Attention please!

Attention is a big thing around our house these days. Certainly, Sarah and I have very little time to pay attention to each other and any way we often feel we are losing our attention spans amidst the ever-changing chaos of Boy-land here. But we have noticed, now that Connor is able to demand so much of our attention, the degree to which a large part of Jamie's behavior is directly tied to his need to reclaim that attention in whatever form possible, even if it's us saying "Jamie STOP IT!!!" 20 times in the span of 5 minutes.

Sometimes he is up front about this. One of his funny Jamie-isms is that when he wants us to listen to some noise he's making he will proclaim, "Hear this!" It makes it sound like he's about to make some sort of large philosophical statement, but what often follows are nonsensical noises he's invented or the various sounds of his baby-lion alter ego (it is both fierce and loving). Or perhaps some surprising bit of information that he's gleaned from our nightly science lesson/book reading such as "Dung flies are always on the lookout for animal poop!"

He is also aware that his own attention can be rather easily diverted. He loves to read books about space, but is sometimes not engaged by the scientific language. As I was reading about the descent module of the Soyuz capsule (a timely topic) the other night before bed, he was drawing shapes on the wall with his foot. Suddenly he asked me, "Dad do you ever feel like I'm not listening to you?"