Good Things in Threes

There is a chasm sitting between the concept of a birthday party for a 30-year-old and one for a 3-year-old.

Never has that chasm seemed so, so wide as this week.

My grandson, Cameron, turned 3 on Monday and let's just put it this way - we are still trying to bring him and his fellow school mates down off the wall.

Of course, Cameron attends school in my home, which is pretty much like heading to the playground every day - grandmothers possess the "spoil" gene and it grows and grows with each passing week.

In fact, there might not be a child in Gulf County who enjoys the concept of school more than Cameron. It will be a shock the first day of kindergarten when grandma is not the teacher.

That ought to be a doozy of a call to my daughter, "Your son is driving the rest of the class crazy as he looks for his grandmother. Please come pick him up or drop off a life-size picture as soon as you can."

I can see it all now.

In any case, the essential staple of any birthday party when one is three-years-old involves one of the basic food groups, sugar, and so the little lunch party with his schoolmates on Monday - the big one is coming Sunday - ended with a mass demonstration of how to spin gloriously for minutes without reason.

Or fling yourself against the sofa or see just how that recliner in the living room actually opens or to flop to the floor in front of your sixth-month-old baby sister and believe she's ready for talking when crawling thus far has eluded her.

The toys he got from Papa and Grandma were pretty swell - my daughter probably has already constructed the voodoo doll for giving him "Letter Phonics" which attach to the refrigerator and run through a song for each letter.

Put another way, when we are old and gray and seeking assistance, my daughter Jennifer is going to remember those "Letter Phonics" and, well, I'll leave the rest to the imagination.

The real problem with Cameron's little birthday celebration, though, was the bicycle.

Training wheels, every safety feature you could think of, nice brakes and pretty bows couldn't dress up this sow's ear for his little three-year-old mind.

Maybe it's the generation of kids we are raising, but the little guy doesn't want a bicycle. Can't run away fast enough.

Now, when I was a kid the idea of getting a new bike was, well, what it was all about. I grew up as the middle of six children and most of my wardrobe and toy collection were, to put it mildly, hand-me-downs.

My parents gave my older brother - the oldest sibling in the family - a Schwinn red racer for his birthday one year and sure enough, it was the same vehicle my two older sisters and I would later receive as gifts on our birthdays.

Maybe my parents figured that through osmosis and watching my brother and subsequently older sisters, at least one of his would go from walking to riding a bike without forcing my father to run down the street beside while mother wondered who was more likely to be felled by, oh, a parked car.

More likely, it was a result of my dad being in the newspaper business because anybody who takes up newspapers for a living understands the vow of poverty taken by any reporter or journalist.

It is part of Journalism 101 in college - "Henceforth, I will no longer worry about a beach house in the Caribbean because a beach house in the United States is out of reach."

I digress.

Cameron, in any case, wanted no business with that bicycle and he sure didn't want to have anything to do with no stinkin' helmet.

Maybe he's been exposed to too many women in his life: sometimes as the wheels spin you'd think helmet hair took precedence over safety.

The bike, I believe, was simply too much work.

As with too many kids - let my wife around him and look out - Cameron is a bit on the spoiled side, which is akin to saying Russia is in Asia.

He has a tractor and a tractor doesn't require any more work than steering.

That bike business, that's pedaling and pushing and balancing and if all that doesn't involve pinging off the walls with gleeful abandon on a cupcake high, well, then what's the point.

After much cajoling and several attempts to adjust the seat, Cameron finally climbed aboard and took a spin around, well, the living room.

Beyond that, though, there was too much fun to be had with balloons and letters and other things that didn't require that nasty combination of work and safety.

We are trying again Sunday with a larger outside party for all his little friends at a local park. We won't be hard to miss.

Grandma will be the one pushing a small bicycle with training wheels in the center of a throng of screaming children. Cameron will be the one running away and Jennifer will be tossing "Letter Phonic" shapes at Grandma.

Papa? I'm sure there will be laundry in need of doing.