• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

another birthday

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Three birthdays in a week! This time it was young Kiyotaka ("Ki-kun"). He's now seven years old. High time for him to repeat some of the activities from my own childhood, if I do say so. Foremost, I'm getting him a DVD of the first Star Wars ('77's "A New Hope"). Then I'm going to send him a LEGO kit of my own design, oh yes.

Also, it was time to finally doll out the X'mas gifts for the smaller children. Mari pointed out that I had two gifts for 18-month-old Ta-kun, and that I should give him the one on which I'd bought and give the wobbly inch-worm toy to little Kenny. So that's what I did.

The toy I bought was a little push thing suitable for a child of Ta-kun's age. He pushes the upright stick that drives a drum containing small wooden balls. The balls clatter about and in my own experiments in the store it was a gentle tinkling sound and quite pleasing. I should have realized that an 18-month-old operating the thing on a wooden floor would result in quite a different sound. A louder sound.

I wound up apologizing to Maki-chan and Nori-chan quite a bit. But the toy was a big hit.

As for the inch-worm, all three kids played with it. Ken giggled when he watched the middle portion rise and fall with the roll of the wheels. And even the newly-minted seven year old seemed to like it. And that's when I learned something about the story behind the original toy that I'd copied in the first place. It turns out that the inch-worm is a familiar children's story in Japan. It goes something like this: a hungry inch-worm is looking for sustinence. It goes around eating good foods at the beginning, but consumes everything it comes across. Then it tries all sorts of rich, stupid foods like pie and candy and so on, and becomes sick. Returning to natural foods, it grows into a big fat worm and builds a coccoon from which it emerges a beautiful healthy butterfly.