Bored Abhay!

It has been hardly been a day since his summer vacations started and Abhay has already begun to feel bored! God help me as I try to find ways in which I can engage my five year old for the next 75 days of summer! God help my in-laws who’ll have a hyper active five year old at home all day for the first half of his summer vacation. God help my parents who’ll have an excited five year old turning their farm house into a mad house for the second half of his vacations! God help my husband who has been trying hard to fit in a vacation amidst his busy schedule, only to find every resort, train or bus already booked!  God help my co-workers who’ll have to bear with one of their colleagues leaving office earlier than usual as her son has summer holidays and God help Abhay from his holiday boredom!

Anyway, in order to tackle his so called first day boredom and to pre-empt any more such declarations, today's bedtime book is  “Bored Bill” by Liz Pichon. This is a story about a bored dog named Bill who was really really bored. Bill’s owner Mrs. Pickle, however was never bored and liked to keep busy all day. Whatever Mrs. Pickle loved to do – reading, gardening, kung-fu, cooking and cleaning – Bill thought it was boring. On a cold and windy day, Mrs. Pickle took bored Bill out for a walk when a huge gust of wind swept down and lifted them both off their feet. Bill was spun into the air and flew high up into space to land on a purple planet. Suddenly Bill was excited to live amongst the aliens on the purple planet. When he asked the aliens to show him around, he got a taste of his own medicine – the aliens seem even more bored than he was on earth! When it was dinner time, Bill was hoping for some delicious alien food, but found their squidgy green stuff revolting and what was worse is that they had the same food every day! Bill then started to miss Mrs. Pickle and all the interesting things she had him do instead of sitting around all day doing absolutely nothing, which was how the aliens spent their day. Bill decided to take matter into his own hands and engaged the aliens in various activities that kept them busy all day. Bill showed the aliens how to cook a delicious meal, just like the one cooked by Mrs. Pickle and showed them some of her top kung fu moves and played some games that they enjoyed so much that nobody was bored any more. But Bill still missed Mrs. Pickle and so the aliens took him back to earth on their spaceship. When Bill landed back on earth, he found that he had become famous as having been the only one on the earth to meet aliens. Everyone wanted to talk to Bill about the aliens, but the only person Bill wanted to see was Mrs. Pickle, whom he gave a big hug and promised never to be bored again. From that day on, Bill always kept himself busy, with books, kung-fu, gardening and helping out Mrs. Pickle when she hosted a tea party for his alien friends! Well,  the message of this book is that the only way to keep Abhay from boredom is to keep him busy. So it's destination summer camps for us!  For Abhay though, this book was another way to avoiding going to bed, when he said " Amma …it is boring to go to sleep….let’s play!”