Jonie and Annie

When children and grandchildren are young, you can talk them into just about anything--wearing a Santa hat, putting on a Utah State mascot bull helmet. Then between six and eight years of age, they get this sense of style. Maybe it's just an attitude.

They know what they want, and anything else is out of the question, so when I spotted this Yoda beanie in the Star Tours store at Disneyland, Jack refused to think about trying it on, even momentarily.

What's funny is the fact that I planned to buy it for myself and even have a picture, so that I could use it as my status picture on facebook, but that's because old people often don't have inhibitions. We smell like soap or worse. Without realizing, men stand with their mouths agape. Women giggle about wetting their pants when they laugh at something funny. We just get weird.

Hair grows in our ears and noses. Masses of it show up on our backs, on our stomachs. It grows everywhere, except of course where you want it to appear. Even eyebrows look like something in an old Lon Chaney movie, where the man howls at the moon and chases country folk in the darkness.

I'm not much of a runner, but I can howl with the best of them.

Old people do stuff like that, because we smell like soap, sometimes like plastic and ammonia. Inhibitions are concessions we make. You accept what you are.

But youth, now that's something special. It's a time when you find yourself.

And to help the process, there is this store in Disneyland called The Mad Hatter. All the hats are there, and it's fun to experiment, and on the day I took these pictures, for just one more time, I was able to get some great shots of Jack wearing hats that he normally would have refused to wear.

It was a magical moment.

It was pure fun.

First, we did the R2-D2 Mickey Mouse ears. It was a great start.

Jack has always been a Star Wars fan, especially a fan of that little droid. When Jack was three, I bought this large robotic version. It has a number of cues, and the small machine reacts by whistling or shaking or moving forward or backward, to the right or left.

As a three-year-old, Jack believed that the little toy was real, and he would bend over and talk to it. That's something I would love to have had on camera, but we didn't.

Needless to say, Jack didn't have trouble with this hat.

The next one was a logical choice. Jack loves the muppet thing. Kermit was a favorite, although he likes the other characters as well.

Personally, I liked the dude that ate the cookies. It's an easy choice for me. What do you find appetizing--flies, assorted bugs, white chocolate macadamia cookies?

How can you even consider making an ecological choice like accepting the role of keeping bugs at an acceptable population level. I'll help control the number of cookies any day--chocolate chip, raisin, macadamia white, or any combination with walnuts or pecans.

Stuff like that just needs to be controlled.

Once we completed the initial Mickey Mouse hat pictures, I began looking at other options. The huge Mickey Mouse Fantasia deal was a first move. The Mad Hatter thing was out of the question.

I made the mistake of blogging that hat after our last visit, so a repeat would not happen, although I plan to do it next time.

The problem, however, is that Jack does not forget. I keep hoping he will, and that I can coax him into my web of being in another cute picture, but it just isn't going to happen.

That's why I probably won't let him see this blog until he is old and smells like soap.

Pictures of grandchildren like this are just plain cute, but the little ones reach a point, where being cute is not what they want to do any more.

They want an identity of their own. They want to be cool.

But then comes the last hat. My mission is complete. I came to The Mad Hatter. I brought my camera with my grandson. I conquered.

I ended up with another cute picture.