Picture for This Day

Please excuse the blurriness of this picture, I snapped it late in the afternoon and today was an overcast day.

He got annoyed with me a little before this. Tuesdays after school are Oliver days, that is to say his best friend Oliver comes home with us after school on Tuesdays and the two of them get to frolic like mad for a couple of hours. After Oliver's mom picked him up Kiernan wanted to do a variety of things I said "No" to, like playing with a neighborhood boy and watching TV. As a result of my "No" answers he decided he was bored.

I simultaneously love it and hate it when he says, "I'm bored." I hate it because I just hate that statement. I think I always have been annoyed by it; I subscribe to the lyrics of the late 90s group Harvey Danger, who said in the song "Flagpole Sitta": If you're bored then you're boring...


I was teaching Health to 9th graders around the time that song came out, and so I heard the statement "I'm bored" an awful lot, and my annoyance calcified into full-on hatred. Not for the freshmen, mind you. They were teenagers. What can you expect. No, just for the statement. So when Kiernan says he's bored my knee-jerk reaction is a flash of anger. Or used to be. Nowadays I get a kind of glee out of it, because unlike some parents who feel responsible when their kid is bored and feel guilty and start tap-dancing, I just put it on him. "Figure it out," I say.

I've come to a peace about this. In fact, I kind of like it when he says, "I'm bored." I see it as an opportunity. A little part of me wants him to be bored sometimes. This is a chance for him to figure out what it means to entertain himself. Which, incidentally, he never fails to do.

Deprived of the easy solutions of watching TV or playing with his neighborhood buddy (the latter which he gets to do nearly every day), he sat down to draw. He did so grudgingly at first, of course, but in no time he was lost in what he was doing. What you see in the picture above is part of a monster project he's doing. The specific drawing above is a monster called Sea Terror and it's sort of a mini-project within the monster project, because Sea Terror is going to be huge and is going to take up at least seven sheets of paper. In that picture he's working on the torso and, in case you cannot tell, fully engrossed in what he's doing.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011