NASCAR Fans Are Born, Not Bred

I live in Georgia, which is kinda-sorta NASCAR country, by virtue of the fact that it borders North Carolina.  My parents grew up in Indiana, home of the Indy 500, and I have uncles and cousins that attend the race every year.  But I've never been into car racing.  To be honest, watching the cars circle the track makes me motion-sick and the noise (which I can hear despite the fact that I am pretty much deaf without my hearing aids in) makes me want to stab myself in the head.  Nope, not a fan. 

Everything I know about car racing I learned from the movie Talladega Nights, which a friend from NC assures me is actually a pretty accurate depiction of NASCAR culture.  My husband, who is an avid fan of whichever sport happens to be in season at the moment, is also not a car racing fan.  So imagine our surprise a few Sundays ago when, while flipping through the channels to get to whatever NFL game was on, my husband flipped past car racing and our three-year old commanded us to, "STOP!  RACECAR DRIVING!". 

To my surprise, my husband relinquished control of the TV and left it on the race.  To my further surprise, said three -year old actually sat and WATCHED the race for a good 30 minutes, which is the furthest I've ever seen his attention span stretch. 

To be fair, the boy has a true love of cars, which is fueled by Disney/Pixar's Cars movie.  Thanks to Disney's character licensing talents, we have not only the movie, but approximately 6,000 Cars books, the tennis shoes, the shirt, the Halloween costume, and about 3/4 of the die cast Cars on the market.  He pretty much plays with these exclusively, distinguishing them from other, second-class car citizens like ordinary Hotwheels by calling them "smiley cars", or the more creepy sounding "cars with eyes".  He whiles away endless hours by parking and re-parking these cars in various configurations, sometimes separating them into different parking areas by "cars with brown eyes" and "cars with blue eyes".  The green eyed cars are left to wander the play area in bewilderment since no parking lot ever seems to be designated for them.  He sleeps with them, he takes them in the car wherever he goes, and he slides them in his pocket to take to school when he thinks I am not looking.

And up until that fateful Sunday, he did not realize that cars actually race in the real world.  Yet instinctively, he was drawn to the race when he saw it on TV.  Now we can only pray that he never realizes the race is not a "program", but an actual event occurring in the real world.  Which he would, undoubtedly, want to attend.  And require a parental chaperone to do so.  I'm thinking this falls in the realm of "sports", which is definitely dad's territory.   

An original Deep South Moms blog post. Cara writes about parenting her three boys on Baby Bunching, The Fox Factor and at Atlanta Parent Online.