The Adventures of Morgan and Crystal: Everybody Rides the Something!

This is a post I have been wanting to write for the last several months, but just have not been able to find the time. Levi has been obsessed with having all his animals and toys go for rides. It is so hilarious, he just loves stacking everything up and saying, “blank ride the blank.”

It all started at church. Every Sunday all the kids between 18 months and three go to Nursery for the last two hours of church. There they have lots of toys, snacks, and fun activities for the kids to participate in. One of the toys that was in our nursery is an old fashion rocking horse. It is plastic and has metal springs holding it up, so when the kids sit on it they can bounce/rock it back and forth. Levi immediately fell in love with this horse. He would run out of the chapel after sacrament yelling, “ride the horsey” on his way into nursery. All the nursery leaders said he would play on that horse the whole time, and he just loved it so much.

He soon became obsessed with riding everything! He would sit on his little plastic animals and say, “ride the giraffe.” He would find every picture in every book we owned that involved somebody riding somebody. All he could talk about for months was riding things. I would type horseback riding in on google images, and he was glued to the screen. It was as if I were showing him pictures of magic balls or something. Finally after his grandmas saw the dozens of videos and pictures of him riding his animals and of them riding each other they decided to go in together and get him his own personal rocking horse. Not just any rocking horse but this one also has the springs, sings, moves his mouth, and says several different phrases. Oh man, he is in love with this thing. He has had it for two months now, and still gets on it several times a day. It currently sits right in the middle of our living room. I have tried to move it out several times and every time he has a meltdown. It is like I am taking away his favorite toy. I would not hesitate to say this horse is his very best friend. Morgan was worried about getting him a toy like this because he thought he would get bored of it after a few days, but that is absolutely not the case. This toy has gotten more use then any we have bought so far.

His obsession with riding things has only increased. He loves for all his Little People guys to ride each other, along with his animal figurines, rubber ducks, balls, cars, and anything else he can stack on top of each other. It is so entertaining. Morgan and I will get up and find Batman riding a horse, or a rubber duck riding the whale. We can’t help but laugh hysterically, it is just so funny. Sometimes he will get more intense and stack them like four tall. He would say something like, “hippo ride the zebra ride the dinosaur.” He also loves to ride Mom, Dad, Parker and Penny. Poor Parker is the most defenseless. He doesn’t even see Levi coming. No matter how many times we have told Levi he can’t ride the baby, he still doesn’t get it.

We need to take him to ride a horse! Hopefully that will happen soon and I will post more about it, but for now you have a little more insight on Levis riding obsession.

There is a downside to Levi’s cute little new found hobby, and that is his overwhelming desire to have constant perfection. Meaning that every time he schemes up a new scenario in his head of who needs to ride who, it has to come to be no matter what the cost. Sometimes batman cannot ride the zebra, because the laws of common sense say that he is too big to balance on such a narrow uneven surface. Or maybe it would take the world’s most steady hand to stack Robin, on the hippo, on the lion. When these impossible scenarios unfold Levi instantly enters melt down mode, and comes screaming at me. I then pathetically attempt to make these figurines balance, and generally I fail miserably, because if he cannot do it then I certainly cannot. In the rare case when it does work, I have to pray that I don’t mistakenly turn on the fan or do anything for that matter that can knock them down because as soon as they tip over we enter freak out mode. Yes, it is a lot of fun, but mostly exhausting.