Afraid of the future - part I

Last thursday when my package with my new pittys arrived I wasn´t at home. My wife got the mail and A and V was with her and when A saw a big white envelope he started to question her about it.
He wanted to open it and he wanted it bad.

She had to tell him in a very seriously tone that it was adressed to Dad and that it is a crime to open somebody elses mail.
She knew what was in the letter.

She is pretty used to it by now. Big white envelopes. With cars. Not for her kids.

But this time it was close. I had once let A open a letter that was for my wife and this was something that he remembered now. So it got hard for my wife. Why then but not now?

She did an extraordinary job and managed to stop A from further questions and when I came home later, he´d forgot all about that envelope.

But the whole thing ot me thinking of what would happen if A or V found out about the cabinet in the garage. And, the larger question, when or if I should give the collection away to them?

How will they react? It depends of course when I´ll do it.

This is how I´d like them to react. Maybe when they are 6 and 8? But then they´ll destroy all the cars playing with them. Kids can´t handle toys.

This is what´ll happen if I wait too long. When they are 14 and 16. But the good thing is that they´ll probably keep the cars in mint condition - since they´ll totaly ignore them.
But there´s a large risk that they´ll sell it all on the internet just to buy petrol to their mopeds.

 

If I wait even longer - say when they´re 20 and 22 - they´ll probably put me in a mental institution. 

V would say something like "Dad. I got a brain disease. I real diagnosis. What´s wrong with you?" 

Nah. I´d better keep this secret for good.

Collection update

 

Team Nitroade - 3 pittys and chief.

Up close with an angry team!

Yes - that´s exactly who he is!

 I got five more cars today, bought ´em on a swedish cars-site: www.playlek.se

An excellent place to find cars from both the first and the second movie.

 

Here´s my collection of pittys right now:

And here´s a picture of a Pitty lunch break :

 

Speed. We are speed.

Snowracers. That´s the swedish name for the sledges. For real. Great fun!

Finally the snow came. So me and V and A hade some fun this weekend. Racing downhill with snowracers.
The speed didn´t scare V as much as I was afraid it would. At least not when I sat behind him. But when I put A behind him and let them both go on theirselves he started to scream.

Bad dad.

But my wife took him for a spinn, she pulled him gently when she took a short winter stroll. And there! The smile was back!

Nothing beats hot chocolate after being out in the cold. Now we have winter as it should be in Sweden!

Hello Cars collectors of the world!

The supreme blog Take Five A Day asked me to write a few lines about my blog and how collecting cars works in Sweden. They´ll run the post tonight but for all the rest of you - here is the blogpost.

And to all Take Five A Day-readers that got interested - please scroll down or click on the links to the left to read more - and Welcome All!

A typicals swedish family. But we should have been Volvo´s. Could someone tell Mattel?

I started my blogg ”Collecting Cars” almost immediately after I started to buy cars. At first it was just a good way to display and keep orders of my cars, since I hide them in a closed cabinet in the garage. I don´t wan´t my two sons (2 and 4 years old) to see it.

The madness in that.

But I guess some people reading Take Five A Day could relate?

(And the kids got their own collection. Rather small ones, but hey, they´re not making money for themselves yet!)

But why start to collect childrens toys just to hide them from children? The answer was, as my collection expanded, suddenly clear to me. It was a way to create a part of my life where I still had control.

Me and my wife had some issues with our second son V. We were quite worried about several things and after almost a year we did a magnetic brain scan. It turned out he lacks myelin in his brain. Whiter matter. It means that his brain works much slower than normal brains do and it effects his development over all.

This was of course very bad news and it made med feel sad and distressed. But my new hobby gave my a chance to forget and breathe.

Now my blog is in english, I see that I have som readers outside Sweden and most of the collectors are in the US and I want you to be able to read my thoughts. I´ve also decieded to go public with my life and thoughts, being a dad to a son with a brain disease.

It´s in many ways a different life, but at the same time, it´s all the same. And the collection of cars is getting larger and larger for every month.

But it´s harder and more expensive in Sweden, I got some photos for you Americans, just to show you how lucky you are!

This is how an awerage toy store in Stockholm display cars. We have more or less monopoly in Sweden, there´s two major toy stores (BR and Toy´s R US) but they have the same owners so this is how almost every toy store in Sweden looks like. 

As you could see we have a huge surplus of Petrov Trunkov over here. Go visisti Sweden this summer and buy your own Petrov – a vacation you´l never forget!

This is a bargain. A two-pack for 100 Swedish crowns. Something like 14 USD. That´s what we nomrally pay for ONE car.

This 4-pack costs 379 SEK – 53 USD. But I got ´em already…

I buy most of my cars on the internet. We have a swedish version of E-bay called Tradera.com and there I use to pay like 75 SEK – 10,50 USD for a Rubber Tire Cars2 racer, including shipping.

But recently a new thing – yes it´s really quite a new thing – happened. In a subway station close to my - job a flower shop (!) started to sell cars.

A perfect mix. Flowers to my wife – cars to me!

The store has all kinds of cars, even the ones from the early series of Cars 1.

So I guess it´s not entirely true that this 4 pack is only available at Walmart?  (A store that doesn´t exist in Sweden, of course)

Just look at the beauty of this picture.  Jay in a perfect surrounding of orchids. Nothing strange at all about it.

Being the Not Disabled One

Too much attention? Or too less?

A few months ago me and my wife went on a lecture. It was about brothers and sisters to disabled kids. Swedish author and psychologist Christina Renlund spoke for almost two ours about familys she´d helped. Very often the brother or sister to the disabled had understood, at an really early moment, that something was odd. Something dad or mom was holding back. Something you could sense, see and experience. But yet, everything else seemed normal at the same time.

The danger not to speak about the disease with the sibblings could be that he or she starts to have delusions. It´s not rare that small children, being so self centered in their view at the world, starts to blame themselves. "It was because I kissed my little sister that she got blind" and thoughts of that kind.

So we started to talk to A. Tried to explain. "You know, some of the kids at kindergarten have brown eyes. Some have blue. Or green. It´s the same thing with V. He has a barin that works slower. And that´s nobodys fault, it´s just the way it is."

I know my wife had a great talk with him about something going wrong when V "was in the belly". And that we we´re very sad at first. But not anymore. Now we´re so happy and found of V - as happy as any parents could ever be.
When A heard that, he looked quite serious, almost grave. Then he cuddled up in her knee and just sat there for minutes.

Yes I know kid. It takes time to melt.

Today I told him to play some simple games on the internet. I hadn´t the time to help both him and V at the same time. So many times now. So many times when V shouts and we all have to help him first, pay him the most attention, get him what he needs before we can satisfy anyone else.

Who´s standing in who´s shadow?

So I sat down with A at last. Remebering the lecture, to pay attention to the Not Disabled One. We played a couple of levels on the Lego-site. And we had some fun going to bed. Hide and seek with V is getting more and more fun, now when he knows that we expect him to look for us...

It was a good lecture. But boy - there´s so many things we´ll have to learn. So many things we hadn´t the slightest idea of before V.

It´s relly a different journey now.

My new favourite - all categories

Look at this guy! I mean just look at him:

Minion Forklift  - Muggsy Liftsome - the picture is taken from Take Five A Day.

He is a bad guy. Here you could see him with his friends Professor Z (Based on the legendary Zündapp Janus from 1957) and Grem (based on the fail-car AMC Gremlin 1970, often seen as one of the worst cars in history).

I love that he is such a LARGE pitty. And the cap that gives him such a classical movie-thug look.

But he looks kind of like a large V...

...V better not grow up to be a crook!

Wild - Wilder - V!

It´s so lovely to see V develop new abilities. So lovely. And so frustrating.

He can can play for really long time with the dishwasher. When I need the dishwasher. Just picking up things. And putting them back down. Forks, knives, plates, dirty ones mixed with the clean ones. Up... and back down again.
Me... I try not to fall into tiny pieces of frustration and cardreams.

But, he´s getting so much better sorting the things, now he knows where the plates are supposed to be and where the forks have their places.

V´s three favourites. The dishwasher, the TV (he loves to turn it off) and the washer.

But he still hasn´t figured out exactly what the big button on the center of the TV is for. Or why the TV always turns of when he touches that button.
Luckily he knows that screaming high enough when that happens always get mom or dad to the scene, ready to put it all back to normal again. Perfect!
- What´s that? A big button on the center of the TV? I just HAVE to push it! Again!

But V´s biggest favourite all time high is the washer. Unfortenately our washer has an extremely bad kids lock - yes Siemens I´m looking at you! - so it´s not worth the three seconds it takes to lock it, V busts it open in no time. He throws clothes out, he starts the machine, he changes the heating of the water and he throws things in that clearly are not clothes.
The good thing - it can keep him occupied for almost 10 minutes at a time...

V is Curious George right now. Me? I feel more and more like The Man with The Yellow Hat...