He was interested. His interest lasted about 15 minutes and that's not all that bad for a four-year-old. In fact, that's pretty good. The bubs is pretty good at keeping on task. When he is interested in something, he'll absorb himself in it. This is especially true of his Angry Birds video game. His mom and I noticed this immediately the first time he played it. He didn't put the game down. Since we're focused on helping him fill his social gaps, we didn't want him to dive too deep into the video game world. There is a happy medium here. The bub's mom and I decided to use this game as a learning tool for other lessons. We moved this video game to the potty. This way he had stay on the potty in the company of a game where heckling birds are slingshot into a house of green, grunting pigs. Of course, it worked. We just wanted him to stay on the potty long enough to poop. However, this soon became too much. He was spending too much time on the potty. We then instituted a timer and set up a 10-minute potty time. We then had to teach him how to surrender the Kindle when the timer sounded, without a battle. That took a little time to learn. After a few weeks, he learned this too. Unknowingly, we taught him to poop in ten minutes while focusing on teaching him to willingly hand over his Angry Birds when the time came. "Going poop" was the lost lesson here, but nonetheless, still the goal.
When I was the bub's age, video games weren't so personal yet. They were housed inside something called an arcade. I never had much interest. I do remember getting Intelevision for xmas one year, well it was for the family. I remember it had a handgun where you could shoot the bouncing dot, on the screen. There was also a tennis-like game, where you used a dial to chase the "ball" from the top to the bottom of the screen (in order to bounce it back to the other side). This system came out around the same time Atari did, but certainly didn't become as popular. I ended up losing interest in video games pretty quick anyway. I was never one that sought out a trip to an arcade. I just always followed my friends into one and didn't mind leaving when the time came.
I didn't have much interest in any one thing as a kid.
I never made cookies with my mom either. The kitchen in the house where I grew up was a hallway. It literally was a hallway. The dry foods closet shared room with the garbage can. My mother used to yell, "Get out of my kitchen!" whenever too many people congregated in there. Interestingly, I recently had a dream about this kitchen. My mother was showing me some improvements made to her hallway-kitchen, as if she were still living there today. I couldn't see her or hear her voice, but I knew it was her. One of the improvements was a bay window put in over the stove. However, everything else was eerily the same as when I lived there in the 70's. It was a dream that had a coming-home-good feeling combined with remorse for not still living there. There is a lot to analyze in this dream, but I'll just leave it at that. Who wants to hear about how a kid was pulled from his childhood before it was time. Am I beginning to sound like that old person who trumpets how they had to walk 12 blocks, in shoes stuffed with newspaper, just to catch their school bus as a kid?
No. I only had to walk a quarter mile to catch my school bus.
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