There are two types of kids in this world: the sitters and wanderers.
You can differentiate between the two immediately. At a playground, the sitters are kicking their legs on the swings or climbing on the playscape. They stick within an invisible radius of about 30 feet. The wanderers, on the other hand, are either crawling through the bushes looking for trash, or trying to pick the lock on the gate and escape.
It's not that they really want to get out of the park; they just want to explore what's on the other side of the fence. Wanderers always want to be somewhere other than where they are.
In church the sitters actually sit on the pew for an entire sacrament meeting. They stay stuck like glue to those miniature chairs in Primary. The wanderers somehow manage to slide under your legs, slip to the front, and play an F-minor chord on the organ. During Primary they sneak out of the room and go eat snacks with the nursery kids.
All kids wander to some degree, but chronic wanderers learn to walk and bam! - they're off: out the door, down the aisle at the grocery store, up the escalator at the airport. If you have a wanderer, you know what I'm talking about, because you probably can't sit long enough to finish this column.
I have a sitter and a wanderer. (And one who is too small to move, but the gleam in his eye tells me he's going to be a wanderer as well.)
When we go to the beach with friends, all the kids group together in the sand, digging and playing. Jackson just gets up and starts walking. He's not quick, but he's constant, like the tortoise. He roams up and down the beach, and would probably be halfway to Daytona if I didn't retrieve him from time to time.
It's not that he's willfully disobedient. He just has the Lewis and Clark bug - an urge to explore. This has made for some trying moments.
When my kids took swim lessons last spring, all the mothers lounged by the baby pool while the children splashed happily in the water. It was so relaxing.
Except for our little family. My two-year-old is a sitter, but his older brother constantly leads him astray. My kids were gallivanting off to the deep end, making a run for the exit, or trying to get through the gate that led to the beach. It was like a game of collective pinball: deep end, exit, gate, deep end, exit, gate.
One day, in a split-second lapse, I lost Jackson. After a frantic search (deep end, exit, gate), I climbed a set of stairs and discovered him on the roof. He was nonchalantly examining the air conditioner vents.
At Christmas, while caroling at a nursing home, I lost Jackson again. The caroling broke up for about 10 minutes while we went on a floor-wide search. We finally found him halfway down the hall fiddling with some oxygen machines. (They were, thankfully, abandoned.) And no matter how much I tried to rein him in, he kept sneaking into people's rooms and trying to adjust their beds.
Because the added bonus of being a wanderer is also being a "toucher." Wanderers bypass the toys at Target to examine the electrical outlets behind the shelving. When you take them to a park with a vast, open field, they manage to find the manhole cover containing the sprinkler system, which they reprogram to go off every hour. Your immediate thought is: "Why don't they make these things more childproof?" until you realize that it's really not an issue with most kids.
My mantra when it comes to my wanderer is: Don't touch something if you don't know what it does. This goes for elevator buttons, electrical outlets, the giant red STOP button on escalators, blenders, power saws and garbage disposals. Don't, don't, don't.
My secret hope is that the wanderers of childhood grow up to be the engineers who finally invent a fuel-free car. I hope that as Jackson meanders down the beach he's doing quantum physics in his head, and as he rewires the computers at the library he's thinking about the capabilities of the Google search engine. I hope by the age of 8, after I've shown him the internal working of the toilet every day for a month, he'll be able to fix a leak, and after allowing him to dissect the phone he'll someday be able to wire the circuitry in my cabin in the Alps. In short, someday I want compensation for the countless times I've crouched down on Jackson's level and said, "Please don't touch that. It will chop your fingers off."
But right now I just want him to be a carefree kid, and I really do want to give him free rein to roam and explore, only I want it to be inside a locked fence, on a leash, with mittens on his hands. So I can just SIT.
