To Build A Dragon

So far today (by 2 pm) Galen has had three chocolate-covered ice cream cones and Chef Boyardee dinosaur-shaped Spaghettios. That is all. Guess I won't be winning any best nutrition awards today.

There is a theory widely promoted among the "crunchy" crowd that watching television inhibits creativity in children, and that given the opportunity, kids will consume the "TV drug" all day without ceasing. I have seen friends of my son behave in this way. At our house, the only restrictions on television stem from the natural limit of having to share it with everyone else in the house (we only have one). To honor my own environmental ethics, I do encourage turning it off when no one is actually watching it to conserve energy (and I always explain this as I do it, and ask first, showing my son the same respect I would show anyone else). The friends who turn into screen zombies have been only those with limits on their TV consumption at home. To take this "zombie effect" as evidence to support the need for limits without considering that it might be the limits causing the zombie effect is to commit an experimental error. There be bias in that there data!

The TV has been on all day here. We have watched or listened to "Back at the Barnyard" (which I hate-- what idiot put an udder on a bull?), "SpongeBob," "Max and Ruby," "Fairly OddParents," and "Pink Panther" (one of my favorites, gotta love the Boomerang channel!). During all this, Galen has mopped the kitchen floor (yes, really, and yes, by his own insistence-- "I want it to SPARKLE!" he said, and yes, it's extremely clean), gone to the mailbox with me (about ten minutes round trip, down and back up a very steep hill), and rediscovered his abacus, on which he designed a dragon, figuring how to arrange the beads to make feet, legs, wings, body, neck, head. My little engineer. Now, he's playing with Hot Wheels and an old motorcycle that turns into a helicopter (it was my brother's when we were little). He is directly in front of the TV, and is not looking at it at all. He has told me all about a movie he imagined about a dragon egg being found by a Viking, who helps it to hatch, then it grows into a grown-up dragon... there are two leaders, a good guy and a bad guy, both Vikings, both with dragons. The good Viking had an ax, which he lost, but the dragon and Viking together find a dead Viking (eek!) and get the dead Viking's ax, and go on with their adventures, finding chess pieces and crystals, and at the end there is a big battle and the good guys win, "'cause the good guys always win," he tells me in that tone that says "Duh, Mom!"

Now if you'll excuse me, Popeye is on...