Shoots the ladders

Amos needs more stimulation than just playing the Wii and watching cartoons (I know, right?  How can he possibly want more than that?), so we've bought games and puzzles to jiggle his brain parts.  His newest game is something he likes to call Shoots the Ladders.  What you do is search your neighborhood and find a contractor who is clearing the house gutters, and you aim really tight so that the guy's ladder...  Naw.  It's his way of saying Chutes and Ladders.  His phrases are more adorable and disturbing than I could have ever imagined.  Yay for kids.

So, yes, we are searching for entertainment and education for our son.  You might call it edutainment.  I call it Necessary Items to Distract the Older Child While Mommy Stuffs a Boob into the Baby's Face.

I curse Vincent Van Gogh.  Actually, I curse the people who thought it would be great to turn Van Gogh's Starry Night into a 1,000 piece puzzle that I felt compelled to buy at Target during our game-buying spree for Amos.  Have you ever looked at Starry Night?  I mean, REALLY looked at it?  Sure, post-impressionist paintings are great and all, but after staring at 1,000 pieces of blue, green, yellow, and muddy brown blobs, I kinda wish good ol' Vincent was still around so that I could cut off his ear myself.  

I find myself looking wistfully at the 24 piece Lightning McQueen puzzle, harkening back to the good old days when lines and colors made sense, and the puzzle consists of nice, fat and thick pieces that you could lob at someone's head, much the way that Amos does with anything small.  But Starry Night?  Good grief.  This blob sort of leans that way in a green and blue mash of insanity, then a brown blob of something -- is it a tree?  a bush?  a mountain? what the hell is it?! -- stands lone in the blobbing, unfocused wave of murkiness.  The yellow swirls of hazy stars just float there, taunting me, saying, yes, I know you can put us together because we're the only defining portion of the painting, but don't blame us for your silly thought that you could put this thing together and make it a project with your son.  Then the baby starts crying, and I'm all, "Baby Man!  Hush up!  Can't you see that Mommy is staring senselessly at 50 brown blobs and fruitlessly hamfisting them into each other in desperation?!"  And Amos begins to throw a few hazy blue pieces toward the ceiling while yelling, "It's raining sky!"  Just then, Phil pops around the corner holding a red-faced Arlo who is shoving his entire fist into his gaping maw and trying to tear the flesh off, and he says, "Um, I believe this child is hungry" while the sky continues to rain itself into my carefully collected pile of brown mush.  This is the part where I would reach across the table and slice off an ear.

So, I place a boob into the baby's mouth and try to balance about 11 pounds of human while muttering, "Little blobby brown mush piece with a speck of mushy blue, where is it, where is it..." This is how I spend a little bit of time each day, getting frustrated with a dead artist and the person at the puzzle company who knew I would fall for their marketing ploy.  No, I don't want the unicorn in a forest puzzle.  I want the puzzle that shows how much I like art.  Impressionist, blobby, undefined art.  And I want to share this love with my son in the form of a puzzle with far too many tiny pieces of recycled board so that we can do a project together and like it, damn it!


Me thinks the lack of sleep in postpartum world is clouding my judgment when it comes to finding appropriate time wasters (nay, edutainment) for my son and myself.  But, it will make a great story for Amos to recall one day.


"Hey, Mom. Do you remember that time when you tried to do a 1,000 piece puzzle with me, and then you got so mad at it that you threw it into the backyard and yelled, 'How ya like that, Vinnie?!  How ya like THAT?!'  That was a lot of fun!"


And I bet he learned something as well that day.  See?  Edutainment.  It works.