Last night we took Wallace to our town fair. In past years we’ve gone to the Italian-American festival, which is really funny given how completely and utterly English Wallace looks, and super-duper funny given the massive numbers of hispanic attendees. My boy is Sicilian, but you would never, ever guess it. Anyhow, at the IA festival there would be a few rides, tons of food booths (and rightly so), some stage acts and a shrine to Mary for the praying of, etc.
This festival is NOT like that festival. This festival has rides. Real ones. Out the wazoo. It has tons and tons of game booths. It has a gigantic stage and, god help us, carnival food. This festival is an exact replica of the festivals that my friends and I used to wait for anxiously every year in my tiny home town when we were kids.
Last year, when we took Wallace to the IA festival, he was much too young to ride any of the rides. We’d show up, look around, watch the game where the trained rat picks the winning color, and go home.
This year… oh, this year is what I’ve been waiting and waiting for. Wallace’s eyes lit up like Christmas trees. In a hot second he was practically frothing at the mouth to get on the rides.
His first ever all-by-himself ride was on the old 1940’s ride where the cars go round and round a center pole like a merry-go-round. Last night he drove the fire truck. I think we got some good cell phone pictures of it (curses my forgetting the camera!), but you should have seen him. He was so excited he nearly peeled right out of his skin!
Next we went on the bumper cars. He drove the car with dad in the passenger side and managed to smack into me a half a dozen times. When the ride was over his dad asked him if he liked it and he said, jumping up and down, “I WANT TO DO IT AGAIN!”
The next one he picked required a step up in moxie. It was a ride that’s a series of fake air balloons and the ride goes around and around and up and down into the air. Kind of like the swing rides, only you sit in a air-balloon thingey. The first time we went up and came down he broke out into a huge grin and yelled, “THIS DOES NOT SCARE ME!”
After that, for his final ride, he picked…
The dragon roller coaster.
Holy crap. What happened to my baby? What happened to the kid that doesn’t like loud things, is terrified of sudden movements, and who has a deep fear of dragons?
His dad took him on the coaster and while Wallace had his fingers in his ears the whole time, he also had the world’s biggest friggin grin on his face, ever. He LOVED it.
After the roller coaster it was time to head home and he just fell apart. He was having so. much. fun.
We have promised to take our Big Kid back to the fair on Sunday with some more time and a chance to do a lot more riding. I can’t believe how adult he is now. It floors me. My baby rides rides by himself!
Segway….
This morning poor TT got yelled at by Wallace’s teachers. Apparently, when they came in from sprinkler day yesterday it took Wallace a shockingly long time to get himself dressed. The teacher reports that it took him 15+ minutes to get his socks on and he was frustrated and miserable by the end of it.
We have strict instructions to let him practice full-body self-dressing at home (We do! Except socks! Because socks are tricky!). Wallace has historically had trouble with fine motor skills. He’s far more intrested in biking and balancing and running and jumping then he is in holding a pencil or fiddling with buttons. He’s very well-spoken, but not fussed about rolling balls with playdough.
Anyhow, we has been admonished (again) that the helping of small people is not always helpful. Honestly, for folks who don’t do day care or preschool I seriously wonder how they make sure not to raise cave-dwelling baby-children. 75 to 80% of all instances when we moved Wallace to the next stage of development has been because a caregiver, used to this age bracket, looks at us with barely-concealed contempt and said, “He can do it by himself, mom and dad”.
It always feels crummy to find out that you haven’t actually been helping your kid by helping him.
Sorry, Wallace! That must have been totally friggin embarassing. I’m sorry. The socks are all you from now on, man!
Love,
Crummy Mummy
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