He's that exhausting type who, once he masters something, tosses it aside and checks it off his list forever.
[...]He has a few young friends his age, but he grows weary of them quickly.
hi aquinas!
i don't know if i have a lot of advice, but i sure do have all the empathy in the world for you.
DD was like this, too - i found the time between 1 and 3 years was the craziest. everything was investigated, and then it was
done. my favourite was a maze game that they assured me at the toy store that it was 8+ and included a lot of high-difficulty settings. she literally squealed when she saw it, tweaked the settings for the hardest one, flipped it upside down and solved it backwards in about 10 seconds: she was not yet 3. so... at $2/sec - not the most cost-effective, but i sure learned a lesson about toys!
we lucked into an older peer group in the early years through Montessori and her dance classes - so that has really helped us with the problem of finding proper friends. i really feel your pain on the age-peer front - it can be ok on a superficial level, for limited periods... but not all the time.
i think the best thing we did was to institute some form of "alone time" every day - it was
kind of for her benefit, but it was mostly
for our sanity. we started slowly (10-15 minutes, ramping it up gradually) and positioned it as "time where no one will tell you what to do" because that was her currency (and still is.) it was quite hard to get going, especially because she was so little at the time and we had to know she was going to be safe. we had major resistance at first, but in the end it gave everyone a proper break. there's been a nice byproduct, too - it has lengthened her attention span (to literally about 9 hours, if left to her own devices - so now at 5 she can mind herself the entire day if i don't suggest an activity change.)
but i have to say the biggest benefit is that it has given her the time to think freely - which must be so great for a kid who used to be so incredibly angry all the time.
ha - and we never did have a second kid. honestly, i am too tired from this one - and man, it was a relief to know that's a real hazard of this kind of child. for YEARS i thought i was just a giant wimp.
