My Son Thinks He’s Snoopy

It appears my two and a half year old son has picked up one of my more annoying childhood habits, putting his own cute yet disgusting spin on it. When I was a kid, I felt compelled to duplicate anything that I’d seen get a laugh on TV (If I could only have back the time I’d wasted pretending I was Mork from Ork), and it appears that he’s following in my footsteps in this regard.

Although this will be his third Christmas, it’s the first time he’s noticing patterns and sensing that we’re building up to something pretty big. To help set the mood, we’ve been using our personal video recorder (PVR) to record some of the shows they’ve already been showing for at least a week on network TV. Among these have been some of the classics, such as Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original with Boris Karloff, of course) and A Charlie Brown Christmas (with its lovely soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi).

Last night, he got to see the Peanuts gang in action for the first time in his life, and he was totally enamoured with Snoopy, the Beagle with the devil-may-care attitude. Quick to pick up on things, he noticed that Snoopy was the real star of the show (because he got all the big laughs), so I guess it only stands to reason that my boy decided to instantly adopt this cartoon dog as a role model. Good news for him, bad news for me – within a minute of the classic “I’ve been kissed by a dog!” scene with Lucy and Snoopy, I found my little guy enthusiastically climbing up into my lap. Optimistic fool that I am, I figured he just wanted to sit in my lap for a while, maybe get a hug and a kiss. It turns out he had an ulterior motive (as per usual), and before I knew it he was licking my face repeatedly from jaw-line to eyebrow.

My wife and daughter thought this was hilarious, which only encouraged him, so nothing I said or did could stop him. He didn’t even seem to mind that I haven’t shaved in about a week.

It’s his new favourite thing, and he did it again this morning (lucky me). Looks like I’m in for a sloppy yuletide season this year.