Tyler is a Spiderman freak and is pretty hard on Spidey and his villains. All of them have held up pretty well except what he refers to as “Shiny Red Spiderman”, the one he plays with the most of course. We’ve have to buy him a few Spidermans.
What happens to the figures is they begin to stretch at their joints and eventually a limb breaks off. We have usually just thrown them away. The other day a figure started to stretch. Tyler showed him to me and I started to walk him over to the garbage. He said, “Mommy, could you not throw Shiny Red Spiderman away? Can you just put him somewhere? It would make me feel sad if we threw him away.”
I said, “Of course, honey” and put Spidey in one of his drawers.
Our exchange made me think of myself. A mommy whom he loves, whose body has joint issues and a lot of other things wrong with it, with the possibility of more things going wrong in the future. I was proud of my little boy, who is already so compassionate and loving that he could not allow his little damaged toy to be thrown away.
