Scavengers

The boy is driving me nuts.

I mean, it’s the happiest time of the year, right? Christmas is literally right around the corner, so you know his enthusiasm is through the roof. Alas, as it’s been crap weather a good chunk of the week—not really bad, really, but bad enough that I don’t want to go out in it and certainly not good enough that I’m going to let my five-year-old go out and play in it without supervision. Wet, cold, that kind of thing.

So he’s been in the house for days now.

Days.

Oh, and since he has the same holiday schedule as me, he’s been my shadow. I started to write “virtually my shadow,” but really, he has been my shadow. I’m there, he’s there.

It got bad enough that I was willing to go to Toys’R’Us to return a toy Tuesday night. Alone. And I’m agoraphobic.

So he’s got energy out the wazoo and nowhere to spend it and I’ve got cabin fever. What to do?

Scavenger hunt! I got the idea from Weelife, but changed it up some. She had these beautiful photos of things her children were to look for, all nicely dolled up in (I suspect) a Microsoft Publisher document and printed in color. As I had neither photos ready to insert into a document nor a color printer with which to print it, I decided to adapt. I instead made a list of things I knew were in our neighborhood—a red vehicle, a pet, a neighbor, our street name, Christmas decorations, a mailbox with flowers around it and a traffic sign. His job was to read the list, find those things while we walked around the block and take pictures of them with his camera.

He. Went. Bananas.

Loved it. He had a blast finding examples of the things. I had fun watching him interpret the items. As an added bonus, we got to talk to some of our neighbors who were out in the (freaking cold!!!) weather as we tromped around and so he got pictures of them.

I’m planning on doing more of these. I can see coming up with plenty of lists—an alphabet list, perhaps, or different kinds of plants or animals or colors, textures, whatever. I love that it gets him noticing things that surround him, gets us out of the house and gets us interacting with our neighborhood.

On a totally unrelated note, I realized tonight that I gave birth to Calvin (a la, Calvin and Hobbes). Trying to take pictures of the kids tonight, we implored the boy to give us a nice face. A sweet face. Not a freaking goofy face!!

And time after time, this is what we got.

All I could think of was Calvin’s parents trying desperately to get a nice family photo and the exasperated father grousing about how it took, like, 47 shots and the one they settled on was still goofy. I so relate. If I can find the comic, I’ll post it here for comparison. :)

Merry Christmas, to all!