About A Boy

Everyone always talks about how boys are so much different than girls; hormones, dirtiness, ease of parenting, etc. Even personalities were supposed to be quite drastically different. I don't think I really bought into that until I had a boy myself. I noticed quickly that he eschewed all things "girly" in favor of trucks, and planes and "struction" vehicles. But it's only just recently that we've begun to notice some of the more obvious differences in parenting a child of the male persuasion.

While our girls weren't perfect angels, we never discovered entire boxes of Cheerios stashed under their beds.

We never had to repeatedly clean up toothpaste messes from them when they decided to smear themselves and any nearby furniture with a pilfered tube of Kid's Crest. On several occasions.

We never had to clean up not one, but two spilled bottles of essential oils that were so sneakily confiscated and liberally sprinkled around their bedroom.

We also never had a child his age successfully wield a pair of scissors to open an ill-gotten Nutrigrain bar.

We never cleaned up half a bottle of baby shampoo off a bed, a brand new bottle, whose foil seal had been impressively punctured by one determined little mister.

And we've never went into a bedroom to check on a little one sleeping, only to find half an orange Tootsie roll, (paper still attached, so I guess he wasn't wily enough to get that off), stuck to the pillow beside his head. A Tootsie roll that had to have been sneaked into that bedroom sometime after he was put to bed. 

Yes, we've never done any of those things. And I have a feeling there will be many more never-dones before we're done. Or perhaps we should call them, Finnanigans.

Gettin' Fit with Finn!

Teag and I have spent the last three months trying to increase our levels of exercise, while also doing a better job of watching what we eat in an effort to get more healthy. It didn't take long for our regular routine of exercise to get a little old, so we started looking to new ways to improve our health; and as a bonus, they're things we can do together. The first one is tennis. After a YW activity where we went over the basics, I suggested we buy a couple of rackets, and Teag hesitantly agreed. It quickly became one of our favorite things to do, and we'd end up playing sometimes five games a week.

We started out trying to play by the regular rules of singles tennis, but discovered we got more of a workout, and had more fun, if we just tried to hit anything back, no matter where it landed.

Teag gets really into it though, let me tell you :).

As for me, I'm mostly in it for the fun. I am trying to improve my game, but I don't particularly care if I get the hang of some wicked serve or whatever.

Other than being fairly hot, we loved playing in the summer time, and it was a great boost to our marriage to get to spend so much quality time together. Once school started, we had less opportunity to play. We tried to bring Finn along, providing him with a few activities to keep him occupied.

But he gets bored pretty quick and begins to lose patience. Needless to say, we don't get to play tennis as often now. So we looked into another, more Finn-friendly activity.

 Bike riding.

Finn actually really likes to ride along behind Teag, and is incredibly good-tempered, even when we're riding 14 miles round trip.

We hit a snag there too, as our bikes are something like 20+ years old, and the tires have given out. We'd both like to buy new bikes, but were shocked at just how much a decent one costs. I'm not sure what we'll do, as both of these activities have proved good for us in more ways than one, but I think we're both committed to being more healthy, and we'll figure something out.