Denuo - denuology.com

I recently traded my city condo, yellow cabs and laptop for a three story house, a Suburban with two car seats and limited to no cell phone reception in a smallish town in KS that is home to my sister, brother-in-law and nephews. My summer “vacation” was spent trying to keep up with (and frankly alive) two boys under the age of 4. Thankfully their parents didn’t totally disappear but I was basically on my own from breakfast through to bath and bedtime.

I’m fascinated with people watching and this past week, all that energy was put towards watching them and the events/people that surround them. I often pay particular attention to how they interact with tools and technologies that weren’t even a pipe dream when I was their age. Lucky for you, I’m going to share a few of my observations…

Lesson # 1, don’t mess with his Nick Jr:
While both my nephews love books (especially ones about trucks), they also love their “t” or TV time. They have specific channels and shows they can watch and in actuality, it fills very little of their day but a four year old in possession of a remote with DVR capabilities is a blessing and a curse. I stood, with mouth gaping, for a whole three minutes when he returned from a trip to the bathroom and proceeded to pitch a fit because I failed to pause his show. He stared me down hard with his baby blue eyes and said with as much anger as he could muster, “Aunt Courtney, you know, you can pause it. Now I’m going to have to rewind and start over and Will has to re-watch it.” I mean, I just learned that I could record a show in full that had already started without having bits of it cut off – I never did get the remote back after that.

Lesson # 2, “pinching and flicking” has more than one meaning:
When siblings are as close in age as these two, there is bound to be some physicality involved in everyday activities. I attempted to channel the pinching and flicking into a more positive activity, iPhone photo viewing. I am in love with my Hipstamatic photo app and as a biased Aunt who thinks her nephews are super cute; I tend to take a lot of pictures of them. The boys mostly indulge me in this activity, especially if “funny faces” are allowed along with “smiley” ones and if they get to look at them. This isn’t frankly anything new to the older one but the insistence of my two year old nephew on holding and viewing and flicking through the photos himself did come as a surprise. When he figured out how to enlarge the pics, I thought it was just a fluke but when I tied names to pictures and he would enlarge to better see them and excitedly point to them, it solidified his genius status in my mind.

Lesson # 3, GPS is a life saver:
The younger one is an early riser and as such, has two specific tasks in the morning that only he does (feeding the dog and getting the newspaper). Once those two things are done, he’s ready for some breakfast. On Saturday morning we came down to the kitchen and he went straight to the porch to start on the dog feeding and I went straight to the coffee machine. I heard him making a bit of a fit a few minutes later when I asked him to get his placemat on and into his chair but I kind of paid no attention. I turned around to find him trying to pull a sports coat off his chair. I grabbed it and set it aside and didn’t think anything of it (likely in my mind it was my brother-in-laws or his brother who was in town too). Well into that evening, as my sister and her husband and friends had moved the weekend festivities to their backyard a total random entered through the front door with an across-the-street neighbor saying something along the lines of, “I’ve tracked them to somewhere here in this vicinity, so they have to be here.” I decided to hold off on heading upstairs to check on the sleeping boys and instead rerouted to the kitchen for a beer of my own – an excuse that let me better follow the conversation. Come to find out, it was his sports coat (accidentally taken from the dinner the night before) that contained two cell phones which he had tracked with GPS to essentially my sister’s front door; beats suspending service and buying a new phone.

While the later lesson had nothing to do with the boys, it does have everything to do with solidifying once again that we live in a world with completely new and different expectations – for both kids and adults. While my observations aren’t earth shattering and may not be all that uncommon, they do reinforce the fact that the game has changed. The nuggets of truth and inspiration that comes from the observations of stepping outside your comfort zone for a bit can be both frightening and exhilarating. I’m recharged and excited about what lies ahead for both me and my nephews. Are you?