Crazy Plates!

My son will turn five this month.  Like many fathers, I am tempted to wax nostalgic about the past half-decade, but I will spare you these details and instead use this forum to get a head start on some progeny-inspired patenting.  Thus, without further ado, I present to you these five haphazardly considered products, one for each year of my son’s life.

Item One:  “You Might be My Mommy” perfume.  Like most people who know us both, my son prefers his mother to me.  I get it.  When he was a baby, though, he would do OK around other people, as long as his mom was out of the room.  He would giggle and cuddle and seem to be having a terrific time, but the moment his mom showed up, he began to sob.  She would either have to swoop in and rescue him or just avoid the room altogether. 

However, with this product, women in a similar situation will be able to walk around their entire home without fear that their children will want to have anything to do with them. Designed from the birth mother’s specific body chemistry, non-mommies simply douse themselves with the artisan perfume anytime they wish to hold the baby.  Over time the child will learn to accept affection from either parent, grandparent, sibling or pet.  Like many of my ideas, this one seems less impressive in print.

Moving on, then, to item two, the Toddlerchute.  Almost as soon as my son began to walk he began to climb, and once he got climbing figured out, he began to jump.  He loved to leap off furniture and still does, but the problem has always been gravity.  Gravity necessitates falling, and falling sometimes hurts.

The Toddlerchute, as its name implies, is basically a micro-altitude parachute.  It looks like a normal toddler harness until the youngster leaps, after which a brightly-colored nylon chute pops open.  This contraption will not only slow your child down as he or she, but most likely he, descends to your floor, it will also allow you to quickly locate the toddler in a crowded playground.  Colors range from fire-truck red to blaze-orange.

Item Three:  Crazy Plates.  Does your kid want the ranch dressing to be exactly three millimeters to the south of the broccoli but not touching the applesauce?  Does your child love hot dogs but only if the hot dog is not in the bun, but he also wants the bun handy so he can dip it in the ketchup that also cannot be touching anything on the plate?  Is your kid crazy?

Try Crazy Plates.  Shape shifting tableware that you can mold to your individual child’s idiosyncratic whims.  Our motto:  “Never again throw away a jellied biscuit that had the audacity to touch a buttered bun.”

Item Four: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle “Are we Getting Closer?” App.  Disguised as a normal digital tablet game, this is a glorified GPS with cartoon characters.  You plug in your coordinates, hand your kid the tablet, and drive.  Moments later, when your kid asks the inevitable question, “Are we getting closer?” one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will respond with, “I don’t know, dude, does it LOOK like we’re getting closer?”

Following that, a map of your two coordinates will then pop up on the screen, along with a slowly-moving icon representative of your vehicle.  This will teach your child both map reading skills and spatial reasoning as well as delay the anticipated meltdown by at least seven minutes.

Item Five:  Sock Molder.  My son has this weird thing about socks.  He has not accepted the terrible reality that socks, for the most part, are just gloves for your feet.  As adults, we soon learn that our socks will betray us.  They will either be too tight or too loose, too small or too big.  Even if they start out great, over time they fray.  They’re just socks, though, and so we accept that and get on with more important parts of our day, like putting on our shoes.

Not this kid.  He’s nothing if not an idealist, imagining a utopia filled with perfectly formed socks and “slick” shirts with no tags.  To help herald in that day, then, let’s consider the Sock Molder.  You simply make a plaster mold of your kid’s foot and then place a slightly too-small sock onto the mold.  Wait three days.  Viola! Your new socks fit perfectly!  At least for awhile.

My son has inspired many other ideas over the years, of course.  However, these seem to be the most marketable, except for maybe that perfume one, which might be unhealthy.  Regardless, I am looking forward to the next half-decade.  Early evidence suggests I come up with a display case for Legos.