How ten year-old boy are you?
- Can you fly for 12 hours without sleeping?
- Can you go another half day, or longer, without sleeping (or even whining) after arrival?
- During this long day, can you also ride a borrowed bike for miles?
- And do backflips on a trampoline for ten minutes without stopping?
- And ride the bike some more, on a bmx course?
- And the next day go climbing for hours on cables and zip lines on a climbing course?
- When you visit a castle, are your only complaints that they have no elven longbows in the armory and that it is a renaissance castle and therefore doesn’t resemble Helm’s Deep enough?
- When your cousin gets carsick beside you in the van, are you nice to her about it, and ask, instead, only, WHAT SMELLS LIKE A DEAD RAT?
- When your relatives take you and your dad to see the ruins of a different, medieval castle are you all Now THAT’S More Like It as you climb the rocky, steep, slippery approach making longbow sounds, speaking of enemy hordes and Tolkein races as you explore the dungeon and examine the view of the valley below and the defenses and orcs and elves and arrow slits and demonstrating how metaphor can be used to gain traction on a flood of new information?
- Are you ready to go back to the bmx course again today as soon as you wake up, but maybe not the trampoline since your cousin terrified your aunt and uncle by spraining her back when she ill-advisedly tried an unsupervised backflip and got taken to the hospital late at night?
If you can answer Yes to all of these questions, then you are a ten year-old boy*
*Which leads me to conclude that I was never a ten year-old boy. Not yet, anyway. There’s always hope, I guess.
I had a guy telling me that K is hyperactive because he was running at the beer garden for some 20 minutes non-stop. “No… I think he’s a ten year old boy” I said. I should print this up and give it to future busybodies.
sometimes i suspect that some boys are sometimes medicated for normal boy behavior. sometimes when i hear about boys acting up, or out, in class, i wonder if they are given enough time and opportunity during recess to burn that energy. sometimes i think boys need understanding and advocacy. that is, when i say girls need advocacy and heroes and help and love, i am not implying that boys do not, in similar or dissimilar ways.
Living in the US, I second that boys here are medicated for simply being boys. You would not believe how many boys are on Ritalin here and act like a vegetable. Also, there was an article last year, saying that the school system in the US is now designed for girls and not for boys with hillarious examples from a science class. (I could not find the article- will try to post it later). By the way I hope the unsupervised back flip did not result in any serious damage!!! The hospital trip sounds scary. Zeynep
I think I’m more like a 10 hour old boy. I’m cranky and I need my sleep. Where’s my dinner? Why do they keep poking me? What’s that I’m sitting in?