Marvin, the WOPR, and Wall-E

"Daddy, daddy, there's a robot in the basement and it's going to bite me in the ass and it's going to hurt!"

It occurred to me recently that Zander is fascinated with robots the way some kids get into dinosaurs or princesses. It's his Thing.

Getting ready for his fans.

Glamor shot! About a month ago.

We bought Wall-E the morning it came out on video. Zander can even tell you where we went to make this purchase (Target), you know, should you wish to get your own copy. He watches it once a day, sometimes twice, although this breaks my longstanding rule against repetitive viewing. A silly rule, perhaps, with a toddler, but he more or less goes along with it and I consider this a small concession to my sanity. What he really hates is my crackdown on screentime. I'm trying to limit him to 1 hr cumulative computer games and 1 movie or 1 hr TV time per day. It's hard only because it took me all week to realize that my days of working from home are over. Period. It used to be that to limit him, I just had to show up at the transition moment, pull the plug and nudge him toward something else. Now, he wants me to play with him all the time if there isn't a screen involved.

Damn robots.

Don't get me wrong. I love my kid but I was never the babysitter type. I was just the warm body who could dial 911 and make them brush their teeth, not an entertainment wagon. He used to nap but that ended this summer so I don't even have that time.

His favorite activities lately, beyond the idiot boxes, are playdoh (he inherited a huge box of toys and doh from older friends), drawing, watercolor painting, and cooking. His obsession over cars and Cars is abating, although not gone entirely. Really, it's evolving. He brought out a box of small toys earlier this week--animals mostly--and threw them up in the air one by one, announcing that they were "space guys."

Cooking. His specialty is scrambled eggs, both to make and to eat. But he also invents dishes. Like banana pudding:

If you would like the recipe: one slice of banana, 1 tsp peanut butter, 1 flake from raisin bran, 1 piece of a pretzel twist, 1 raisin, and 1 candy corn. He made two for himself and two for me. And he ate both of his, o yes.

My favorite part of all this is watching his imagination unfold with manic energy. This is one of the best times in child development, when the world, through their eyes, is pure magic. We could all only be so lucky.