It's the fashion

I've noticed something about Evan recently. He's a faddish kid. He goes through phases--the spiral notebook phase, the Tony Hawk phase, the no pants phase. Now he's in the middle of his baseball phase. He wants to watch baseball, play baseball, he even finds baseball games on the computer. It's fun, and we're usually willing to indulge him when he shows an interest in something. We want to be encouraging, and help him find things he really enjoys.

But the odd thing about these phases is how they burn out and fade away. You think he's going to be in one forever, then you realize one day that he doesn't do a certain thing anymore. Like the notebook thing. For weeks on end he had a thing for spiral notebooks. He had to color in a spiral notebook, and we had a bunch of them on hand for him to scribble through. And now we've had this one spiral notebook on the dining room table for a while, and it hasn't been touched. It's like Ev woke up one morning, decided he'd outgrown the notebook thing, and moved on. It takes us a couple of days to catch on that he's stopped doing something, but once he does, he never looks back.

I guess it's part of growing up, but it seems so strange. Now we look back and remember these old bits of Evan that don't really exist anymore, but they helped make him the boy he is now. And he's only three. How many more phases will we see in the coming years?