On Wednesday the middle boys spent the night at a friend's house giving everyone a much needed break from one another. Sans kids, Ana spent part of the day yesterday taking an online IQ test....repeatedly. Although she earned a respectable above average score it fell just short of the ranking needed for entry into the high IQ society sponsoring the test. She repeated it multiple times always scoring within a few points of the previous try (what's that definition of insanity again?). I helpfully suggested that maybe there was an IQ Test for Dummies out there which, when googled, produced unsatisfactory results.
As time-wasters go at least it stretched the brain a little bit. Before kids (and internet), because we frequently opt out of paying for cable tv, we were masters at silly, unproductive self-amusements. Sure, we had our enriching pursuits. We volunteered, spent time with friends, hunted for antique books for our growing collection, kept a little garden, read copiously, cooked just for fun, and threw holiday and themed parties for our buddies.
But on slow nights with no tv we really had to get creative. We had art contests. Not about who was the best but real challenges like who could draw the most pictures of James Cagney with the results papering our dining room for weeks. We wrote really, really small. We renamed all the crayons in a 64 box. We made tortillas from scratch. We combined two sets of Scrabble tiles and played by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien's rules allowing any word that has ever been in print. We made hundreds of origami cranes. We took turns reading funny poems aloud. We assembled "fiendishly difficult" jigsaw puzzles.
I don't get it. With so much to do how come kids are always bored?
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