Stuffing it

It is a truth universally acknowledged that boys like to put things in things. In my experience, anecdotal evidence suggests that if there is a hole, a boy is far more likely than a girl to attempt to fill it.

First, there are the bodily orifices. Sacha is a great nose picker, and if I have fewer photos of him than I do of Sarah and Gabriel, it is in part, because many of them wind up looking like this:



Once when blowing his nose, a pea came shooting out. And the less said about his exploration of his anus, the better.

When Gabriel was this age, he too loved to explore the possibilities of putting square pegs into round holes. He is mechanically inclined, so was more likely to experiment on machinery. Once our printer was not working, and we opened it up to find a matchbox car Gabriel had placed inside, so he could watch it move back and forth as the inkjet traveled.

Then there was the time the vacuum stopped working, which constitutes a state of emergency for me. David took it apart, to find that the hose was clogged by a spoon that Gabriel had dropped inside, in an attempt to figure out the suction mechanism.

Sacha also likes to stuff things into mechanical devices. Last week, my kids rented a...what's the word...video tape! from the library, which got stuck as soon as they put it in the VCR. When David opened it up to extract the tape, this is what he found:


Clockwise: one orange die; a letter "R" tile; a used band-aid; three double AA batteries; a glass Mancala stone; a blue game pawn, origin unknown; a black checker.

Clearly, Sacha had been working on this for quite sometime. Watching David remove each item, I would not have been surprised to see a clown jump out.