“I want a flat egg. No, no, I want a bagel and some Cheerios. And some milk.”

The Boy’s breakfast decision process is similar almost every day. I feel fortunate that we are in a position to provide him with so many choices, but at times, it exhausts us.

This indecision spills over into all parts of the Boy’s life. When given a choice for clothes, he can dither similarly. When given options for how to spend the afternoon, he can flip-flop similarly. It’s only a mild inconvenience, and probably common for his age. I can’t remember L being like that, but perhaps that’s just selective memory.

His indecisiveness comes into full bloom (to thoroughly mix my metaphors and split my infinitives) when he as a little money to spend, which has been the case for the last few weeks. He’d earned money with various chores and received some from aunts and neighbors, so for the last few weeks, he’s been playing out his options for how to spend his $30.

“I think I want a new log truck,” he said one day.

“But you had a log truck, remember. You lost all the logs, and now you don’t know where any of it is.” That probably wasn’t quite accurate: I don’t know those things are, which is not to say that he doesn’t know.

“Well, still, I think I want a new one.”

A few days after that, it was a new Nerf gun.

“Son, you have two Nerf guns.”

“But they don’t fire that well.” Don’t they? I wasn’t aware of that.

He toyed with a few other ideas, but when we went to the toy store tonight, he’d finally settled on a Nerf gun.

And then he had to choose which gun…