Landon’s Little Obsessions
Our 2 and a half year old son doesn’t just get interested in a toy/show/character, instead he becomes absolutely obsessed with it for months on end. It started at 6 months old when he had this one toy, a cow from his exersaucer, that he took everywhere for nearly 3 months. By the end of those 3 months the cow had gone through so much torture that it’s spots were pretty much gone and looked more like a sheep! Anyways, he loved that cow so much that I dressed him up like one for his first halloween. At the time I didn’t think through the fact that cows are female (we’ll just tell him he was a little bull for his 1st halloween) so I’m pretty sure someday he’ll hate me for it. Eh, add it to the list of things he’ll hate his father and I for, at least he looked cute!
The only reason he moved on from the cow was because he discovered Elmo. Yup, before we knew it our house was filled with Elmo paraphernalia and the theme song to “Elmo’s World” could be heard playing multiple times a day. That song did in fact grow really old really fast, but we felt fortunate that it wasn’t Barney playing 24/7. I mean, at least Elmo has a sense of humor, right?!
He even had an all out Elmo 1st birthday with the always necessary party hats:
An Elmo cake that looked like this:
That was devoured by our little man in an Elmo bib:
Buuut, much like the cow, Elmo became phased out and at about 15 months Landon discovered elephants. I know, could he have picked an uglier animal to like? I mean why not puppies or pandas? He couldn’t say elephant yet and instead called them “babadas.” For at least a year elephants became known as “babadas” to our family and friends. Man, you should have seen the weird looks we got at the zoo when we told Landon to “look at the babadas.” At any rate, over the course of about a year, Landon must have collected at least 50 elephant toys. There were stuffed ones, collectibles (which really hurt when you drop them on your feet), books, puppets, and even an elephant that was big enough for him to sit on. If you left the house without at least one of the elephants your trip was sure to be ruined.
For a short time during the elephant phase Landon discovered sports. We really thought this meant no more elephants but really it meant he went everywhere with a basketball in one hand (which he couldn’t pronounce either so he just called it a bball) and a babada in the other. We even took him to his first pro sporting event, which I’m sad to say wasn’t a tennis match but instead a Wizards game, before he turned 2. No he didn’t last past half-time but he did love it up to that point.
The elephant obsession finally faced competition (and lost) when Landon discovered Thomas and Friends at the beginning of this summer. Thanks to his “Lita” (his grandmother/my mom) he owns nearly every possible Thomas and Friends train and a massive amount of the other Thomas paraphernalia. We recently took him to ride the “real” Thomas in Pennsylvania and by the look on his face in the picture you can tell that he realized we drove 4 hours just for him! Eh, we knew he was happy, grateful and just upset to leave.
Now, to the point of this post. I wanted to find a way to incorporate all of Landon’s little obsessions (and the ones to come) into the decor of his new “big boy” room. I decided to create a wall collage with at least one thing to represent each of his obsessions. So far I’ve found this for basketball:
I framed this card from his Aunt Jackie for his elephant phase (since it was a gift it has a double meaning):
The item to represent Elmo is in the works but the Thomas and Friends art just came in. I couldn’t find anything unique enough for the wall so I scanned a picture of Thomas and Friends (really the front of a wooden collectible box) and sent it into a company called Canvas4life, that did a wonderful job of printing the image onto a canvas. I think it looks really cool and now Pavlo is making a frame for it (which you don’t need but I kind of wanted).
That’s it for now. I’ll (hopefully) be back soon to update you on the new frame for the canvas, the Elmo art or maybe even the final wall collage. I’ll be working on it today and tonight so fingers crossed these kids let me accomplish something so I can post again soon!
