Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Beware of Falling Objects

Jack has made an important discovery: gravity.  I'm sure he is not the first to discover this amazing phenomenon: seems like I've heard of it before, but he is pretty excited about it, nonetheless.  It seems there is no end to the fun of dropping things and watching them fall.  I load his high chair up with as many toys as I can and see how much I can get done in the kitchen before they all hit the floor: not much, I can tell you that.  

The bookcases in my living room are a great place to practice this idea of gravity as well.  He can reach the three bottom shelves and he regularly empties them of books, one by one, holding a book at eye level, then dropping it and watching it fall before grabbing the next.  This morning, he thoroughly explored my Stephen King collection.  He must really enjoy Mr. King because he took a break from dropping him to actually sit in a pile of his books and chew on them.  I think he enjoyed those books almost as much as Matt did, and was only about as hard on them as Matt already has been.  (I feel I should clarify here that Matt doesn't chew on books, just really "breaks them in.")

He loves to stand at the couch while I sit here and drop the same toy over and over again (provided I continue to pick it back up and hand it to him again and again.)  

As if I needed yet another mess-maker in my house of messy boys.  We are really working on teaching the big boys to clean up their own messes, but let's face it - I still do the bulk of picking up and cleaning up.  The book mess got old after about 3 seconds.  I'm not sure how to keep him away from bookcases and I certainly can't just leave the bottom three shelves of all 4 bookcases empty.  

I really can't enter a room now that has not been ransacked by Jack.  I know that soon, he will move from this dropping stage to the dumping stage though, which, in my mind at least, is even worse.  My older boys are not allowed to dump toy bins, but Jack has yet to learn that valuable lesson.  

So for now, I am on pick-up patrol.  Kids are messy, right?  Toys are meant to be played with.  Kids can learn to clean up.  Jack can be distracted from the books (sometimes.)  I do sometimes feel like I need to wear protective head gear around the stairs though when he is standing up there.  He has discovered that dropping toys makes WAY more noise if he systematically drops toy after toy through the railing, watching and listening to it crash and roll and clatter down each step.  Thank you, Jack, for giving me some more to do with  my days.  I was feeling a bit... bored and lazy.


6 comments:

  1. I feel like I wrote this one.... this describes my life right now with Tate. Ugh, it's exhausting some days. I'm glad to hear that he hasn't learned to throw the objects yet, or use them as a hammering tool. Ahh, life with a boy is certainly different than life with Hazel.

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  2. throwing? no. hammering, oh yes. forgot to mention that.

    are you saying hazel didn't do these things? man, girls must be a lot easier!

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  3. oh no.. girls drop stuff too.. like pots and pans, tupperware, books, etc... plus we get the banging too! a wooded spoon on a metal mixing bowl is cute until the headache sets in!

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  4. Oh yes, she would do the cute little banging on pots and pans, but never ever did she take my empty coffee cup and hammer dents into our wooden furniture or grab a bowl out of the dishwasher and chuck it onto the floor, breaking it into hundreds of pieces...

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  5. well, that is what you get for trying to make him do the dishes for you already! :)

    what a little pill!

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