Lately we’ve been steadily teaching Thomas to share. After all, learning to share is arguably one of the most important social skills one can possess. Not sharing in grade school will usually result with you sitting alone on the playground, watching all the other kids play while you pick your nose. Similarly, not sharing in adulthood may result with you sitting alone at a bar, watching the other adults play while you pick your nose. Needless to say, we don’t want Thomas picking his nose. We want him to learn to share his time, his resources and his affection. Much to my delight he’s really picked up on this sharing concept; especially considering he’s about to turn two. He’ll give hugs at the drop of a hat (any hat) and he is more than willing to share a toy he’s playing with. But lately he’s developed an interesting and somewhat disturbing habit of wanting to share with the TV.
When he’s watching Elmo or Veggie Tales he badly wants to share his sippy cup with the characters on the screen. Stretching out his little arms, cup in hand, he gets this look in his eyes of “please, Elmo, pleeeeeeease have a taste. This is good stuff.” Much to his dismay Elmo never takes the cup. My first instinct as a logical male is to explain to him that it’s a fruitless endeavor to offer his sippy cup to an inanimate object. But to Thomas, Elmo is quite real, quite alive. So I try to put it in terms he’ll understand like, “Oh, Elmo’s not thirsty right now” or “Elmo has his own cup” but I don’t think his two year-old mind grasps it yet. I don’t think he understands that Elmo is in a studio somewhere with a hand stuck up his butt; that hand being attached to a man who’s cashing in on my son’s obsession with a furry red puppet that tells him over and over that he loves him.
Or perhaps Thomas is simply making a logical deduction based upon Elmo telling him he loves him: that if 1. Elmo possesses feelings of love then 2. surely he’s an organic life form and 3. as such requires water and food. Either way, I’m hoping Thomas will soon figure out that Elmo’s not real. Yeah, he’ll probably figure that out right around the time he starts believing in Santa. But at least then “Santa” will get an offering of milk and cookies and not a drool-covered, crusty sippy cup filled with 50% apple juice and 50% water.
