Sunday Morning Cold

On Sunday mornings when my brother and I were kids, we would wake up early and go down to the basement to play.  My dad had built me a huge Barbie doll house and my brother a Matchbox car city with roadways and little buildings.  Never mind that Barbie dolls and Matchbox cars are on two different scales; my Barbies and his cars were neighbors.  We played and played until my dad called us upstairs for waffles. 

Now my kids are up early on Sunday mornings.  We don’t have a basement for them to play in, but they drag their Fisher Price Imaginext robots and their Polly Pocket dolls out to the living room and convert the furniture into a landscape.  Their toys are more correctly proportioned to play together, except for the 11” Tinker Bell doll who looms over them all.

I am beginning to wonder how long their friendship will last.  Their interests are diverging.  For now futuristic robots and fashion plates can co-exist, but already I see them playing in parallel rather than together, reverting to the parallel play of toddlers who haven’t learned to interact with others.  It will be sad if my kids forget how to interact with each other.

After Barbies and Matchbox cars, my brother and I stopped having much in common.  In high school he was in the band; I was in the choir.  He played football; I was on the speech team.  We went to the same college, where he joined a fraternity and I served as a chapel deacon.  My mother used to worry that we wouldn’t have any reason to get together after she and my dad are gone.  Now I understand.