This past Christmas, I gifted my family with some tickets to the Yo Gabba Gabba: Get Your Sillies Out! concert in Seattle. Unfortunately, since the concert wasn’t happening right at that exact moment and my kids have no concept of time, they were very meh about their mother giving them such a wonderful experience! Nathan went back to playing his new Nintendo 3DS (which his mother also paid for!) and TJ went back to destroying everything else that I hold sacred (rest in peace, Caboodles jewelry organizer and MTV’s Party to Go Volume 2, back when music was REAL!).
It was a crazy day downtown because the Emerald City Comicon was going on, which meant I had to explain to Nathan why there was a grown man in the street wearing a horse’s head. And a grown woman in a horse’s head. That’s just something adults do, son, after years of living in their parent’s basements and saving enough money to buy a horse’s head because that’s what adults do.
We found some sanctuary in the Barnes and Noble kid’s section where the horses were on farms and not on the shoulders of thirty-somethings who work way too hard to be cool on the internet.
Nathan read from his memoir, “Farts: a story of hope.” It’s very riveting, for everyone BUT ME.
I’m always amazed at what other parents go through for their children. The theater was filled with families and little children twirling light-up toys that probably cost $20 each. Our theater concession meal came out to $40: greasy cheese sandwiches, apple juice, and chips. Forty dollars! Ugh. I hate spending that kind of money and not enjoying the food. I already cry while I eat, I try not to do that in front of the children.
I thought about going back downstairs and finding the pool of moms who were taking shots at the bar. And we would high five each other for being awesome parents and somewhere in the tequila haze, we would decide we were faded enough to enjoy a concert with a cat that has a fish tail and other characters I frankly do not understand sober. But I had a little boy in my lap the whole time and that was enough excitement for me, to see his eyes grow big in the glow of stage lights, to hear him whisper a “wowwwww” when the music began.
It was a nice break from the frenetic pace of being a family in a big city. We sat together in the dark and listened to high-pitched voices sing about not biting friends and hugs feel good. I know I’m going to miss these moments later when kid concerts no longer have any appeal and my lap is too small to fit either of my boys.
