The Boy has morphed into a Butt Barnacle. When I’m at work, he gloms onto Mommy and never lets more than about five feet (usually less) come between them. When I get home, he does the same to me.
It’s cute, and sweet, and endearing, and unbelievably annoying after a few hours. The Girl needs attention, too, but it’s hard to juggle both while getting anything else done.
When does the Butt Barnacle phase end? When does the ability to play quietly by himself develop? It’s physically impossible to entertain both The Boy and The Girl while also making dinner, or emptying dishes, or any of the other housekeeping stuff that takes up an astonishing amount of the day.
This is the dark side of the “let’s limit the tv time” theory of parenting. When he isn’t watching tv, which we limit pretty strictly, he has to be doing something else. In olden times, we’d just send him out into the fields, but we live in the burbs and don’t have fields. He’s too little to play outside unsupervised, he can’t read, and he has the energy level of a ferret on meth. Legos sometimes work for a little while, but that’s about it.
When he was smaller, if the weather was nice, we could just take him to the park for an hour or two and run him down. His endurance now defeats that; when we get home, he’s the same forty-pound hummingbird he was when we left.
If mine were a publish-or-perish job, I’d be in deep trouble. Score one for administration…
