Xander Week 87 – Gotta love the quirks
August 4, 2008
I think every kid develops their own set of entertaining and interesting quirks. Xander seems to come up with new ones every few weeks. One of his more recent and rather entertaining quirks is his fascination with trees. Sure, most kids probably find trees interesting at various points of development, that’s not out of the ordinary. Xander’s quirky little personality has decided that it is necessary to pet every tree and say “nice tree”. I’d like to be clear – we live in New Hampshire. We do not live in a city. There are plenty of trees in our back yard, there are trees surrounding our parks. There are trees at day care, and pretty much every spot that Xander inhabits has a backdrop of trees. So trees are not a new phenomena in Xander’s life. However, petting each tree, and telling it that it’s a “nice tree” is new.
I think he discovered this most recent trick when our friend’s daughter (about 9 months younger) was examining a pine tree during a recent visit. Someone said, that’s a nice tree, isn’t it? And suddenly, Xander discovered the joys of petting bark.
This becomes particularly entertaining when there is a row of trees, say in a parking lot, and Xander must pet each and every one. Of course, the entertainment value wears off quickly when suddenly you’re running late and arguing with a 2 year old why you simply don’t have time to pet each tree three times today, but maybe tomorrow we can come back and pet them again… Somehow that “tomorrow” reasoning just isn’t good enough yet 
Anyway, this is one of those quirks that I expect he’ll outgrow relatively quickly, and someday I may want to look back here and be able to tease him about his desire to pet trees.
