Let Me Entertain You

Sonny is bored.

He didn’t get to watch much television this weekend or play his video games because Daddy — that is, me — was watching the PGA Championship. I imagined that we, as a family, did not rely as much as other people on the hypnotic monster in the corner of the living room, but now I see that I was kidding myself. (And not just because I watched ten hours of golf this weekend when I have never held a club myself.) Take away the Disney Channel and the Playstation and Sonny simply doesn’t know what to do with himself.

He relies on us to tell him what to do: This morning we’re going to Costco. Next we’ll go to the nature center. Tomorrow we’ll go to Bounce U. He’s like an executive who’d be lost without his secretary to tell him what meeting he has next.

Left to his own devices, however, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’ll play on the computer for a while — which is just a television by a different name — and he’ll page through his giant picture book of trains. This weekend he even sat down with some coloring books and… well, scribbled. But at least he tried doing something creative, which he never ever ever does.

He wanted to ride his bicycle a lot, mostly so he could earn the power windows. But he became grouchy and frustrated three minutes into the bike ride, which means he didn’t get to sit in the car and play with the buttons, which meant that five minutes later he was saying again how he wanted to ride his bicycle, and after a while we’d fall for it and take him back out there, but again he’d get grouchy, and it was a long weekend for him all in all.

What makes his restlessness just slightly alarming is, he’s coming to my office this morning. Peanut has a doctor’s appointment, and it’s apt to be a long one, so I’m watching Sonny. He’ll have his Nintendo DS, but I don’t expect that will keep him occupied for the full hour or more that I’ll have him. I predict I am not getting a lot of work done this morning.

Update from last week: Peanut’s talent show performance went fine, and she came home psychologically unscathed. (Her camp counselor called the spoon-balancing trick “unbelievable,” which I suspect was a carefully chosen word.) Makes me feel a little silly for even worrying about it. Okay, I feel very silly. Not that this will stop me from worrying just as much next time.