As much as the vast cavalcade of parent bloggerati disagrees on virtually everything there is to discuss about the mentoring of little people into big people, can we at least agree that no good can come from the end of Daylight Savings Time? Some argue: "Hey! There's light in the morning!" And I think: "Hey! What is there to see? Except more somnambulant parents shepherding their children off to an indoor facility? That presumably has lights in it?"
Each year, we are lulled initially by that magical and ephemeral extra hour of sleep, but once it's gone we spend the next five (5) months cursing the Faustian bed we've made, as we schlep our kids home from school in the dark.
I happen to be that schlepper, and every afternoon I handle the same diplomatic impasse that befalls us the moment we turn for the subway: What to do, and how to get both boys to agree to do it. Robert, the eight-year-old, is just fine with hunkering down in the Laid-Off Lair, either 1) reading or 2) giving himself an embolism while he fights to rescue Princess Peach and/or slashes up LEGO droidbots. He's so committed to inertia that he insists on watching the weather report before we leave for school, so he can proudly announce that there is a "60% chance of not us having to deal with the outdoors."
Really? The great outdoors is something to be "dealt with?" Argh. DadFAIL.
TwoBert, on the other hand, has the energy of thirty-eight (38) industrial suspension coils and would gladly run the entire ten (10) miles back home. Since we don't do that, it's my job to find a repository for all those five-year-old Kiddie Kilowatts.
And the answer, the saving grace, the Treaty of Ghent to my War of 1812, is kinetic gaming, and I for one am enjoying how the technology that began with the Wii is reaching new levels of fun and laziness. Like, now, you don't even have to hold a controller!
The latest player in this game is the Xbox Kinect, and my friend Heather, from whose book I read last night, is giving away five (5) of these bad boys on her site. If you click over and enter a comment, you'll be entered to win one. I have no idea what it retails for, but during the bleak winter afternoons I reckon it will be worth approximately eleventy-five trillion billion dollars. American.
[This is the second of two posts sponsored by the good-natured spendthrifts at Ol' Softy. We thank you for your patience as we pause to pay a few bills, and we now return to your regularly scheduled gooberfluff.]
