It seems that boredom is the invention of creativity. I once heard a wise mother of four boys, each in high school, tell me that the key to raising boys is to keep them bored. So they’ll want to get lost in a book or build something or be imaginative. Not allow them to play video games or detach from reality too much or too early. This has long been my philosophy. Why turn on the TV when we could instead put on a show of our own or have a dance party or bake something? Sometimes, in the dead of winter though, when it’s too cold to go outside for days on end, this says easier than it is to do. But it also helps that my boyz are in the habit of no TV (or at least little TV) so they don’t ask to watch it and they entertain themselves creatively most the time. Sometimes, TOO creatively.
One evening last week the younger boyz were playing in the basement while I was helping the older boyz with homework. In between fraction flash cards and spelling words I had barely noticed that Griffin was getting dressed up as a puppy dog in Carter’s last year’s Halloween costume – complete with fluffy ears, gloves with paw prints and collar with a bell. I vaguely remember zipping and velcro-ing and straightening his tail and then he was off to play in the basement with Fletcher. A few moments later I heard a horrendous cry escalating up the stairs. After strict instructions to play downstairs while we completed homework I asked, “Is someone bleeding?!” And the cry back returned “YES!”
“Oh no, what now!?” I thought to myself. Griffin, still dressed as a puppy dog, has had a wiggly front tooth for the past several months and as he turned the corner there was a lot of blood and a loose tooth hanging from his muzzle and a worried look on his brow. He had been playing tug of war as a puppy with Fletcher’s blankie and the winner had pulled his tooth out with it! (Actually, both front teeth, but the other one’s not quite ready to come out yet – and Griffin wants to lose it at school because you get a commemorative tooth-shaped necklace from the school nurse when you lose a tooth at school!) (Who can blame him!?)
Then the dog’s master rounds the corner, blankie in hand, saying, “Yea, it was time for that tooth to come out so I helped him!”
Isn’t that brotherly love in action?!
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| Woof Woof! |
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| Here’s the tooth! I told him that happens to real puppies too! |
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| For the Tooth Fairy! |
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| For the memory books! |
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| Fletcher “helped” |
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| Brotherly love! |
