Dateline 7-11-2017

Yesterday ended up being a very pleasantly uneventful day. The only thing even close to excited that happened was a dispute between me and my three-year-old nephew, who just wants to hand out and watch YouTube videos with me all day which is fine with me but he doesn't really grasp that I need to get my stuff done first in order to free up my time to play.

The problem is, the little guy breaks my heart because he is very high energy with no other kids around to play with and though his mom/my sister does a lot to keep him busy there are still so many hours to a week and he is justifiably bored for a large portion of the day despite having gadgets and toys to distract him.

He's also getting to that age where he is getting better at being able to communicate but still doesn't fully grasp the concept of some things that are being said, so when he came into my place ready to play, he walked away with his head down in disappointment when I said give me one more hour to work then you can hang out the rest of the day.

I tried to explain how waiting until I was done would free up my time so I wouldn't just be looking at my computer while I was watching him watch stuff on TV. The unintentional head game that he started by almost crying when I sent him away led me to call him back to hang out but I was so frustrated by but my work aside for an unknown amount of time that I wasn't the fun uncle that I always want him to see.

What sucked the most was that he could sense the frustration which triggered him to get frustrated with me so instead of the normal fun and games we normally get up to, we ended up in a child fight when I told him he had to come back in an hour so I could finish my work to be in the right mindset to play but he just wasn't having it due to a child's need for instant gratification.

I should have put my foot down in the first place to avoid the dueling frustration from letting him get his way when I really needed to get things done but between the puppy dog eyes and fully understanding the bored prisoner like life of an active boy too young to do anything unsupervised trapped in a house filled with adults doing their own adult things made it hard to turn him away.

Eventually, we did work out a deal where things worked out exactly how I was trying to explain where. With my work done, I was no longer responding to his demands for attention with an unintentional frustrated tone and he didn't reciprocate said tone because it just wasn't there in the first place which was what I was trying to explain from the start.

Oh well, this isn't the first time that this happened and I'm sure that it won't be the last but it was probably the most eventful thing that happened on an otherwise boring day. Now it's time to start another equally boring day, at least that's how things seem to be lining up.

As always, I'll check in tomorrow with how things end up turning out.

Talk to you then,

The Wicker Breaker