Ice Box Art: The Ratio of Hotness to Craziness and The Life-Cycle of Dating

What Kid Artwork Hangs from Clark Kent's Icebox?

So my wife walks into the office the other day and holds up these two sheets of paper. I squint a bit, and lean forward in my chair. What the... All I can make out is the color of the markers that were used, but even so, I knew these had to be something from the mind of Allie. Her sister Avery is the artistic one who draws various family members, over-zealous flowers, and HAZMAT kits; Allie's more prone to graphs and charts which is exactly what her mother was smirking about at the moment.

"Oh no. What'd she come up with this time?" I asked.

That was the cue for my wife to burst out laughing. "Well," she finally said, lifting one sheet higher than the other, "This one's supposed to be a graph that shows the ratio of Crazy to Hotness in women."

I closed my eyes, unsure if I wanted to know the explanation behind this one. My curiosity as per usual in such situation got the best of me. "And this came from ...?" I trailed off mid question for my wife to fill in the details.

"How I Met Your Mother," my wife said. Apparently, while my wife was watching an episode of the TV show, How I Met Your Mother, Allie had curled up next to her and was following along. I'm not going to go into a long, drawn-out run down on the show, but one of the characters, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), plays a lovable, but cocky metro, womanizer who often shares his whacked-out theories on the fairer sex--in this particular case,the correlation between a woman's physical attractiveness and their mental stability during a relationship. Or to put it in simpler terms, the hotter a woman is, the more crazy she is too. (I know people, but it's only a TV show.)

The Ratio of Crazy to Hotness - Thanks, Barney

Hearing this, Allie was able to visualize the concept and commenced to putting this theory down on paper (hence the "How I Met Your Mother" heading). As a testament to her blossoming intellect, Allie also included a couple circles (1 & 2) to indicate examples. Who she had in mind for these two points was never mentioned, but if you asked me #1 would be the lady who does Houston's weather on morning TV, and #2 would be--oh boy, so many to pick from--I'm gonna say Megan Fox.

But the theoretical graphics didn't stop here as Allie went on to outline Relationships via The Life-Cycle of Dating--a concept completely of her own mental processing faculties. For both my wife and me, the sequence was a little muddled (even Allie got a little confused when asked later), but we made our best guess at it.

Relationships: The Life-Cycle of Dating

The first thing to point out is that the whole concept of dating basically centers around Marriage and begins with (1) a Cute Guy. (It's been two days and I'm still rolling my eyes over item number one.) From Cute Guy the next milestone is to (2) Date--not bad, except it moves disturbingly quick to (3) Marriage. By the same token, I am quite happy to see there are no direct lines from Dating to 4 (Kiss), 5 (Make Out), or 6 (Kids). I plan to vigorously reinforce these connections with the girls until they can no longer be claimed as dependents on a tax form.

It's sad, though, that Allie has (7) Divorce listed as part of the cycle, but that is a reality in our family, and not something we shy away from when talking with the kids. There's a lot of discussion around here about the consequences for decisions we make in life, to include relationships which is where number 8, Effects comes from, which means, despite everything, at least the message is getting through to her.

What still puzzles me, though, is the connection between Cute Guy and Divorce. I have a few theories of my own which I plan to test out on the her future dates who I am less than thrilled about.