Things A Six-Year Old Can Do For Hours Without Getting Bored.

Or so Nate tells me.

Scott and Nate (my brother and little nephew) - along with Dad and Rusty - came into town last weekend. It was fantastic. We went to the dinosaur museum on Friday, and then while Dad and Scott were skiing the next day (read: my foot still can't handle a ski boot - but more on that later), Nate and I had the ENTIRE DAY to play together. This was a dream come true.

Nate spent the night at my house (by the way, it's really kind of a tender thing to carry a sleeping kid from the car to the house), and the next morning I proceeded to attempt to plan all sorts of fun stuff for the day that any kid - I thought - would be THRILLED to do. Here's how that conversation went (and I'm condensing this - it happened over the course of the entire day):

"Nate, do you want to go sledding?"

"Um, not really. Can we go fly planes now?"

"Nate, do you want to go to the aquarium?"

"Um, okay." (we wait till it's time to leave) "Actually, I don't really want to go anymore. Can I get back on the treadmill?"

"Nate do you want to ____________?" (insert here: several other fun things I offered)

"Um, I don't really want to. Can we go ______________?" (insert here: several stay-at-home activities we had already done that day)

I tried to reason with him. "Nate," I said. "If we don't go and do something, you're gonna get SUPER bored. We have TONS of time today." And Nate proceeded to explain all the things at my apartment that he wanted to do (some of which we had already done several times), and he was afraid that if we left we wouldn't have time to do them again (and again and again). At this point, I'm beginning to realize that Scott was right when he told me Nate was enthralled with my apartment and the fact that I had roommates (actually, he usually called them "teammates") and a landlord. This thoroughly intrigued him. Anything that required leaving the house couldn't compete with the fact that my "teammates" might suddenly come home.

But I underestimated his attention span. And we had a phenomenal time. Turns out kids are easily entertained. For free. So here's what we did, several times, all day long:

We colored. (I'm pretty sure Nate drew, like, 17 pictures while we watched the Olympics.)

We played Twister (and Candyland and Sorry).

We made cookies.We flew glider planes that I think Scott bought for less than a dollar. I'm pretty sure we went outside about 6 times that day to throw them some more. And once, my landlord was kind enough to retrieve mine from off the roof with his ladder.

And he ran on the treadmill.

It was a fantastic day. Nothin' like quality time with the nephew.

Also.

That night went up to the condo at Snowbird, and other fun things were added to the list (including striking a different pose in the elevator every three seconds):

It was a long day for little Nate.