The War Between My 4-Year-Old, His Teacher, and 5 Genie Lamps

You will regret getting in between my son and his special interest.

In general, I don’t like to write about my kids in much detail, because I care deeply about their privacy. But generally I like to abide by this rule: if I told this story to them at the age of fifteen, would they find it funny, or be humiliated? That’s why my son’s picky eating made the cut, but you’ll never see me writing about toilet training.

So this is another story about my son that made the cut, mostly because it’s just too absurd for it to ever be embarrassing. Enjoy.

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Young children get obsessed with stuff. I had a variety of obsessions as a little girl—dogs, princesses, and for many years, macabre stories of Victorian orphans. My brother was obsessed with animals, various capitals of countries, and eventually by the age of ten, Maoist China.

When I had my first child, I knew he’d get obsessed with things too. But one thing that perplexed me was that his obsessions didn’t fall into any of the stereotypical little boy (or even little girl) categories. He had zero interest in dinosaurs (he was borderline offended when a friend gave him a dinosaur toy, as he “doesn’t like dinosaurs like all the other little boys.”) He doesn’t care for trucks, trains, or any other vehicle. He doesn’t like dolls or princesses either. His interests have been intense but completely random: his first one was “brushes,” followed by pigs, followed by Petey the cat from the Dog Man comic book series (and no just Petey, but “Flat Petey,” a sentient cardboard clone of Petey who only appears in one book.) Briefly, he was obsessed with the word “yee-haw” (but not cowboys) and would bring a paper that said “yee-haw” everywhere, but cried if anyone actually read it out loud.

tfw u bring a piece of paper that says “yee haw” and then get upset when someone says “yee haw”

Anyway, since he turned four, he’s been obsessed with something a bit more esoteric, which is the concept of “putting things inside other things.” If he finds a box, bag, pouch or any other kind of container, he will shove it full of random small objects he finds around the house and then hide the container into a slightly larger container. When he got a pencil sharpener as part of a goodie bag, he took it apart, stuck a small fragment of a necklace chain inside, and then hit the pencil sharpener in a box. We got him several Russian nesting dolls to scratch the itch, but the desire to put things inside slightly bigger things is so strong that no matter how many toys he has specifically for this purpose, we keep finding a few allen wrenches stuffed inside a jewelry box, which is stuffed inside the rectangular box intended for the complete Winnie the Pooh book collection.

Several months ago, he watched the movie Aladdin, and although he hated the movie itself, he was mesmerized by the concept of a genie. Not the magical powers of a genie, but the “large entity implausibly living inside tiny object” aspect. He stole our old tea kettle and turned it into a makeshift “genie lamp,” shoved a bunch of calico critters inside, and then shoved the genie lamp into a laundry hamper. We eventually bought a storage ottoman, where he began hiding the kettle, as well as his other various treasures.

His school photo. The outfit was his idea, and it wasn’t supposed to be costume-themed.

For Christmas, we took him to the mall to see Santa, and immediately he spotted a toy that I knew he would be obsessed with, as soon as I saw an ad for it online a few weeks back: The Magic Mixie genie lamp, which, unbeknownst to me, was about to be the Main Character of my entire winter, and the sworn enemy of his Pre-K teacher: