Water Cups, Water Cups Everywhere
I have no idea how we ended up with so many cups in our house. Ten years ago we got our first two sippy cups and what I didn’t know at that time but have since learned is they reproduce like rabbits. We now have so many cups I’ve lost count.
What I’m referring to as a “cup” can take a multitude of different forms. This includes your common drinking glass (well, not made of glass in our house), tumblers, and sippy cups but also metal water bottles, sports bottles, and plastic containers of various dimensions.
When I was a kid I was only aware of the importance of hydration when playing sports and when fishing. I didn’t tote a water bottle around with me. My kids (and their friends and peers) do this pretty much 100% of the time. I’m really not sure how this came to be a thing. Individually, I think we made it a thing by getting our oldest a special bottle for water and once he had that he wanted it with him all the time. Kind of like Linus and his security blanket, except vastly easier to lose. This of course set the precedent for each subsequent kid wanting their own cup. However we ended up with exponentially more than six cups is a mystery, as well as how this became a trend in society.
“Go potty, put on your shoes, grab your cup,” is a common refrain in our house before we go anywhere. As is the panicked reply, “I can’t find my cup!” Cups reproduce like rabbits and hide like them too. It’s amazing how well a brownish gray rabbit standing motionless can blend into the forest. These cups are the same way.
I suppose in a sense they are the perfect camouflage in our house. Most of them are brightly colored and have special patterns on them (spaceships, monkeys, etc) and with all the colorful kids toys in the house they blend in. But there are also 14,000 cups so every time I say, “is this it?” to a panicked, cupless kid the answer is inevitably, “no, mine is the [fill in the blank] one.”
Because these special cups get taken everywhere they also get left behind everywhere. A parent saying, “You are in charge of your cup,” roughly translates to that trumpet sound all parents make in the Charlie Brown movies. Children have left cups at: the grandparents, the park, church, the store, the playground, the pool, the library, restaurants…actually it would probably make more sense to list off places they have never left their cup. For example: at home.
50 years ago kids drank from an outdoor spigot if they needed a drink while playing. 25 years ago we did the same or went inside for a glass. Now? Kids have enough water for a journey across the Sahara in order to cross the street.
Hydration itself is certainly a good thing. And maybe the mobile water cup thing is an inevitable result of living in a world where having stationary anything (phones, computers, Internet, radios) is passé. But we might have taken this to an extreme.
Before you know it, there will be water bottles with built-in tablets on the side. Hmmm, I think I see a business opportunity.