The ADD flea

My son, whom I adore, is a pip. He won't sleep. He's entirely unwilling to play nicely with his sister and acts exhausted all the time. But, as I said, he won't sleep. And each time we sleep train, we have massive regressions within weeks. Just contemplating sleep training him is exhausting.

But I have to think that this failure or refusal to sleep only makes his unfortunate proclivities that much worse, the worst of which is his inability to focus on one task or occupation for more than 3 minutes, literally. He has the attention span of a flea. A flea with ADD.

Tonight I decided to include him in dinner prep while his sister was still napping, so I told him he could put the carrot slices into the steamer basket after I cut them up. The two things he did manage to fixate on were the stray carrot scrapings in the sink ("Eww! Eeewwww!") and the one piece of carrot whose cut was crooked. That truly appalled him, and he refused to have it in with other carrots. It was the pariah of the bunch. But once we got past that, he could not put more than 3 pieces of carrot in the steamer basket without moving on to bigger and better things.

Splashing in the sink.

Reaching for knives.

Acting like his stool bars were the parallel bars in a gymnasium.

It was quite remarkable. It took him 25 minutes to get slices from 3 carrots into a steamer basket. He seemed to be having a lovely time doing it, but it was excruciating for a "git 'er done" type like myself.

And then there is his sister, who finished a 200-page children's version of Arabian Nights in one day today. Nothing like some quality reading time with Daddy on his sick day.