My Best Friend

I never would have dreamed how much I would come to love and depend on this little bottle of glue. As a kid I found the stuff kind of fascinating, as an adult I found it useful, and now as a parent I find it absolutely essential. That is mostly due to the needs of my very creative and somewhat destructive son. I'm sure you can understand why his destructive nature would call for a little super glue. I guess I shouldn't even call it destruction. He'll just play really aggressively with a toy and then be very upset when it doesn't hold up forever. I've glued more arms on dinosaurs and splits in rubber animals than I can count. Thank you, superglue, for saving the day time and time again.

It's the creativity part that really makes me laugh. I will admit that sometimes I feel a bit like an assistant to the infamous Sid, the toy mangler from the first Toy Story movie. Stomper doesn't mangle his toys out of spite, as did Sid; he gets these ideas about changes, or shall we say improvements he wants to make to his toys and isn't happy until we perform extensive operations on them. I've always felt a little guilty about the time he asked me to cut off a rubber lizard's tail and glue it into his open mouth to create a very long tongue. It just seemed cruel. But Stomper could not rest until the deed had been done. Without my trusty bottle of superglue the procedure would have been impossible and I would have had one miserable little boy. Here are two of our latest creations:

This poor creature was once nothing more than a humble spider monkey, purchased from Hogle Zoo. Then Stomper saw a cartoon, The Secret Saturdays, featuring a large ape-person type guy named Fiskerton. He just had to have a Fiskerton toy to play with. Problem? Fiskerton has no tail. Off came the poor monkey's tail. I felt horrible just chopping it off. Then Stomper decided he'd like to transform Fiskerton into this dinosaur creature thingy and he insisted that we needed to shorten the monkey's arms and add a head and tail crest. So we cut out the middle secion of both arms, reattached the shorter arms with superglue and a little duct tape, and glued Stomper's homemade crests on. Now it kind of gives me the creeps.


This guy used to be a lizard. Just a plain old lizard. Now he is the mighty Godzilla. I guess it's kind of great that Stomper's desire for the toys he's interested in isn't satisfied only with a trip to the toy store, which is lucky. I don't think anyone carries Fiskerton toys, or dinosaur creature thingy toys, or any of the other myriad things bouncing around in his head. We just create them! Godzilla has taken over life at the Preslar household. I have to say that I don't know where the first exposure came from, but at this point Stomper is pretty well versed in all things Godzilla. Fortuneately (for Stomper) and unfortuneately (for the rest of us) Troy's oldest brother has a son who went through the same stage, and recently delivered right to our door approximately 15 Godzilla videos. Oh my. At first the only one Stomper would watch was the latest one, from 2002 or so, with Matthew Broderick in it. He thought the covers of all the others looked scary. They're all the old Japanese shows from as early as the 1950s and 1960s. Finally he decided to watch one and now he's totally hooked. I have to say that they are some of the funniest shows I have ever seen. But Stomper loves them. And now I spend a good deal of my time cutting out paper teeth and neck spines, glueing and re-glueing them to a variety of small rubber toys. What a parent won't do for their kid. Just keep the superglue coming. I panic when the bottle gets low.