sense of fairness, preventive damage control, potential for training

Recently both boys have gotten into throwing things.  All sorts of things.  In particular, throwing things upwards.  You can easily imagine how a window or a glass light fixture would do in a bout against a wooden toy, to say nothing of people's faces and heads.  As usual, Benjamin is more of an instigator of throwing things.  Zev follows suit, not that it takes much.  Today I preemptively tried to convince Benjamin to through things is a particular direction - away rather than up, away from glass things and towards book shelves.  They shelves do contain a vase, but I will take my chances.  

Seems to have worked - so far.  The game evolved into both boys being on the couch, me tossing them a rather soft rubber ball and them throwing it back.  Which means, in my general direction.  Mostly.  Benjamin was much more into it, while Zev went along for the ride.  About seven minutes in, Zev relocated to my lap, put his arms behind his head and lounged, while Ben continue to burn off some energy.  Works for me.  The surprising part, however, was that the idea of taking turns throwing the ball worked.  I was pleasantly surprised that Ben, who clearly enjoyed the game more, actually pointed at Zev to indicate it was his turn.  A couple of times he picked up the ball and handed it to Zev to through. 

An even better (and hopefully representative) example of Ben's behavior took place last week at the playground.  This was related to me by aunt Olga.  Zev decided to make friends with some older boys - perhaps four years old.  He would come over to them and tough them with his palm.  Think a rather mild high-five to the chest.  Not a sign of aggression, exactly, but it was not welcome attention, I guess. After a couple of minutes one of the boys pushed Zevi down - not hard, just enough to make him sit on his butt, to establish a boundary.  To aunt Olga's surprise, Ben immediately ran over and started hitting the boy with both hands.  Naturally, he could induce not much more damage than Zevi did - light weight, using palms, no technique (yet).  Aunt Olga got involved and hostilities did not escalate.  The behavior, however, was commendable.  As soon as boys have better target discrimination (i.e. won't use each other for punching bags), I am teaching them both about palm strikes, knees, and elbows.