Here's a secret:
Whenever I got a balloon as a kid (for some reason I feel like most of them came from the shoe store), I gave it a name and a backstory and, until the day it inevitably popped/fizzled, treated it like an imaginary friend of sorts.
I've never told anyone that story before because, quite frankly, I've always kind of wondered if that was a ... normal ... sort of game for a kid to play.
Normal as in, not the sort of game that would make people worry about you growing up to be a little bit ... off.
So you can imagine my relief when I heard about an 8-year-old girl playing the very same game -- with feeling, apparently. Because when the girl's dad made the tremendous mistake of trying to clean up the deflated remnants of his daughter's birthday party, well ... she left him a rather nasty note:
Would you like it if just because you were getting old you got poped.
Egads! I daresay I have no interest in getting "poped" just because I'm getting old! (Not that I'm getting old, just old-er.)
What sort of strange torture ... OH. Popped! She meant "popped." Her dad explained:
Today I armed my kids with unrolled paperclips and asked them to pop the two-week-old helium balloons that have been kicking around our house at ground level since my daughter's birthday. I was not aware that my 8 year old daughter had given the balloons personalities and was really not happy with my plans for them. She was so upset she couldn't talk, but marched into the room and gave me this note. Bad Dad!
The moral of the story, dear parents (apart from the thing about me not being as weird of a kid as I thought): You never really know what's going on your kid's head. In her world, maybe balloons have feelings or cracks in the sidewalk are really snakes or people can be "poped" if you wish it hard enough.
Having lived in a world like that once long ago, I know what I'm talking about.
Does your kid have a huge imagination? Do you ever have trouble keeping up with it?
Image via edenpictures/Flickr
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Comments 14
I count myself lucky as my 2 year old has a BLAST 'fighting' us with balloons (like a sword fight, but with balloons) and then when he gets bored he jumps on them until they pop. :) No naming of the balloons here! Currently, I see 5 balloons in my vision around teh edge of the room. I know that in a day or two I'll be abel to have my son throw the popped remains away.
As far as this dad goes...it's a balloon. the little girl may be mad, but she will go on with her life & laugh at the story when she's a few years older.
My son had balloons for a week after his birthday. He game them all names. All 10 of em. I got away with making little holes in them to let out the air slowly lol. He would pick one up and ask me what happened. I just told him that's what balloons to... lose air. :P He loves his balloons