For the first five or so years of his life, Toby had no idea McDonald’s served food. He’d been through the drive-through many times with me, but as far as he knew, the place was a giant soda fountain, as all I ever got was Diet Coke (trust me, McD’s Diet Coke is better somehow). As a family, we don’t eat much fast food at all. 

One day when Toby was about 5, he and John had been fishing and gave me a call on the way home. Toby gleefully told me that he’d had THE BEST lunch, with really good chicken fingers and “so good French fries!” I had a sneaking suspicion where they might have dined. Then Toby told me his meal “came in a cute little box, and there was A TOY in there, too!” The delight in his voice was palpable. John was chuckling nervously in the background.

“Toby, did you have a Happy Meal?” I asked. “Why, YES, mom, it WAS a happy meal,” my son replied without any sense of irony or catch-phrase. John burst out laughing, yet was still aware of the severe disapproval that lurked under my amusement. Apparently they’d both developed a severe case of the hangry and McDs was the only game in town.

Toby still raves about that first McDs meal. He’s also become enchanted with their cheeseburgers, as he and John sneak around behind my healthy-food-dedicated back and indulge themselves every now and then. We eat a lot of chicken, salmon, and broccoli. His main guilty pleasure is pasta. He’d eat pasta for every meal if he could. Straight up, no sauce. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be warm.

Toby lives a bit of a monastic life compared to most 7-year-olds. His world has not included television until very recently, when quarantine life has called for some desperate measures. He’s probably the only kid who has gone to two Paw Patrol live shows never having actually seen an episode of the show. He has read the books though! He’s never played a video game. 

Toby’s lack of exposure to TV has for sure helped him be innovative in his playing and ensured he enjoys the outdoors, but it’s also created a few hurdles I didn’t anticipate. In the summer after his kindergarten year, Toby went to his old daycare for the days, and they had weekly field trips. One day, Toby told me they were going to a movie theater to see Penguins of Madagascar. “Is it scary, mom?” he asked me. I had no idea, never having seen it. But how scary could it be? It’s an animated movie about penguins! “Not scary at all. You’ll be fine,” I told him.

Well, apparently there’s an evil octopus in Penguins of Madagascar. Didn’t see that one coming. 

All other kids, immune to a little theatrical bad-guy suspense due to their experience with the genre, were enjoying the movie. Toby? Toby was hysterically sobbing and terrified by the octopus and had to be escorted out of the theater and returned to daycare. Ooops. He still occasionally brings up that I lied to him about the penguin movie. “It WAS scary, mom.”

With quarantine becoming our new norm, we have resorted to letting Toby stream some shows occasionally. There is only so much Lego play an only child can do alone while his parents are work-from-homing. His new kick is Dirty Jobs, which he’s enjoying immensely. It’s also led to some interesting dinner-table talk, as he tells us of sewer cleaning and “how they put baby cows into tubes and then put them into a mommy cow.” So my kid hasn’t had the birds-and-bees talk yet, but he’s watched a little artificial insemination. Eh, there’s worse parenting, right?!

As a child, I wasn’t allowed much TV myself. I never watched cartoons, and the only shows I remember from my youth are Little House on the Prairie, which I was somehow allowed to watch, and the Lawrence Welk show, which I watched when I was with my grandmother. I have very vivid memories of the bubble-filled dance floor. I can only imagine what Toby’s memories are going to be—the interior of sewers, chimney sweeping, the life of an avian vomitoligist (really. season 1, episode 17)—with this Dirty Jobs bingeing. I can just picture him trying to find common ground with his peers as a teenager. It’ll be interesting.

The other night we ordered Chinese takeout from a place we just discovered. We usually get Thai food, or Mexican, when we order out. We hadn’t realized Toby had actually lived to be 7 years old before he first had Chinese food. It became obvious when he was surprised and delighted by the iconic boxes. And then the fortune cookies?! That sent him over the top. 

It’s becoming clear that the real fun part of depriving your child for years isn’t necessarily their keen ability to self-entertain or their lack of interest in screentime. The real reward is that every so often, you get to really blow their mind.