He diddles and he dawdles and he gets distracted. Last night, he was supposed to be doing his vocabulary cards and I checked on him and he was looking up the word "traipse" in the dictionary. ME: Oh, is that one of your words? Him: No, I just wanted to know it's precise definition. Me: Why's that? Him: I just want to". He'll go to the bathroom and if there's any reading material within 10 feet, he'll read in the bathroom. He also has trouble getting through the tedious stuff. He wants to move on to the next thing because, of course, that's much more interesting than whatever he's doing. If he's supposed to read one chapter, he'll read until I make him stop. If he's supposed to be doing math, he might be reading the newspaper or his science report or playing with the dog or whatever.
For example, yesterday, he got home at 4:30 and had a snack and then went to piano lesson, and got home about 5:40. I told him to get right on his homework because he had a scout meeting at 7 and he asked for 5 minutes of downtime. So, 5 minutes later, I told him his time was up, and to get busy. He finally got around to getting his homework out at about 6:20. I have no idea what he was doing in that time - daydreaming, creating sand castles in his head, solving the mystery of the universe, who knows? Ten minutes later, supper was ready so he ate and went back to his homework about 6:40. He "worked" on it until 8:00 when I told him to put it away and play with his dad. "What'll I do about it? It's due tomorrow?". I told him I didn't know but that he had had plenty of time to do it. Then, he realized that he had missed scouts and started calling himself stupid.
