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So Liam turned 3 last week. He had two preschool Valentine’s Day parties and not only did we celebrate his birthday on his birthday, but he had a party for his friends (note: do not try this at home) and another party for our family. It was a weeklong debauch of candy, cards, cake and presents, which I’m sure he believes is 100% devoted to him and his miraculous birth. We still nearly have an entire cake’s worth of leftover cake, which we are working our way through steadily each night. It’s wrong to waste food, after all.
Anyway, for his birthday, Liam’s uncle and aunt (my brother and sister-in-law, respectively), presented Liam with a gift certificate to a store called Build-A-Bear Workshop. Now for those of you who aren’t around children, or never enter a mall, or perhaps you enter malls, but do not have this store in your area, Build-A-Bear Workshop is a store where children make their own stuffed animals and then accessorize them with a bunch of overpriced crap. We would never take Liam to Build-A-Bear on our own, but as a gift, it’s not such a bad idea.
The store is more of a concept, where the lucky child picks out an unstuffed animal of his or her choice. An animal skin, as it were. There are bears and dogs and Fredbird the Redbirds (St. Louis only) and a pretty cute turtle whose shell was really a backpack. Liam chose a dinosaur and instantly became attached to it. After choosing an animal, the child takes it to a stuffing machine where a nice teenaged girl sticks a large metal tube in the animal’s back and fills the animal with stuffing. Then the child picks out a little fabric heart and places it inside (awwww … barf) and the girl sews up the back of the toy. Then the kid takes his new toy to a “washing station”, which is a pretend bathtub with showerheads that blow air and the kid is supposed to brush and fluff the animal.
Then it’s on to the real moneymaker of the joint, the spot where you can pick out clothes and accessories for your animal at exorbitant prices. There’s T-shirts, pants, shoes, sunglasses, strollers, cars, Halloween costumes, police uniforms, ballet tutus, you name it. Liam picked out a T-shirt with dinosaurs on it for six fricking dollars. So there it was, his new dinosaur with a dinosaur shirt.
Next, you take the toy to a computer kiosk and make a “birth certificate” for it. I could kind of taste a saccharin bile in the back of my mouth that my parents must have tasted when I got my first Cabbage Patch Kid. Adam filled out the form and when it came to the part where you name the dinosaur, we asked Liam, “What’s his name?” Liam has never named a toy in his life. Any named toy is purely descriptive, such as “Blue Blanket” and “Blue Bear.” So it came as no surprise that Liam decided to name his dinosaur “Dinosaur.”
So fine. Dinosaur the dinosaur it was. Complete with dinosaur shirt. We took it to the register, plopped down the gift card and were on our way.
Liam fell in love with his dinosaur. He held it the whole way home and slept with it that night. He napped with it then next day and slept with it again the next night. We took a picture and emailed it to my brother and sister-in-law so they could see what he picked out. He napped with it again yesterday and then he woke up and here’s where the story gets interesting.
Apparently during his nap, Liam had a vision or an epiphany, and decided, for the first time ever, to name his beloved toy a true, proper name. And the name came to him while he dreamed and that name, my friends, was Crack.
The conversation went like this, and as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up:
MOM: Hey there! Did you have a good nap?
LIAM: Where’s crack?
MOM: Crack? What’s crack?
LIAM (presenting dinosaur toy): Here he is!
MOM (incredulous): This is Crack? Your dinosaur’s name is Crack?
LIAM: Yeah!
Mom stifles emotional combination of weeping and snickering.
SCENE
And that’s that. The toy’s name is Crack. Liam took Crack out to dinner with us that night. When our friends asked, “What’s your dinosaur’s name?” He replied, much to their amusement, “Crack.” He hugged Crack, and kissed him and said, “Thank you, Crack.” Then he hugged him some more and said, “I love you, Crack.” And then when we tucked him in when we got home, I had to kiss Crack goodnight.
LIAM AND HIS ROCK-SMOKING FRIEND
