boredom, creativity, and other great stuff

as a sort of experiment in "real time" blogging, I'm gonna write this on the countertop of the kitchen while the kids play with their "doctor machine" (see photo above) that is made out of pillows, a chair, blankets, and other hidden items.  a couple of realizations: if I'm a stay-at-home dad, I may as well blog as one.  most of the impulses for writing that come these days, are ones dealing with children, raising them, or keeping the household functioning.  all things that I didn't necessarily dream about as a child or young adult, but if you have a hand of spades, you may as well play the hand.  if we use the feedback I get from this blog as any indication, my target audience may as well be other stay-at-homers, and in this case, women. 

realization #2.  children are most invested in ideas they come up with themselves.  if you clean up something every day or multiple times a day, you begin to analyze it's necessity in the home.  for instance, if your  1 year-old loves to take out all the puzzles and spread the pieces beautifully around the entire house and eat a few in the process; and after a few days of sorting the pieces and putting them back in their places, you decide, hey!  let's put these in storage shall we?  right.  so the objects we must sort and organize on a pretty much constant level, we really start to scrutinize and decide if they're really worth thier weight in plastic and are earning their keep on the toy shelf.  so in this vein, I keep a hypothetical list of "the worst toys you can spend your money on" or "good idea toys that just didn't work" - a sort of guide to toys that really ended up having any "play time" value for the kids or were just "logistical nightmares" for the parents.  one item I added to the list today was the little flippable workbench with the pegs that you hammer back and forth.  I am trying to remember if I've ever actually seen one of the kids use that thing in the prescribed method.  maybe a couple times on the day that Nigel opened it.  granted, some toys can be salvaged by hiding them away for a while in the basement and getting them back out in a cyclical way.  some toys end up being valuable, but only because they become part of a completely different narrative - such as a hot-pad glove that was intended to be for the playstove, but has been mostly used as a pretend sock.  by and large, the play of children that (from a parents perspective) is the most stimulating, creative an engaging for the child is derived out of their own imagination - objects inserted into their own created narrative, coopted and used for something other than their original intention. 

realization #3.  boredom is completely necessary for children.  I mentioned to my wife this morning, after 4 year old Maggie was complaining about having to stay home because it was SO BORING, that BORING is the latest of Maggie's "power words."  power words, of course, being the words young children use to pry their parents' emotional selves apart, after learning that their words can have this incredible kind of impact when attempting to control their environment, which is admittedly, very much out of their control.  (they typically learn them from the older siblings.)  this added to her nice little arsenal containing words like HATE and DISGUSTING.  it is a common day to feel guilty about not providing enough "stimulation" or direct eye contact or one-on-one "floor time" play or whatever it is that we feel guilty about not giving the kids (trips to the museum? concerts? epic adventures?)  but let's be honest.  if we're gonna clean the house and do the laundry and get a few good meals on the table each week (and that's just the easy stuff), we're not gonna have alot of time to create daily epic adventures for children.  we're gonna give 'em all the adventure we can but one thing I've reaized is: kids have a whole lot of epic adventure already preprogrammed into their heads.  this relates to realization #2.  the best kids play, the most engaged creativity and the overall happiest times as a family in the working day, more times than not come out of a sort of "forced boredom" setup.  if children complain of boredom, it just might be a good indicator that they are in fact, not bored enough.  good golly, send me hate-mail if I start to sound like a patronizing know-it-all, knock-on-all-the-other-parents kind of parenting discussion.  but these are things I've noticed in my kids on the days that I was not overcome by guilt or depression.