Everybody loves a surprise, but nobody loves every surprise.
Before we married, I made Jenny promise she would never throw me a surprise party. The very thought of everyone I know scheming behind my back makes me cringe. I don’t understand the appeal.
Surprise parties are the most fun way of demonstrating how easy it would be for everyone in your life to conspire against you.
I know it’s an irrational reaction but if I ever had a surprise party I’d simply seethe with resentment wondering how many times each person lied to my face.
Sometimes even the best-intended surprises backfire. This is particularly true with babies.
I surprise my fourteen-month-old daughter Senita a lot, which either makes me a really great dad or a really bad dad, depending on how she reacts. It’s putting it mildly to state that her responses are not consistent.
It’s a catch-22. On the one hand, nothing makes me feel better than making her laugh for a sustained period of time. On the other hand, nothing makes me feel worse than inadvertently making her cry.
Surprises are a guaranteed way to accomplish one or the other – sometimes even both at the same time.
Like one of the rare moments in the past year when Jenny and I left Senita (with her grandparents) for a few hours to enjoy dinner and a movie. We returned home expecting the surprise of us walking through the door to elicit a big smile, which it did for a very brief second. only to follow with her bursting into tears.
Surprise is a complicated emotion, especially when coupled with fear.
I think Senita cried when we came home because she didn’t know what to do with the corresponding happiness to see us and the simultaneous realization that it meant we had abandoned her (even though her grandparents reported she was in a good mood the whole time we were gone).
The surprise-party promise immediately echoed in my mind.
That’s one reason I now purposefully scare my baby often.
Not in psychological ways like by explaining the impact global warming might have in her lifetime, but in safe and spontaneous ways like by “blasting off” from the changing table or popping out from around a corner while she’s using her baby walker.
It’s a cheap trick to get her laughing from a burst of adrenaline but I believe (without any evidence) that each happy scare also hardens her against solely associating the surprise emotion with fear or resentment.
I’d much prefer for her to associate surprise with laughter.
I do this through misdirection with my nephews since I’m not responsible for their cognitive, moral, or behavioral development. I think nothing about telling them silly lies for a laugh, but I need to tread carefully with Senita because I need to retain my moral authority.
It’s embarrassing how many things she thinks are hats (stacking cups, toy cupcakes, stuffed animals) because I keep putting them on my head to make her laugh. At some point, I need to make sure she actually knows what does and doesn’t normally go on your head.
She understands the silliness of putting a cup on your head, but as a baby, she doesn’t have the most refined sense of what is and isn’t to be expected. In her eyes, it seems entirely normal that the first time she opens the fridge of her kitchen playset she’d find her stuffed owl, Owlivia, inside.
I expected the discovery to blow her mind, but she just gave Owlivia a hug, put her right back in the fridge and shut the door. Then opened it back up and repeated the process twenty times in a row.
She prefers her surprises to be repetitive, which I completely understand.
In fact, peek-a-boo is one of her favorite games to play. She’s long enjoyed being the boo-ee but has recently started becoming the boo-er by hiding behind our living room curtains and then pulling them away and saying “boo.”
I know she’s my daughter because she doesn’t care about the “peek” part, she just goes straight to the “boo,” expecting laughter and applause every time she says it.
And she always gets it. Even when it is the fiftieth time in a row and my face is tired from jumping in and out of a shocked expression.
Everybody loves a surprise, but nobody loves every surprise.
My job is to equip her to enjoy as many of them as possible throughout her life no matter what’s on the other side of the curtain when she pulls, even if it’s something as horrible as all of her family and friends gathering to wish her well.
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