I was a little surprised by the depth and breadth of my four year old’s delight at the blue and lime track suit my mother bought for him.
He gasped. “It’s everything I ever wanted.”
I was bemused and confused, and called my mother. “Tell Grandma what you think of it.”
“It’s PERFECT,” he declared.
He wore it on a walk with his dad. He apparently flung himself through a sprinkler and came home soggy. I thought little of it, and his dad hung the suit up to dry.
In the morning, he came into my room, climbed on the couch, and took a flying leap at my bed, track suit jacket open wide.
It was not until later, when he jumped off the couch and explained to our roommate, “This helps me fly” that I realized what he’d seen in the royal blue polyester.
The track suit looks like this.
What he saw is this:
Needless to say we had a long talk about the difference between a squirrel suit and a track suit, and that the track suit wouldn’t help him fly.
And thus I crushed the dreams of my four year old. Who has already fallen out of one tree this year and broken an arm. I told him that he’d have to be an adult, and take a class, and be in really good shape, and not tell me about it until he was on the ground.
