. Nearly every day begins with him assembling his cars on the ledge behind the loveseat in the living room--and happiness, for him, is those rare days or nights when it’s just the two of us and he can eat pasta while watching Cars I from beginning to end without complaint from the rest of the house.
As both boys have made the progression through Cars fever, rudimentary approximations like ka-keen and light-neen-a-queen for Lightning McQueen have given way to meticulously accurate articulation of Francesco Bernouli and "life is a highway, I wanna drive it all night long". If the second son is anything like the first, the growth in the sophistication of language skills will prove inversely proportional to the gradual fade of Cars’ influence—and that will be a sad milestone indeed, for Ray and I. We’ve studied the names of all the characters, committed to memory the dialogue from 2 movies, scoured the aisles of every Target and Walmart in search of paraphernalia ranging from rare to ubiquitous, and sought out every spin-off--from digital shorts to 5-minute music video montages to random YouTube clips where Lightning McQueen has been superimposed in to a video game alongside Spiderman, Mickey Mouse, and Elsa from Frozen. Our son, like his brother, will just grow out of this phase and move on. But for us, the parents—it’s never that easy.
Like when a relative continues to give you Barbie Dolls a few birthdays too long, what seems like 2 lifetimes ago to our kids is recent past for us. Our still-vivid memories resist letting any other image rest on top without colors from the underlying picture mixing and muddling our perception of anything that comes after it. As parents we are in a constant state of letting go of whatever littler person once was—or just was—just 6 months to one year ago. Along with those habits we can’t wait to forget—the crapping in one’s pants not 2 minutes after the fifth reminder to go sit on the potty—goes the singing, the excitement, the endearing mispronunciations. At this point, I feel like I could rest easy for the remainder of my life, never having to listen to a single second of Real Gone ever again. But I’m sure, one day, it’ll come on in the car as we’re flipping stations—and I’ll gesture to my younger son excitedly in the rearview mirror, saying, “Remember?!? Remember how much you loved this song?” And my son will likely shrug and grunt in response, not even pretending to really listen before returning to Minecraft, Grand-theft Auto, World of Warcraft--or whatever monstrosity of a gaming experience has, by then, caught the interest of his generation of device-wielding zombies. Meanwhile, I’ll probably soak in every note--in spite of my former self, singing along to the forgotten soundtrack of his toddler-hood—and undoubtedly embarrassing my son to within an inch of his existence.
It seems entirely possible at this point that my younger son may be a Cars super-fan for life—but more than likely, this too shall pass for him, as it did for his brother. Until then, that Cars placemat remains a fixture on the table. It has migrated from the older to the younger son’s spot with the passage of time and it’s beginning to peel apart into two separate layers at the bottom right corner. My younger son can now “hide” the head of his spoon in the resulting crevice—a crevice that is surely a breeding ground for any number of childhood viruses and flesh-eating bacteria. When I ask him for the millionth time to put his spoon on his plate before he contracts dysentery from his placemat—he’ll tell me the disease-infested flap is “a tunnel, Mommy” and that his spoon is trying to “win the race” through the smear of yogurt snaking away from the placemat. Maybe this time, I’ll take a picture--of his face, of this mess, of his brother encouraging him despite my pleas to the contrary. Because one day that placemat will be in the garbage—or at best, deeply sanitized and sealed in a storage container. And if I have the good fortune to come across that mat 20 years from now, I know I’ll yearn to see these faces again alongside of it, just as they are now, before they forgot this set of things that they loved and moved on to embrace whatever came next.
But...sometimes I get ahead of myself emotionally when it comes to the kids. Just last weekend, the younger one woke up in the middle of the night because he'd kicked off his blankets--and then lay awake in his bed for the next hour and a half, periodically calling out to me with subsequent issues he refers to as "ploblems". On my fourth and final trip to his room, I asked him what he needed. "I wanna watch 'Left from right, have a big mouth, say sumpin I don't like...'", he began to respond before I cut him off with a whisper-yell. "Tomorrow..,now good NIGHT."
And just the other day, the older son fashioned this on the floor of his room during quiet time (the mandatory period of solitary play gently enforced each day during the hour his brother still naps):
"Mommy, I made you a flower!" he said. I guess somebody still loves Cars--and his mommy. For now anyway!
Lucky for me, these young years are going--and going fast--but not gone. Not yet.
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