Today I took the boys to the Children's Discovery Museum. I guess it's my way of spending time with them while at the same time avoiding housework. This place is an enormous mess.

Anyway, we had lots of fun there. My favorite part is the tennis ball display, where you can use cranks to manipulate tennis balls in a great big machine. Luckily the boys like it too; we spent about an hour fiddling around with it. A couple of times while we were at the museum one or the other of the boys ran off away from me; I'm trying to make sure they know that's not o.k. I'm so scared of losing one of them.

The last thing we did was visit the Arthur display. One of the rooms in there is a library, where kids can pretend to scan the books. Ricky started grabbing books from other kids and I steered him away from there. Then he found a felt board where a little girl was making a picture and pulled all of the little felt figures off and threw them on the floor, making her cry. At this point I told him, "Okay, we're out of here" and we left.

All the way to the light rail, all the way home on the light rail, and all the way to the car from the light rail station he cried and hollered and pouted about having to leave.

It occurred to me that maybe this behavior problem we're trying to get diagnosed means that he just doesn't know when he's doing something bad. Maybe he is not observant enough of what's going on around him to notice how is actions affect other people. Does that make any sense?

Anyway all I could do was put my arm around him and make sympathetic sounds; but I also made sure he knew why we had to leave.

We came home and I got Andy down for his nap while Ricky watched the end of Star Wars, which he started watching this morning. I wasn't much younger than him when I saw it for the first time, in 1977, at the movie theater.