UPDATE: My child loves me again! This is very good news. We are once again as thick as thieves and I can revel in the feeling of his tiny, sticky hand in mine. The downside to this love fest (if you want to call it a downside) is that his kisses are abundantly juicy, thanks to his constantly runny nose. I don’t care. I have Patsy Cline’s “I’m Back in Baby’s Arms” running through my head on repeat, and I’m delighted to be back in Tiny Sir’s good graces.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about obsession.

When my beautiful darling nephew was a wee lad, he was moderately obsessed with vacuums and cleaning implements of various sorts. He would stare at mops and brooms and say “Ti Ti Ti”, like he was saying “Tidy”. So cute.  Having been through this with the nephew, it was no big surprise when my son developed his own sort of obsession. I know kids go through phases where they’re super into something- trains, cars, dinosaurs, princesses, stars, etc. But my child is currently obsessed with . . .  cuckoo clocks.

Not just clocks. Cuckoo clocks. To be fair, every clock is a cuckoo clock. It’s been months and the obsession hasn’t grown leaner. It’s quite prevalent in our day-to-day conversations. Husband and I have rolled with it and have been very supportive. It all began with a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode where Mickey and Donald have to go to wonderland to retrieve the missing cuckoo for Daisy’s birthday present: a cuckoo clock. I love this episode because it’s 47 minutes and it allows me to take a little nap in the morning because my child wakes at 5am and I am Jesus Lord in Heaven Tired and need a few more minutes please and thank you, God. Also, it’s pretty trippy, as we know Wonderland tends to be. As a surrealist, this fits my aesthetic better than, say, the episode where they have to pick up Santa from the North Pole and the train vomits out his own tracks. ???? So, they go to Wonderland, weird awesome stuff happens, they find the cuckoo and mommy gets a nap. All quality happenings. The unintended consequence is that upon repeated viewings, Boychild has been saturated in the cuckoo mythos. Cherche la cuckoo. It’s leaked into our everyday life. Now, every time we see a clock, BC says “Da cuckoo gonna come out an say cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!”

I’d like to blame Husband for a part of this because on a walk, they imagined a giant cuckoo coming out of the library clock.

Rather than fight the cuckoo obsession, Hubs and I are Leaning In. We’re gonna foster that little guy’s love of cuckoos in whatever way we can. Is this the right thing to do? Sure. I have no idea- I haven’t raised a small child before. Here are some of the ways cuckoos and cuckoo clocks have permeated our lives:

We draw many, many cuckoos.  In the morning,  get the edict that I must draw a cuckoo clock. And so I do. There’s a BIG difference between the pre-coffee cuckoo clocks and the post-coffee cuckoo clocks.  You can really track my caffeination based on how effed up the cuckoo looks. My last series featured a skinny post-coffee cuckoo with bulgy eyes that looked like it was 4 days into a drug  binge.  “I need a worm, man. Just- hey , you got some change where I can get a  worm, a grub, somethin’? Even a termite will do, man.” Three cuckoos and two cups of coffee later, and the cuckoos feathers were all shiny and the clock had, like jewels and lace details.

Husband has done his part as well. After asking around town for a few days, he scored an actual cuckoo clock for free! Getting an actual cuckoo clock from a stranger at the Diner is one of the luxuries of living in a small town. It was broken, but that’s fine. But when Hubs went to repair it, we found a photo negative of a person on the toilet hidden in the inner workings. I think it was from the ‘80’s? Dude was on the pot, hand up like “get out of here with that camera!” Is this related to a crime scene? Did we just see the moment before a murder? Porn? IDK. Weird stuff. It’s still in there. Maybe we’ll leave it for the next person to find.

We don’t want a cuckoo clock in our house. Those things are annoying as hell. So we haven’t gifted Boychild with the refurbished pee-photo clock. Yet. In the meantime,  BC and I made our own cuckoo “clock” out of a birdhouse from Michael’s. We painted it in neon colors (my choice) then stuck sticky gemstones all over it (his choice). My philosophy on decorating is that there should always be room for tacky stuff. We even bought a little pink cuckoo bird made of actual feathers. The cats love it and secret it away to bat around and lick at their leisure. Now we can’t find it.  I think one of the cats ate it, but they’re not talking.

We’ve seen every cuckoo video on YouTube. Real ones, fake ones. I think we’ve seen the Peppa Pig and Puppy Dog Pals episodes on cuckoo clocks at least 70 times (props to the 99 Luftballoons reference in Puppy Dog Pals. Us olds appreciate that type of thing.) If I’ve exhausted you by writing so much about cuckoo clocks, then I’ve done my job. We appreciate Boychilds’ enthusiasm, but we are depleted!  The people at the children’s museum even recognized him after he pointed at their clock and asked “Is that a cuckoo clock?” I’m ready for this phase to be over. It’s cuckoo. 😀