It's like this. Ed linked to an article about being bored by kids.

I've read the article twice, and gone through a fair number of the attached comments, and I think I've got some things to say.

I was bored by some of the more tedious bits of child-rearing when my kids were younger. The videos that got played over and over. The Berenstain Bears. Hated those books, they are so saccharine, but my kids loved them and I was forced to read them out loud. And my girls always wanted me to play Barbies.

Rachel and I (she's 11) went to babysit for a friend of mine recently. We were watching Terra (she's 3). Rachel was really doing the babysitting, but it was her first time, so I went along to provide moral support. Rachel was in the bedroom playing Barbies with Terra, and I was watching TV, and after about an hour she came out and said to me, "Mum, you go play with her. I can't any more." I sprawled on the floor as best I could with Terra, and played Barbies. It was fine, because I knew it was only for an hour or so. But I remembered the endless appetite of three-year-olds for your time. How they'd suck it all if you let them. Which I often did. Because I loved them. But Barbies, seriously, they get boring. Their stupid little clothes that don't fit over their pointy hands. Slutty clothes. On their cold plastic bodies. And the games that get played consist mostly of a running commentary from the girl 'playing', while I put different clothes on them. "Barbie's going to a dance. She needs her purple gown. Now she's going to the beach. She needs her bathing suit."

When we got home, I said to Rachel, "So. When I say I'm done playing and I go do something else, is it because I don't love you?" She replied, "NO, it's because you're getting bored."

Watching kids do sports can be boring, too. Depending on the sport. Watching a beginners gymnastic class, especially if the kids aren't paying attention, is painful. If it was interesting, on a basic level, we wouldn't bother with major league sports. We'd just show home movies on ESPN. School plays and things like that are good for the three seconds that my offspring are featured, and yawn-making the rest of the time. All the other parents are just there to see their own kids, too. Otherwise the principal wouldn't have had to remind parents not to take off home after their little darlings performed. The last Christmas production I went to, they didn't announce it, and by the time the grade sixes were performing the final song, there were about seven people left in the auditorium. Which tells me that not even all the parents attended in the first place, since there were 20 students in the class.

Ok. So I've said how I agree. But -- there are so many ways kids are not boring. There's Plasticine. I can play with that for days. There's making really messy crafts. We did lots of that. In fact, Rachel and I spent an entire evening last week making crazy collages with the pile of magazines in the living room. And there's poker. And swimming. And reading Roald Dahl out loud. And I LOVED going to the park. That was one thing that kept me sane when they were younger, (I had the three of them in four years) was just getting them out into nature and letting them run around.

I hope the woman who wrote the article is being a bit tongue-in-cheek. I'd like to think that she's not always bored silly by her kids, that she's somehow trying to be ironic, to question the motivation of the sort of people who talk to their kids in silly voices and pretend that everything the kids do is fantastic and interesting. I remember being in the grocery store one time and the cashier said to Ian, in a sickly sweet voice, "Isn't it nice that you're helping Mommy to shop. What a good boy." He was about four, and he turned to me and said, "Why is she talking to me like that? I'm not a dog."

Terra's mom said to me, when Rachel and I were leaving her house the other night, that another friend of ours who has a three-year-old boy, David, had phoned her the day before and said, "You have to bring Terra over. I'm home alone with David and I can't play Spongebob Squarepants for one more minute."