Crap.
So Wednesday morning I tried the next best thing: I got out the Matthew-sized travel mouse and looked up some Flash games.
I tried this with him about 6 months ago and it was a total failure. He could not associate the mouse's movements with the screen pointer. He got frustrated, I got frustrated, even Rachel got frustrated when she tried to teach him. Hence, the TV-in-the-morning-while-Dad-pulls-pillows-over-his-head-on-the-couch-and-tries-to-sleep-another-ten-minutes routine.
But Wednesday, he was ready. He wasn't very good at it, and he still got frustrated when he moved the mouse too far outside his flash window, but he could understand the basics of, "I move the mouse left, the little guy on the screen moves left." Hurray!
So now our mornings go something like this:
- 6:00-6:30: Matthew wakes up. I tell him to go back to bed; it's still dark outside.
- 7:00: Matthew gets up for good. (He's surprisingly puctual for a kid without any clocks in his room.)
- 7:01: Matthew asks for "crackers and cheese." (His breakfast of choice for the past couple weeks. Both his parents enjoy crackers and cheese, so I guess it's not hard to see where he gets it, but neither of us eat that for breakfast. I'm more of a cereal guy, myself, and Rachel's into actually cooking stuff like eggs and oatmeal.)
- 7:01: I tell Matthew he can have his C&C if he first eats something healthy. Bananas or slices of toast frequently appear here. Hey, it's better than jello and oreos.
- 7:45-ish: Matthew finishes breakfast. (He's easily distracted. This morning, for instance, the garbage truck, peeing, getting on a jacket -- "I told [cold], Dada" -- and his baby sister all took significant amounts of attention.) Daddy busts out Rachel's dell for him to play a flash game on.
- Hopefully he doesn't get bored until I start to get ready for work around 8:30. Otherwise we have to move on to messier activities, like destroying magazines with scissors.
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