He finds his voice

Being Lastborn has its advantages. I remember a friend telling me she felt guilty with how strict she was with her firstborn child and how lenient she was with her third. I wouldn't call myself lenient. It's not in my nature, but I certainly know better which battles to wage than I did on my first go around.

Lastborn is beginning to realize that the older brother he used to idolize has his weaknesses. For example, Firstborn sets him up to get into trouble. He can't always be trusted by his fan club. Lastborn is also realizing that not everything that Firstborn likes is necessarily great and not everything Firstborn thinks is boring is actually that much of a drag.

These changes can sometimes be a lot for Lastborn to take, though he rarely goes around whining about the loss of his idol.

Lastborn is mixing this loss of his leader with a new found understanding that he is smart and interesting on his own. He is beginning to try things even if they aren't recommended by Firstborn. He is also beginning to fight for his rights under the tyranny of Firstborn.

So yesterday, we were beginning a wonderful Saturday with nothing on our agenda. Being adults, we awake to days like this with great glee. Nothing to do. Nowhere to run around. Maybe I can do what I want to do today.

In fact, these days usually end up with the kids plastered to the electronics and fighting about who gets a turn, or will you help me with this part. Since Firstborn is officially a tween, he relishes torturing Lastborn by not complying with his requests. And he has an amazing ability to ignore Lastborn's whines.

I do not.

So I began my first yelling tirade of the day. "Everyone gets only one hour today, so play it and get out. We're not sitting in front of the game system all day rotting our brains and arguing." And yada yada yada.

Firstborn continued to press, "how about the PC? How about hand helds? Do we really have to not play games all day? No I won't read. No I won't play outside. None of my friends want to play because they get to sit in front of the game system and rot their brains!"

... and on and on.

I warned him.

So they lost all electronics for the day with the threat that it would be for November!

I had to give Lastborn credit. He did call his friends. No one was available.

Rewind to last weekend. No rewind further to this summer when we returned from vacation and found that someone had chewed the plugs off two of our lights.

It probably wasn't the kids this time.

It could have been the puppy, but she was either locked up or under supervision in this room, so that was hard to believe. However, she chews on everything.

But then that cats chew on everything too. It must have been the cats.

Whoever, we had to rewire the lamps. One was easy, just a new cord. ba da bing, it was done. The other was made so that you couldn't get to the connections for the socket. So there was no way to remove and replace the cord. DH bought a new socket but we never got to fixing it. Then I saw in Lastborn's Cub Scout book that fixing a small appliance is an elective, so I figured we would do it together.

Last week, we finally got a chance. He was reluctant, but when I started having him wrap wires around screws and use a Phillips head to tighten the screw himself, he began to take interest and ask questions. I was surprised. He's not as much the engineer personality as his brother. He's disorganized and imprecise; more the artistic type. He's very into interacting with others and bending the rules. But he was very interested and so proud of himself when he switched the lamp on.

So when he was looking for something to do, and I was sick of playing board games with him, I pulled out the Snap Circuits set that DH had gotten for Firstborn years ago. Firstborn has done a few circuits and liked it, but never loved it.

We did the first circuit together and I explained to Lastborn that the pieces snap together sort of like Legos. There are pictures to tell him what to do and there are all kinds of attachments to use to make things. Once we finished the first circuit, he was off on his own and had the greatest time hooking up sound boxes and making serial and parallel circuits. By the end of the day, he had completed about 40 of the circuits. DH promised him that if he completed all of them, he could use the other bigger set he had in his closet. So Lastborn finished all of them this morning.

He announced at dinner that he didn't need gamecube. Circuits were just as fun as playing video games. Not only that, but he carefully kept track of each piece placing them back into their plastic compartments between each build. He even remembered favorite circuits and built them from memory to show us.

I think a light went on for him. (Sorry.)