Easily Entertained

Aaron (18 months old yesterday!!) can spend hours with a plastic bag (I know, DANGER) throwing it up in the air and watching it fall down and trying to catch it. He is also constantly walking around the house with a ball in his hands tossing it up and catching it over and over. It doesn't usually go up higher than a few inches, but he's never looking at the ball. He just walks around and looks at stuff while he bounces the ball in his hands. Good fun.

David spends his time outside, riding his bike (until recently when the chain broke and now he's been wearing black and moping around the house for the last few days--not really, but we think it's kind of a miracle that he doesn't, he loved that bike so much). Or he plays inside with Aaron, teaching him to be about 30 times louder than we'd like him to be. He also teaches him such important life skills as pretending to be shot(making a shocked face, freezing with his back arched and then suddenly dropping dramatically to the floor and always, always keeping his right foot up in the air. I'll try to get some video of this). Aaron still can't feed himself cold cereal or make an "m" sound, but he can throw up a ball and catch it and fake a western movie death.

Evie, however has issues. She's "always bored." If you've ever read her blog, you are aware that this is quite a theme with her. I think being bored means she needs something to complain about, but nothing hurts her, she's not hungry and nobody is beating her up. So boredom becomes the default dilemma. She's not "in the mood" for any of the 12,000 interesting activities you suggest to her.

Well, there is one thing she sometimes wants to do, which is to play games with me, but that usually means, wait for mom to get the dinner in the oven, change Aaron's diaper, and quickly finish hanging the laundry. Then we finally sit down for a rousing game of Mastermind and after the first round realize that the dinner will be coming out very soon and there's still a salad to be made. Fortunately Evie loves to make salad dressing. And she's dang good at it too. No recipe or anything. Just a little of this and a little of that. Once it was too sweet, but we just thought of it as candied lettuce. So after the salad is ready we set the table and Mastermind goes back on the floor in the playroom, where it belongs (all board games should be stored on the floor of the room in which they are most likely to be stepped upon, in case you didn't know).

I guess I shouldn't fault her for the frequency of her boredom. She obviously needs a great deal of mental stimulation. I know this because of the kinds of math she's learning at school. Just a sec, I'm gonna run up and grab her book and give you a sample. Are these the same kinds of things kids are learning in the 5th week of fourth grade in America? I don't remember at all:
[(7x6-15)x3-17] ÷2^3 or
(59+61)x[2^3-3x(41-39)]
Well, I'm impressed. It's no wonder she's bored when she's done homework for 3 hours and then read or watched TV for an hour. She needs MORE stimulation!! Or maybe we just need to be making more salads.

And, um, I'm really nervous about the prospect of trying to help her with her sixth grade math.

* I forgot to mention that Greg is really big on the whole, "intelligent people are never bored" thing, and reminds the kids of it often. I don't think they care a whole lot about being(or being considered) intelligent at this point. They just want something FUN to do!