James' Game

Yesterday James came up with a new game. I was just listening to him happily playing and enjoying the noises that he was making. After a while (maybe longer then I thought) I decided to go see what he was up to. Here is what I found. James standing over the vent in my room (he had taken the cover off) yelling "Ball" then actually throwing a ball down the vent. I had no idea how many he had already thrown or what would happen. He had to carry them, 2 at a time, from his ball pit in the living room, all the way down the hall to throw them in. No matter what I did I could not distract him from this "fun" game. And I worried that if I kept him from this vent he would discover one of the other 10 vents in the house and start throwing things in there. When Doug got home I told James to show him what he did, he grabbed a ball and went and did it again.

Here is what our vents normally look like:

Here is James playing the game:

Here is the vent after the game:

Here are the balls Doug was able to pull out just by sticking his arm down the vent:

The rest of the balls will have to be taken out by Doug going in the crawl space, unhooking the duct and emptying it. Luckily no balls made it to the furnace, we were worried about that.

So now we have two questions: 1. How do you keep your kids from taking the vent covers off and throwing things down there? 2. How many balls to you think he actually threw down the vent? We wont know until Doug goes in the crawl space. Any guesses?