The Joys of Boys

My 3-year-old son brought me a screw last week with a mischievous look on his face. I knew right away what that meant. We marched to the door to replace the screw. This may be the third or fourth time he has removed the deadbolt. A burglar in the making, eh? He really aggravated me, because he couldn't match up the inner mechanism in the deadbolt, and it required about 20 minutes of my time to fix. No sooner had I triumphantly replaced the bolt and returned the screwdriver, Tobias was up and at it again. This time, I found all the bathtub drains unscrewed. At least he hadn't thrown them in the trash. We surmise that was the fate of all of our remote controls. Up until last week, we had been turning the TV on its side to push the buttons manually when we wanted to change the channel, volume, or input. And we chose to ignore the DVD menus because all we could do was press "play." Good thing they all played in English. Imagine my delight when I opened a package addressed to my husband and found a replacement remote control. Universal. I found it today in my bathroom, missing the battery cover. Sigh. Boys like fiddling. Take it off, put it on (if you're lucky). Unscrew it, rescrew it (sometimes.) Push the button, flip the switch, open the door. Yesterday, my husband and I were sitting on the couch enjoying a play our children had written and rehearsed for us. I think Tobias' role was Superman Prince, from what I could gather. But instead of standing on "stage," he walked across the glass-top table, jumped onto the springy ottoman, and leapt onto the stage. Well, we do have accident insurance, just for him. Praise God, we haven't had to use it yet. Boys can't just walk anywhere. They bounce. Or strut. Or skitter. Or zoom. My sons keep my life entertaining. They will take care of me when I'm old. They will help their sisters. They will invent something wonderful one day. Like a voice-controlled home theatre system. But what fun would that be?