Column: Need some light entertainment? Get yourself a nephew.

By Thomas Winterhoff

First published on December 13, 2000
Copyright © Thomas Winterhoff
 

My nephew has got to be the coolest three-year old on the planet.

I am in the enviable position of being either an uncle or a pseudo-uncle to a six-pack of kids belonging to sundry relatives or close friends. Since my wife and I are waiting at least a few more few years before starting a family of our own, all these wee folk essentially provide a pre-natal boot camp, if you will, to prepare us for what we may see in years to come.

The nicest thing about it is that we can revert to kids ourselves as we play with Lego and throw water balloons. It also gives us the very welcome option of quickly handing the little tykes back to their rightful owners once they starting oozing liquids or other noxious substances, or start destroying the house beyond recognition. It’s a very convenient arrangement – and offers up some premium entertainment value at the same time.

Take Nigel, for instance. His happy arrival in our lives took place just over three years ago and the fun hasn’t let up since.

When he was still about a week or two away from crawling for real, he would spend hours rocking back and forth on all fours and then make tentative forays across the carpet – with largely unpredictable results. It was sort of like watching a prairie hayseed test-driving a new tractor, but not quite getting the hang of the gearshift. He would start moving in reverse and you could see his brow furrow up, perplexed that his objective seemed to be moving ever farther away.

Of course, all that effort required a great deal of energy, but fortunately he recognized his tiny body’s fuel requirements and fed on virtually everything in his path. His OTD (Operational Theatre of Destruction) was astounding in its scope. Books, magazines, shower curtains and large pieces of furniture were his favourite foods early on, as was our remote control. On one memorable occasion, he managed to readjust our TV’s colour balance, gain access to channels that we didn’t even know existed and reportedly knock a few satellites out of orbit. There is still residual liquid emanating from the darned thing.

Who would have thought that a single baby could produce so much drool? In one form or another, his liquid output outstripped his intake by a factor of about four to one. It defied the laws of physics.

But just think of all the good one could do with such a remarkable and underutilized resource. You could line up a battalion of babies at the edge of the Gobi Desert, let ’em rip, and that barren wasteland would become a lush and verdant paradise overnight.

As Nigel grew into his “terrible twos”, his destructive powers became truly awesome and made Attila the Hun look like a lightweight. Once he had fully developed bipedal locomotive skills, he was off like a diapered rocket to cause chaos at every turn.

For millennia, humans have gradually perfected optimum methods for eating and drinking. Nigel, clearly a free thinker, chose to forge his own path in this regard. He would watch us taking small sips from our glasses, shake his head with a kind of tolerant amusement, and demonstrate a much more efficient method of drinking. After plunging his entire hand into his glass, thoroughly covering it and the table with milk, he would then simply lick the milk off his hand. Why no one had ever clued into this method before, his expression seemed to say, was beyond him.

Now that he’s older and enjoys conversing with everyone around him (often at an ear-splitting 140 decibels or more), Nigel is really coming into his own. When we babysat him last Halloween, we left the house exhausted.

We had envisioned a quiet evening of pumpkin carving and a few games to keep him amused, but that plan derailed almost before it started. He was very excited about the carving portion of the program and took the opportunity to poke a number of oddly shaped holes in the pumpkin while we weren’t looking.

Hoping to add to the spookiness of the evening, I mistakenly described in gory detail the fleshy “punkween” entrails I was extracting from the victim’s innards – forgetting for a moment that I was dealing with an emotionally sensitive and highly impressionable three-year-old. His face fell and he covered his eyes in horror, putting a premature end to his first pumpkin carving extravaganza and laying the groundwork for years of future therapy.

Fortunately, that episode was soon forgotten as we watched soccer on TV (he cheered for the referee), made a pirate ship out of the couch and scattered dozens of Hot Wheels cars to the four corners of the Earth.

Eventually all the excitement took its toll and his eyelids began to droop. Decked out in his rocketship pajamas and Pokemon runners, he snuggled up between my wife and I, and gamely tried to stay awake just a few minutes longer. He was essentially unconscious a few minutes later, with only a twitching forefinger subconsciously making some last-minute alterations to his nasal mucous configuration. All in all, it was a very successful evening.

Take it from me; a pint-sized relative of the nephew persuasion is pretty much the best fun around. If you already have a quasi-nephew or two, you know what I’m talking about. If your siblings haven’t had kids yet (but are so inclined), give them a bottle of wine, some Barry White CDs and some scented candles – and tell them to get busy. You don’t know all the fun you’re missing.