Monday, December 26, 2011

Why Santa, why?

I wonder about this Santa guy, I really do. He's usually right on, gets mostly what you want (maybe too many socks) knows what colors you like, and is pretty lenient with the whole naughty/nice thing. He's always on time, does a good job wrapping and does a good job with fairness. All of that is great. The other thing he does, which was awesome as a kid but is terrifying as a parent, is get you things that your parents never would. As a kid it was things like BB guns and video games and boxing gloves. This year Santa hit a new high by bringing my son a pair of jumping stilts. This is something that I would clearly never buy my son. Even with good health insurance, these seem like a terrible idea. Who even designs these things? Who decides that what they really need to do to have fun is be 12 inches taller and bouncy? Who then decides to make them for children? I'm not admitting who first saw them on a youtube video and said "Look at these!" and put the idea in his head. It would be too easy to asign blame if I did. He's really a coordinated kid, he learned to ride a bicycle at three and holds the house pogostick record at over 1000 bounces. It's probably fatherly pride thinking that he's unusually coordinated, but he's like a different species than I was at that age. Or still am at this age to be honest. If ever I've met a kid who could use these, then it's him. Even with all of that he was pretty nervous  when staring to walk on them and was leaning pretty heavily on me. He wasn't sure he was going to be able to figure them out. That quickly melted away and within 10 minutes he was not only walking around in them, he was running. At this point his only limitation is his weight. He's at the bottom end of the weight range for them so he doesn't get much bounce. That's probably ok. They're good for up to 110 pounds and I can imagine that things will get much bouncier and crazier as his weight and athleticism increases.
Maybe, just maybe, I can understand what Santa was thinking when he had his elves make up a pair of these for my son. In the future though, he should really include a map to the hospital with gifts like this.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas.

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