Children are source of laughter, snack

This is not an easy job. Can I just say that up front? I don’t know what you might have been thinking about the life of a humor columnist for a student newspaper, but I can assure you, this is not all popsicles and rainbows.
Funny-on-demand is a bit tricky, even for a guy like me. “But Aaron”, you might be saying to yourself and perhaps to some sort of hypothetical version of me, “you’re the funniest guy on campus! Surely writing a column of humorous ideas and stories in a timely fashion cannot be difficult for such a man as yourself!”
While, yes, I do appreciate and thank you for your confidence in me and in my writing abilities, I really must insist that this gets a smidge difficult at times. Do you know how hard it is to consistently entertain a group of primitive screw-heads (nice little Army of Darkness nod there, changed to knuckleheads) like you and not offend anybody? I don’t really enjoy staying up until 4:00 AM burning my eyes on the harsh biting glow of a computer monitor with a blank Microsoft Word file the only company I keep that prevents me from meeting my pillow in a sweet embrace of blissful slumber.
Thanks for letting me get that out. Now onto something that is hopefully funny.
I love kids. I especially love little kids. I especially love little kids with a bit of lemon and pepper.
I’m joking, I promise. Lemon makes the skin too tough.
But I really do love kids, which is why I am an Education major. I’m getting K-12 licensure, hoping to be a Kindergarten teacher when I graduate. After teaching Kindergarten for a while, I’d like to move on to middle school or high school history. I had, until my junior year of high school, planned on going into the field of medical research. Then I took Chemistry and Pre-Calculus in one semester and decided that was not exactly the path God had planned out for me.
As I’ve said, I love little kids, and little kids love me. From then 3-month old Addison Butler, who fell asleep in my arms on Baby Day in my Speech and Language Development class 2nd semester my freshman year, to 3 year old Cade Wilson, an incredibly sharp boy at my church (he’s a Batman fan), to all the kids I’ve ever had at church camp and all the kids in my Scout troop back home, I really am just a big fan of kids.
I think part of it, and I know this will really shock you, is that it’s a lot easier to make kids laugh. Kids make me laugh, too. And not in that Art Linkletter/Bill Cosby “Kids Say the Darnedest Things” kind of way, I mean kids make me laugh that deep, hearty, entire-body, gut laugh. Kids make me laugh the laugh that comes just from being happy and laughing not necessarily because something funny happened. And that’s a very good laugh.
Being a human jungle gym also lends me to a kinder disposition on kids. After months away from home, I walk into my home congregation and gain about 400 pounds. Immediately, 8 or so 50-pound balls of hair, kool-aid, and Spider-Man t-shirts bounce out of the pews and onto my arms, legs, back, chest, and somehow even my head.
Do you remember those toys, especially Transformers, that would all join together and make one really big Transformer that could just wipe the place clean in fifteen seconds? Yeah, that’s what I become. I step into a room with little kids and two things happen. First off, there’s a loud 80’s hair metal song playing with lyrics going “More than meets the eye!” Then, kids leap into the air, spin around, catch a ray of the sun off of their shoulder or something, and then latch on to me tighter than wet follows water.
So I walk around the church a few times, passing parents who pry their children off me with no great ease. Sometimes I have to leave before the kids are all clear, and let me tell you something from experience: getting a little kid with a mind dead set on hugging you off is harder than getting a bad waffle out of the waffle iron in the cafeteria. Normally, in both cases, a good fork goes a long way, and a little butter never hurt anybody.
Little kids never cease to amaze me in their constant wonder and awe in learning new things. Now, you may be thinking that kids don’t like learning, seeing how most kids hate school. Well, no, kids like learning, just so long as they’re learning something they find interesting. For instance, I can sit down with Andy and Matthew, a couple kids I met over the summer, and tell them everything I know about lightning, in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm no less, and they’re both sitting there in slack jawed amazement at everything going on around us. This is especially impressive since not fifteen minutes earlier little Andy was breaking out into tears when the wind picked up, that’s how scared of storms he is.
What I did next, I suppose, could be seen as a little mean, I guess… Since Andy wasn’t so much scared of the lightning anymore, I put the fear of electricity back in him a few weeks later by attaching a pair of live jumper cables to his earlobes. Last I heard, he was out of the hospital, and the speech therapy is supposed to be making a lot of progress. But man, you should have seen the sparkle in that kid’s eyes.