That's my ride!

I made the mistake of showing Vir some pictures of cars and then this video on youtube to distract him once. Now he thinks the only reason to switch on the computer is to show him pictures and videos of whatever he asks for. His requests range from cars and airplanes to bikes, horses, dogs, cats, and donkeys. Cars are of course head and shoulders above anything else on his list of absolutely fascinating things. No description of the current version of Vir is complete without this three letter word that I sometimes hear in my sleep now (and wake up screaming in a cold sweat!) His first word ever was "car." We realized what he was saying when he started running excitedly towards cars on the road screaming "KA...KA....KAAAAA." The obsession has only grown since then. He sleeps with a couple of his dinky cars next to him. The first thing he thinks of when he wakes up is one or the other specific car ("pupple car, yellow car, geen car, poee/police car"). He can spend an entire 8-hour drive from Delhi to Dehradun just looking out and staring at cars and announcing each one as it passes by. At the end of the day, he collects all his cars (and now that nani has realized how happy they make him, she's bought him like a thousand of them) and stuffs them in the boot of his little tricycle, which then travels with him to the bedroom so it's close to him in case of an emergency requirement in the middle of the night. He has to have a couple of them with him ALL the time - in the bathroom, in the park, at the dining table, when drinking his milk. So, of course, you can't go anywhere in our house without stumbling upon a dinky car. You'll find one or two stuffed inside the sofas, some stuck between the matresses of the bed, a couple on any shelf or counter you come across...never a shortage of these annoying little things here! I don't even understand what he really does with them...sometimes he'll just park them in one line and stare at them with this happy, wistful, faraway sort of expression on his face. I can only imagine the day dreams!

This obsession has now extended to basically any vehicle - autos, bikes, tempos, tractors, trucks, trains, and airplanes. I try so hard to get him to notice trees and flowers when we're out on a walk or a drive, or when we're reading a storybook and looking at pictures, but it's a lost cause. I don't think we'd have this problem if he was a girl...it's amazing how they're born with these predispositions. I didn't quite believe that until now. Anyway, there's something so incredibly cute about the way he lights up EVERY SINGLE TIME he sees a car. Before we know it, he'll grow up and lose this ability to be happy with something as small as a broken down auto rattling past us on the road. And start caring about things like models and makes and costs. Yuck.

If this carries on, I'm guessing the most special thing he'll ever say to a girl one day as he looks deep into her eyes won't be "I love you" or "Will you marry me?" but "Honey, let's go for a drive."