Lately we have developed a problem around here with the Captain, and it’s this: there’s nothing to do.

Oh I know, all kids have down times where they are bored with the same old toys, there’s bad weather outside, and all their friends are busy. But with the Captain, this is turning into a permanent state of being, and it’s driving us all crazy.

He used to be really into Lego, but now that we own every single set ever created, BY GOD, he’s kind of growing out of it. He still likes playing with the minifigs from the various sets, setting up dialogs between them, occasionally recreating scenes from TV shows or movies. But unless Gal Smiley is available to imagine along with him, he’s bored. He is no longer into building for building’s sake, or creating for creating’s sake.

He is not an artistic guy at all – he still stick-figures his drawings for school and art class is like torture for him. He doesn’t want to paint or colour or glue collages. He is not interested in science – whereas Gal Smiley can spend all day creating elaborate experiments, or building solar cars, or testing electrical circuits, he just doesn’t want to bother. He isn’t curious or into learning new things in his spare time.

We had hoped he would be a reader, and while he has taken baby steps these past months into reading on his own, it’s clear it will never consume him, the way it does other kids who always try to sneak a book onto their lap at the dinner table, or under the covers at night. If we tell him to go read, he’ll read on his own for a half hour or so, but that’s it. Efforts to engage him in board games or card games are refused, unless it’s Sorry, where he can use his minifigs as the players, and DEAR LORD, if I have to play one more game of Sorry I may do something drastic.

He’s not a sporty guy, and he hates the outdoors. He has no interest in going outside just for the sake of it. We force him to take swimming lessons, which he despises, and he’s happy with his once-weekly soccer lesson, which lets him see his buddies, and isn’t interested in working on his skills or taking it any further. All other sports have been roundly rejected.

Of course, he’d play video games all the live-long day if we would let him, but we try to limit his screen time, so he’s on a very fixed income when it comes to the Wii. We tried to get him interested in other computer-like stuff – simple programming languages, say, or making stop-motion movies using his minifigs, but all that stuff was too much like school and he refused.

So what does he do with his time? Mostly he skulks. He’s an expert skulker. We’ll find him sitting on his bed in his room, in the dark, just sitting there doing nothing. We’ll find him wandering endlessly up and down the hallway, up and down, up and down, nowhere to go, no plans, just being aimless. We’ll find him lying on the couch in the TV room, staring at the ceiling. Just staring, for like, hours at a time.

It’s kind of freaking us out. I don’t know if it’s his age (nearly 10), his personality (he is generally fearful and quiet and withdrawn), or his gender (we have the opposite problem with the girls, who are both so interested and into EVERYTHING that we are constantly trying to limit their activities).

The other day I sat him down for a Serious Talk about this. I told him I felt he needed some kind of hobby. I started suggesting stuff he might like, and he actually cried from the stress of having to choose something. So I backed off, and he went back to staring at the wall. GAH.

What do your boys like to do? What did you like to do when you were 10? I’m all out of ideas here.

So, I’ve been sick this week. We made it all through the fall illness-free, and trust me, I was knocking wood and throwing salt and chanting prayers on a continuous basis to keep that going. We even lasted all through the holidays with no one getting sick, for possibly the first time ever, which was so, so amazing.

Then I got cocky and thought we were going to go through the whole winter sick-free, likely due to this miracle drug we had discovered, called vitamin C, perhaps you have heard of it? I thought our rock solid immune systems were ON IT.

So of course, January, and now February, has been one thing after another, and I feel like I should just give up already and buy my own Kleenex factory, because it would be cheaper, SERIOUSLY.

Last week I had a classic cold, along with the Little Miss, and I was just getting over it when, on Saturday, I got a little tickle in my throat, and although that seems like Impossible Karma, it was indeed the dawn of a new illness.

By Sunday my throat felt like a thousand tiny knives, swallowing was impossible, and my tonsils were actually VISIBLE bulging out the sides of my neck, which was pretty horrifying.

I have this thing where I have become really against going to the doctor. It’s partly because getting in to actually SEE the doctor is so hard. You can get an appointment that’s about a week out for important but non-urgent things, like say a funny mole or an ingrown toenail or a lazy eye. You can get an appointment that’s about six months out for things like annual physicals or yearly checkups for the kids.

Anything else, you need to come in during walk-in hours, which are only in the evenings, where you are stuck in a small room for, literally, HOURS, with dozens of other sick people, often waiting with three cranky children, only to see the doctor for five minutes. Walk-in hours have become an avoid-at-all-costs situation for me.

There’s also the fact that, as part of my continuing avoidance of walk-in hours, I’ve learned that 90% of things will Just Go Away. Wait it out! Everything will be just fine! Even things that used to send my mom racing to the doctor for meds, like a fever or an ear infection or a sore throat, are likely to just go away if you give them a good 48 hours of lying around on the couch with a trashy magazine and bag of cookies (mandatory germ treatments, of course).

So my point here is that I tried really, really hard to live with the Throat of Knives for several days, only to finally cave in on Tuesday night and go to the dreaded walk-in hours, where they warned me there was a two hour plus wait, and then I wound up getting in to see a doctor in 20 minutes.

Plus, she said it was strep throat, and gave me this newfangled medicine for it, called antibiotics, perhaps you have heard of it?

And then I went and got said antibiotics, and took said antibiotics, and LO, I WAS BETTER. Like literally, I was sitting on the couch drinking tea, one moment feeling like total crap, then suddenly, my tonsils were a bit smaller and things were a bit less painful and my ear canals drained and I FELT BETTER. I felt like I could win an Olympic medal, solve world hunger, AND catch up on the entire season of Parenthood which is still sitting on my PVR, all in one evening.

I was superwoman!

So the moral of this story is: modern medicine actually works. Who knew?

Postscript: Of course, now Sir Monkeypants is totally in Throat of Knives land, and our Valentine’s Day plans, which we NEVER would have made on any other year, are totally blown. But still! Modern medicine! Superwoman! All is well, people, all is well.

Let me start this post by saying that I adore the library. The library is THE SHIZZLE. You know what you can do? You can go online and ask for any book or movie or magazine or ANYTHING, and then click it, then they’ll find it and transport it to the branch of your choosing. Then you can pop by and just pick it up. FOR FREE.

I know, right? Purely amazing.

And if you are my husband, and more tech savvy than I, you can even install some software on your phone, and ask for a book online, then it is delivered to your phone, then you can read it anywhere at any time, then you return it with the click of a button, all for free, and you never even have to leave the couch. AMAZING.

So! We can all agree, the library is great, right?

I have just one fairly minor quibble to discuss here. Last week we wanted to check out Green Eggs and Ham, because next week we are going to the NAC’s concert Green Eggs and Hamadeus, and our kids have (AHEM) actually never read the book, and we figured it would give some good context (and, as Sir Monkeypants wisely pointed out, save us from having to answer a thousand questions DURING the concert, GAH).

So I went online to their awesome system, and looked up Green Eggs and Ham, and it was actually on the shelves at my local branch, which is Hazeldean. I immediately requested a hold on the book, because I wasn’t going to be able to physically get there for a few days and thought this way, they would, you know, hold it for me. Using the hold system.

Now, in a situation like this, what do you think is going to happen? I was number one on the holds list, there were more than 25 copies available throughout the library system, and there was one copy currently on the shelf at the branch I was going to do the pickup at.

Wouldn’t you think that, upon receiving this request, a librarian would be dispatched to walk over to the shelf, pull the book, and put it on the hold shelf?

I sure did, but the answer is no, that is not at all what happened. What happened was that my request went into the system, and the system decided the best thing to do was to transfer a book from a different branch. I kept checking the website, and it would keep saying that Green Eggs and Ham was still on the shelf, currently available, at Hazeldean; meanwhile, my hold copy was “in transit.”

Today I happened to be going to the library and Green Eggs and Ham was not waiting for me on the hold shelf – it was still marked as “in transit” online. So I checked in the kids’ section, and it wasn’t on the shelf there, either. So I went to ask the librarian if perhaps they had pulled it for me, but it hadn’t made it out onto the hold shelf yet, but could I just pick it up since I was there. I explained the whole story about how I had seen online that it was on the shelf, then put it on hold, but yet days later it still wasn’t on the reserved shelf waiting for me.

Then, I got a very polite lecture on how if I see a book is on the shelf in the branch I want, I should NEVER put it on hold, because it’s a waste of resources for the librarian to have to go over and pull the book off the shelf, when I could have just come in and picked it up. And then, she looked it up in the system, and discovered they actually did have the book in the library – it was on the Early Readers shelf, not the Picture Books shelf where I had looked – so she walked over, found it, and pulled it for me.

Now, nothing against the librarian, who was really very polite, and clearly was just trying to highlight to me one of her pet peeves, which is people who use the online request system to request books that are already in their home branch. But I do wish to ask the following questions:

1. Do you use the online request system? If so, have you ever used it just to put a hold on a book, instead of requesting a transfer? Do you think it’s inappropriate to use the request system for holds?

2. Do you think it is a waste of library resources to ask a librarian to pull a book that is just sitting there on the shelf? I really wanted to point out that it was almost as much work for her to look up the book, then walk over and find it on the shelf, then pull it for me, since I couldn’t find it on the shelf myself, anyway.

3. Do you think (leading question here) that a bigger waste of library resources is that the online request system apparently does not give top priority, when filling a request, to books that are already in that branch, but instead decides that an inter-branch transfer is more appropriate? I would love to know what the algorithm is here – are they grabbing a copy to fulfill the request from the first branch that has one, alphabetically? Or perhaps the branch that has had it checked out most recently? You would think that “closest branch” – and nothing could be closer than the actual branch – would be most efficient, wouldn’t you?

Discuss.

Gal Smiley got her Scholastic order a few days ago. She’s always angling for the book that comes with a toy. She likes stuff that comes with a free action figure, or animal shaped eraser, or fancy pencil and pad set. For a long time I tried to resist, but although I still draw the line at things are pure toys or craft kits – there has to be SOME reading involved – I usually let her get the thing that comes with a thing (after she swears that she will TOTALLY read the book, and then NEVER reads the book, and I am a total idiot who, apparently, never learns, yet is capable of writing a run-on sentence like NO ONE’S BUSINESS).

So this time she ordered a Hardy Boys mystery book (which she would probably love, if only she would read the damn thing), and it came with a Voice Warper. It’s a little box that’s shaped and stickered up to look like an iPhone, which in and of itself makes it super cool. But there’s more! It can also record your voice – ten whole seconds worth – then play it back at one of four, count them FOUR, speeds.

This, as you can imagine has led to much hilarity – people greeted at the door with a chirpy chipmunk saying “hi daddy!” People woken in the morning with a booming, low voice warning, “GEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTT UUUUUUUUUPPPPPP!” People having their laughter secretly recorded, then played back to them in the most embarrassing way possible! GAH.

I’d probably be annoyed by now except for one really mysterious thing, and that’s this: when Gal Smiley records her own voice, then plays it back at one speed slower, it sounds exactly like me. It’s freaking us both out. You would almost swear it was me speaking the words.

Every single time she tries this, we both look at each other in wonder and befuddlement and renewed amazement, like, HOW is this possible? I mean, I know we are related and all, but we never would have thought we sounded alike before. Physically speaking, we are different in almost every way. I am SHOCKED.

It’s almost like her voice from the future, calling back to us over some fancy time-travelling telephone. Weird, but cool.

So we continue to be both charmed by this, and a little squealy about it, but either way, I can’t get enough of listening to the thing. Scholastic, I owe you one.

(But seriously, Gal Smiley, READ THE BOOK ALREADY.)