Birthday parties for 2-year-olds rarely make news, but Grayson Dobra’s did last summer. In a story picked up by NPR, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post, America learned of the Louisiana boy who was so obsessed with personal injury lawyer Morris Bart that his parents threw him a Morris Bart-themed party, complete with a Morris Bart cake, life-size cutout, and T-shirt. Grayson’s mom has said her son would rather watch Bart, whose television commercials are ubiquitous in the region, than Mickey Mouse.

Zia Coleman dressed a feline firefighter for Halloween, and her brother, Ray, decided on Eric Hosmer.

I suspect this story went viral because so many parents recognize the obsessive tendencies of their own children in Grayson’s unusual party theme. For me, the revelation of my kids’ preoccupations has been fascinating and funny, if a bit mysterious. It calls to mind Richard Dreyfuss’ character in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” who is compelled by extraterrestrials to create a miniature Devil’s Tower out of his mashed potatoes. Like Dreyfuss’ wife in the movie, who finally flees when he builds a model of the monument out of mud and chicken wire in their living room, we walk a line between indulging our kids’ obsessions and shutting things down when they get out of hand. It’s a common tension this time of year, when that age-old parenting quandary crops up: When exactly should the Jedi and princess costumes come off?

My son Ray was drawn to radial shapes from an early age: ceiling fans, the letter X, spoked bicycle wheels. We cut out images of fans from newspaper ads and pasted them in notebooks, and a visit with him to the ceiling fan aisle at Home Depot was like standing in the Sistine Chapel with an art historian. My daughter Zia was obsessed with pamphlets, brochures, coupon booklets, and — treasure of treasures — the Lawrence Transit bus map. Like many toddlers, she is fond of pouches, purses, bags, envelopes, and anything else into which she can methodically put stuff, especially if it will fit brochures.

Zia has spent much of her early childhood listening to imaginary heartbeats with a toy stethoscope, and taught me the word for that thing doctors use to check your ears (“otoscope”) since each of the several toy doctor’s kits she has accumulated contains one. I’ve watched her devote 20 minutes to Band-aiding a stuffed cat until its fur was no longer visible. As for Ray, he never met a ball he didn’t like, and when he can propel one through space with a stick toward some goal, such as a hole in the ground, or over a fence, it’s game on, and you’d better play hard. When “real baseball dirt” is not accessible, he’ll ask you to draw a baseball diamond or five, complete with baselines and batter’s boxes, for him to color in with brown and green markers.

I assume Grayson’s mom is about as much of a fan of Morris Bart as I am of buying yet another $4 box of Band-Aids for Zia, or chasing Ray around the bases on a humid July afternoon. And yet we indulge them, probably because it feels so good to be around someone having so much fun. I’ll take parenting moments that make me feel like a kid again any day over the other, all-too-frequent feeling of having my heart ripped out and shown to me right after crossing the finish line of a marathon.

“He might be a future lawyer,” Morris Bart told the Wall Street Journal when asked to comment on his biggest fan. Such an interest at so young an age does sometimes have the look of a true calling. Will we someday trace a direct line from our children’s adult careers to these early impulses? Of course I’d be happy if my daughter became a doctor and my son a pro ballplayer, not least so they could buy me a new house. More likely, they will find a vocation as different from their toddler interests as I, who, I’m told, dreamed of becoming a fire hydrant when I grew up.

Mostly I just want my kids to find jobs enough like the rapt play of their earliest years that they never completely forget the feeling. It may seem odd to find that kind of bliss in the middle of a rain delay, but there it was during Game 6 of the ALCS, when the Royals and Blue Jays were brought to a halt by an ominous eighth-inning downpour. I switched on the radio, weary of watching heads talk in HD, only to hear a play-by-play account of Royals Hall of Fame groundskeeper George Toma raking the infield. The 86-year old Toma, who has presided over the turf at Super Bowls, Olympics, and countless other world championships, ran to third base to rake out a flaw, then back to second when he spotted an errant pebble, each move dutifully described by Denny Matthews, who, at 72, has been calling Royals games for 47 seasons. Not paint drying, but close. Literally, it was “real baseball dirt” drying, and my wife and I could only laugh in recognition of a couple guys whose love for it matched our son’s, and had never faded.

We listened, strangely captivated, since the passion of people in the act of doing just that thing they were put on Earth to do is always irresistible. Soon enough, younger men played ball again, and my wife and I, two links among thousands in a chain of contagious enthusiasm for a child’s game, jumped around the living room like toddlers. The real kids slept on in their rooms down the hall, resting up for another hard day’s work.

— Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay at home dad with his daughter and son, but in his other life he is a librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room. He can be reached at danielfcoleman@yahoo.com.