I have a brilliant idea. Why don't we get a professional photographer, my wife's wedding dress, a 75 pound wing back chair, a dozen helium balloons, and a toddler with the demeanor of the Tasmanian Devil and haul them all to a park and try to take pictures of the aforementioned toddler. And just to make it fun, let's give our daughter some coffee in the morning just because we think it's cute when she drinks it. That's how you should spend a Saturday.
That is exactly how we spent last Saturday. My daughter loves going to the park. Living in L.A. makes frequent trips to the park quite a necessity as houses with yards aren't exactly easy to come by (at least if you want to live in a neighborhood where you can actually go out into your yard). Also, my daughter is not really known for her ability to do anything that requires standing still or sitting in one place for more than about a second. Needless to say, the idea of going to the park, or as she calls it, "PARKANDSWING" but not actually being able to go swing or run around in the grass didn't really sit very well with her.
The photographer's idea for the photo shoot was actually pretty cool: have our daughter wear my wife's wedding dress whilst sitting in a giant chair in a pretty park making cute poses, then tying a sundry of balloons to the chair and having our daughter ooh and aah at the balloons, and so on and so on. I'm sure that this idea would have been magnificent had it been attempted with a human child, but I think what resulted was actually the photographer deciding that she never, ever wanted to work with children again.
As I walked from the parking lot carrying a giant, art-deco styled chair upside down on my head, my vision was really limited, but what I could hear was my twenty-three month old daughter screaming "PARKANDSWING PARKANDSWING" as her little voice faded off into the distance which meant she was already running, full bore, toward the play area. I rotated the inverted chair around on my head and could make out both my wife and the photographer running after her to prevent her from diving, face first, into the sand that surrounds the play area, because, of course, we were here to take pictures and a sandy baby simply would not do. I chose a spot that I thought would be a great spot for picture taking (mainly because I was tired of carrying that ridiculously heavy chair) and we set up all of the equipment. As I said earlier, this concept was great in theory, but trying to make my daughter sit in a giant chair wearing a full size wedding dress when the swing and slide were RIGHT OVER THERE just wasn't going to happen. Without fail, every time someone would sit her in the chair, and even before we would take a step back away from her, she was out of the chair and making a bee-line for anything that was not us taking pictures of her. A toddler in a full grown adult's wedding dress can't really run that well, so there was a lot of tripping over a wedding dress, face planting into the grass and yelling out "I'M OKAYYYYY" as she would bounce up and start running again. As to not potentially ruin the wedding dress, it was decided to put regular clothes back on her, when meant she was then totally unencumbered and could again run at her normal speed, which I have clocked at approximately Warp Factor 3.
As the day was playing out pretty much exactly as I had dreamed the night before, I decided that I would not actively participate in chasing the littlest thunderbolt around the park trying to snap pictures of her, but I would watch from the relative comfort of a giant wing back chair that I hauled into the park like some hobo Sherpa. What I witnessed was a type of psychological and physical torture that I was certain my daughter was inflicting on her mommy and that poor photographer with absolute calculation. As the photographer would run ahead of my daughter, my wife would try to herd her toward the photographer so she could snap some pictures and try to salvage something out of this nightmarish day. Whenever the camera would be in a position to get a good shot, my daughter would either make a sharp turn and run perpendicular to the camera or she would do a quick spin, double back and totally evade my wife who was trying to catch her. This went on for a solid twenty-five minutes before I decided to meander over and suggest calling it a day. The now out of breath photographer said to me, "You know, this really gets easier when they're four or five years old". I asked, "Would you like to come back then?", which elicited an only half joking chuckle. The decision was made to keep trying to get pictures with the thought that if my daughter ran around enough, she would wear herself out and become docile enough to take decent pictures. What the general public is unaware of, however, is that deep in the center of my daughter's being is what I can only assume to be a neutron star which generates more energy per second than the entire population of the earth consumes in any given day. So much energy, in fact, that when our sun eventually collapses in on itself and then supernovas, my daughter will still be running around a park somewhere at several times the speed of light.
I decided to wander back to where the chair was set up and contemplate the lessons learned that day. As if the day had not yet been crazy enough, I was struck by what I like to refer to as "Random Crazy", or simply "getting crazied." From behind the bushes near where the chair was set up, I started hearing, "Hiiiii-Yaaaaa" over and over and over with some very labored breathing. I peered over the bushes and was met by the sight of a rather old gentleman (and by gentleman I mean crazy person) dressed in black, tactical fatigues and wearing a silver helmet doing what was apparently a drug induced version of shadow kung-fu. He was Hiiii-Yaaaa-ing to nobody and kicking the air with all the fervor of seasoned martial arts master, except he was a crazy old white dude dressed up like a drug store soldier for hire.
This was more than I could handle, so in utter, exhausted, amazement I picked up my armchair from the middle of the park and started the trek back to the parking lot. The others in my party of the damned followed suit and made it to our conveyance back to the world of the sane. We'll try again in ten years.
In case you're wondering how the pictures turned out, here's one that was taken in one of the split seconds where my daughter wasn't moving faster than modern cameras could capture her:
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