“I need to work on my Polish,” the Boy recently declared, so he and K have been working on Polish lessons again. He doesn’t look enthusiastic all the time, but he is (still) willing.
Almost as lovely as his effort were the azaleas blooming this morning.
Tonight, I took the Boy to curriculum night at his zoned middle school. We’re still not sure if he’s going to the charter middle school L attended (he’s grandfathered in) or if he’s going to the zoned public school. Right now he’s leaning toward the latter: he’s interested in music, and he wants to play in band, which is not something the charter school offers.
We spoke to the band director for a while, talked to the strings teacher, looked at the instruments, talked about the advantages of each.
“I think I’m leaning to this school,” he said.
“My only concern,” I said, “is that the academics at this school won’t be at quite the level as the charter school.”
The Boy expressed that he’s okay with that, suggesting once again that he’s not such a smart guy as someone who needs those “high-level classes.”
K and I don’t know where this idea comes from. He gets great grades; he scores well on standardized tests — he just doesn’t see himself as a gifted person, certainly not as a thinker. He sees himself as perfectly academically average.
He couldn’t be more different than his sister…
The Boy has become interested in ciphers and codes. They learned about them in school this week and so he wants to learn about more of them. Tonight, he and I were writing things back and forth in pig pen cipher:
It’s a simple replacement cipher, but the Boy loves it.
During our evening walk, I mentioned to him that Papa knew a real code: Morse Code.
“Really?!”
I thought Papa had mentioned that so many times, doing his “da-dit-dit” routine to spell various words out in code, that no one could have forgotten about that. Apparently, E had.
“I wish Papa was still here.”
We’ll be having those moments for some time to come, I think.
He’s been begging for it for ages now.
“I really want an electric guitar!” became the Boy’smantra. Yet we were afraid that, like so many other interests, it might just fade away, so we told him to use L’s old pink guitar to show that he’s really interested in playing, committed to playing, disciplined enough for playing.
I’m not entirely sure he proved all those things, but he made a valiant effort. He learned a few chords (really mastering a couple of them) and got to where he could switch back and forth between them. He practiced chromatic scales to get single-string control along with finger sequencing. And he talked about it a lot.
Of course, he had a point: an electric guitar, with its lighter gauge strings, is easier to play than a steel-string acoustic. A nylon-string acoustic/classical guitar would be the easiest and the gentlest on his fingers, but he wanted an electric guitar. Passion is important, and he was passionate about this, and we want him to keep that passion.
The Boy is often playing catchup with his school work. I’ve often brought it up here. We’re both tired of it — K, too. Recently, we made a deal with the Boy. Well, not so much a deal as a threat. A hostage situation. No electronics of any kind until he is all caught up. No TV in the morning with breakfast. No YouTube on the weekends. No Minecraft. Nothing. And so he has really buckled down and began doing the work.
Most of it — on his Chromebook…
He’s improving. He’s thinking in terms of potential. He’s looking at my last move and giving it consideration.
Tonight, he moved his rook to the semi-open file — always a good development strategy in the opening 8-15 moves.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“So I could attack that,” he replied matter-of-factly, pointing at one of my pawns.
“How many defenders does it have?”
“Three.”
“How many attackers?” I enquired further.
“Two.”
“Is it safe to take?”
“Nope.”
I looked over at K. “He’s going to be able to beat you sooner than later,” I said.
“I’m sure,” she smiled.
Then his tummy started hurting — but that’s a different story.
Today the Boy had music for his related art class in school. They’re working on the treble clef.
“I took the after-lesson quiz,” he explained, “and I got 3 out of 20 right! I took it again and only got 4 out of 20 correct!” His frustration was mounting to the level I’m sure it achieved when he was struggling with the material in class.
After dinner, I printed out the old methods of memorizing the treble clef: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” and “FACE.”
We went through his work together, and he made a perfect score. “That was easy,” he decided.
He noticed, though, that there are two D notes on the treble clef: one just beside middle C, and one almost up at the top of the clef.
“Two Ds?!”
So we went to the piano and started poking around. We talked about the patterns of the black keys and used that as a way to show which keys corresponded to which note.
“This is D,” I said. “See how it’s between the two black keys? Now show me another D.”
The Boy wanted to try to start a fire with his flint and steel from the survival pack he bought earlier this year. He didn’t get it started, but he enjoyed chopping at a half-rotten (but dry) log to get small chips to try to catch a spark.
I tried to explain to him that that would not be sufficient, that he should try other methods. We tried using a small planer to produce some thin strips, but nothing worked.
In the end, he just got some matches.
The Boy was having trouble this morning with three-digit subtraction, things like 352-178. He was thinking a little too much, mixing prior knowledge with current practice. For example, in the number above, he would know he had to borrow a 10 from the 10s place in order to subtract 8 properly, but then that would leave him with 4. Instead of writing 4 above the crossed-out 5, he wrote 40. Which is technically correct. But the be was subtracting 7 from 40 and coming up with 33, and before long, he was subtracting one three-digit number from another three-digit number and coming up with a six-digit answer.
I remember the frustration of borrowing numbers in subtraction. I, too, experienced it in second grade: I just couldn’t figure out how those numbers were shifting around, 5 becoming 4 so I could subtract something from the 1s place. Everyone tried explaining it to me: my teacher, mom, dad, the girl who babysat me from time to time. It just didn’t make any sense to me no matter how often and how many different ways it was explained.
So I understood the Boy’s frustration this morning. I sat with him a while, taking a break from my own work, and tried to help him through it.
“Yes, but Daddy, that’s the 10s place, so it’s not just 4, it’s 40.”
“Technically, you’re correct, but…”
“What do you mean ‘technically’? What does that even mean?!”
It was another moment that I found myself in awe of elementary school teachers. I don’t teach many new skills: I mainly take existing skills and improve them. The kids can write when they come to me; I just help them write better. They can read when they come to me; I just give them tricks for comprehending more challenging texts: things like “make sure you keep track of your pronouns’ antecedents — you need to know who ‘he’ is when the author uses that pronoun,” or “determine the part of speech of that unknown word — that will help you a lot in inferring a possible meaning.” But just taking a kid who doesn’t know at all how to read and turning her into a reader? I haven’t got the slightest clue how to do that. I know it’s just a matter of training: I minored in education in college, but in secondary education — not primary. An entirely different field of study.
Still, having experienced that frustration myself, I had a certain patience and understanding of his frustration.
This is why some feel that teachers who teach subjects they were always good at isn’t as effective as alternatives. We — for I was always good at literature and decent at writing — know how to do these skills seemingly instinctively. It’s hard to teach someone how to do something that you can do, relative to the struggling student, without thinking. It’s better to teach something that you yourself have struggled with, goes the thinking. But the problem with that: where’s the passion? I don’t teach English just because I want to teach and happened to choose English. I teach it because I myself enjoy writing; I teach it because I love reading. I teach it because I have a certain excitement about certain books, certain poems, even certain reading skills that I love to share with students. I struggled with math, and the only passion I feel about it is a certain kind of revulsion.
The Boy loves working in the yard. We bought a battery-powered weed eater just so he could help (which is now out of trim line, which we don’t have). Today, after scolding me a little bit about still not having the right line, he asked if he could help mow.
When we first started doing this, I would let him do the little flat, straight portion in the front yard just between the flower bed and the crape myrtles. Today, I let him tackle some of the more challenging areas.
“Make sure you keep the line of uncut grass just on the inside edge of your outside wheel,” I explained, demonstrating just what I meant.
He tried, poor fellow, but he just couldn’t stop drifting inward, leaving slivers of uncut grass with every row.
Still, I can’t help but be pleased that he’s still willing to help. At some point, the job will be his entirely.
The Girl finished up the afternoon with a little more painting: the swing I’d started Saturday for K’s Mother’s Day gift is nearing completion.
It’s always a chapter that confuses students: the 24th chapter in To Kill a Mockingbird feels like someone took a chapter out of a completely different novel, changed a few names to match a few characters’ names in Mockingbird, and just slipped it into the stream of the story. The only connection it seems to have with the rest of the book is the news of the death of Tom Robinson toward the end of the chapter. I contend that in many ways it’s one of the most important chapters in the book as it fully develops one of the book’s major themes: the hypocrisy of Southern white Christians.
Most of the chapter centers around Aunt Alexandra’s hosting the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South Missionary Society meeting. Scout attends as “a part of [Alexandra’s] campaign to teach [Scout] to be a lady.” Poor Scout is lost from the beginning: she asks about what they studied and gets confused immediately:
“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” [Mrs. Merriweather] said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.
Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”
Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure: “The poverty… the darkness… the immorality—nobody but J. Grimes Everett knows. You know, when the church gave me that trip to the camp grounds J. Grimes Everett said to me—”
“Was he there, ma’am? I thought—”
“Home on leave. J. Grimes Everett said to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Merriweather, you have no conception, no conception of what we are fighting over there.’ That’s what he said to me.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I said to him, ‘Mr. Everett,’ I said, ‘the ladies of the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South are behind you one hundred percent.’ That’s what I said to him. And you know, right then and there I made a pledge in my heart. I said to myself, when I go home I’m going to give a course on the Mrunas and bring J. Grimes Everett’s message to Maycomb and that’s just what I’m doing.”
A skilled reader with a moderate amount of background knowledge immediately understands: this J. Grimes Everett is a missionary to the Mrunas, who, in turn, are clearly an African tribe (“Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett”).
The reason the author includes the Mrunas is clear only toward the end of the missionary society meeting, when Mrs. Merriweather begins talking about Atticus’s decision to represent Tom:
Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that wool of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”
“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”
Miss Maudie said it. Two tight lines had appeared at the corners of her mouth. She had been sitting silently beside me, her coffee cup balanced on one knee. I had lost the thread of conversation long ago, when they quit talking about Tom Robinson’s wife, and had contented myself with thinking of Finch’s Landing and the river. Aunt Alexandra had got it backwards: the business part of the meeting was blood-curdling, the social hour was dreary.
“Maudie, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Merriweather.
“I’m sure you do,” Miss Maudie said shortly.
Yet this is where students really get lost. In typical Southern gentile fashion, Mrs. Merriweather won’t deign to gossip about anyone — how uncivilized — so she simply makes talks about Atticus in the third-person plural. And everyone in the room knows exactly who she’s talking about — everyone but Scout. And our young readers.
Today, my English I students started the adventure of figuring out this marvelous chapter. I always read the relevant passage aloud in class. It’s one of the most enjoyable things I do all year. I lay on the Southern accent, dropping final rs (“squalor” becomes “squala”) and altering the cadence and tone of my reading. How to do that when in lock-down? Simple: record it. My favorite part — that passage above.
The day started out foggy and stayed dreary — it could be a kind of metaphor for everyone’s mood, I suppose. But we’re fortunate: we have food; we have (a bit of) toilet paper; we have money in the bank; we have a home; we have a family that’s together. That’s what’s most important.
Today was our district’s first day of online learning. There’s a vast spectrum of what this means. For E, it was a 90-page packet of reading, math, social studies, and science work. He took on the reading first, making it through a fairly long retelling of Goldielocks with relative ease and breezing through the questions.
“We’re not seeking to further their education,” was the mantra as teachers in my school prepared for our own students earlier this week. “We’re just tasked with providing work that will keep them from slipping.”
That seems like a fairly succinct description of the work E got.
I helped him with some of it; K helped him with some of it; he did a fair amount of it on his own without direct help. Helping him usually just means giving a nudge when he gets overwhelmed and frustrated — a kind encouragement, a hint. Sometimes it becomes too much, though, and we need a break. Such was the case today.
Still, we managed to work through all the challenges and completed the work just after lunch.
L had video conferencing with teachers and they went over some new material. Of course, she goes to a charter school, which means there is a bit of a semi-natural selection process involved in the enrollment.
As for my kiddos, I got a few emails, exclusively from honors kids and mostly about outstanding assignments.
“When is that paper due?”
“When can I take my makeup test?”
As for the rest of them? I’m not sure. I didn’t hear from them. And I got word today that if kids are not doing the work within two days, I need to be contacting parents. That ought to be fun.
Not as much fun as our little fire this evening, but fun.
“Daddy, can I play on my iPod?” The Boy had called my old phone that he uses for games an iPod for as long as I can remember. Sometimes he just calls hit his phone. For a seven-year-old, some details are unimportant.
“What did Mama say before she left?” I asked. I’d just gotten home, and K had just left for a showing. We like to be consistent, to make sure kids don’t start playing one off the other. Not that our angels would ever do that.
“She said no YouTube and no television,” he confessed.
“Well, let’s generalize that to ‘no electronics’ and say ‘No,’ okay?”
“Okay.” A pause. I knew what was coming. “What’s ‘generalize’?”
“It’s when you take something specific, a detail, and make a broader category from it. Like if I were to say, ‘apple’ and ‘orange,’ what category would those both fit into?”
“Fruit!”
And there we had it.
“Daddy, can we do this for a long time? Can we play this game for a long time?”
I love how so many things become a game for him. We played the generalization game for a while, each taking turns listing two items and having the other figure out what category they fit into.
No bigger themes; no lessons learned. Just a fun little game that we might never remember to play again but got us both smiling for a few minutes today.
About a year ago I read Treasure Island to the Boy. It took us a long time because I read the original, unabridged version. E loved it.
“Daddy, can we read Treasure Island again?” he asked the other day. I thought it might be a good idea to try to read another classic adventure tale instead of re-reading that one, so I suggested Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
I read the opening to him:
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.
For some time past vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.
He was hooked.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Well, that’s what the whole book is about.”
In the course of the opening pages, the longitude and latitude of various sightings. I tried to explain to him what the coordinate system was, but he was a little lost. This evening, after dinner, we looked on Google Earth and mapped out the precise locations of all the sightings of the mysterious creature.
While he was eating his snack, I read another chapter to him. It’s kind of slow going: he asks for definitions of a lot of words, and the sentences are so long, with so many embedded subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, that it’s hard for him to follow. Here’s an example:
Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times–rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length–we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all.
That’s one sentence — it would give my own students fits.
It is in these sentences, though, and the challenging vocabulary that I find the lasting value in the reading. Sure, we’ll have great memories to share; certainly, we’ll enjoy the book. But when it’s time to tackle things like this on his own in school, he’ll have some experience with it because he’ll have heard me reading Jules Verne and Robert Stevenson and eventually Twain and Dickens.
After the Boy was in bed, I was in L’s room, talking to her about the books she’s reading. I’d had in my mind that I wanted to start reading to L again, and I thought A Tale of Two Cities might be a good start. So I asked her if I could read her something.
“Sure,” she said fairly emotionlessly — it’s a thirteen-year-old thing, I’m discovering.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
As I was reading, she jumped up, skipped over to her bookbag, and dug out her social studies notes. “We went over that in class!” she said excitedly.
She looked through her notes and I saw a heading “The Reign of Terror.”
“That’s where it will be,” I said.
We talked about it for a bit, and that was it. Will we go through with this reading? Does she even want to? I don’t know. I understand less and less of her thirteen-year-old mind, but I know that just being there is often enough. Do I do that enough? It’s the worry of every parent, I suppose.
I’ve never really been a fan of Monopoly. After about the age of ten or eleven, I determine that there was too much chance involved, and I just found it frustrating. I never played it after that.
As an adult, though, I’ve come to recognize that there is a fair amount of chance in life that just sucks money from one’s bank account. Medical emergencies, car repairs, accidents, home issues, and the like — all unplanned, all expenses.
When the Girl got Monopoly for Christmas this year, I knew I’d end up playing it with the kids. I didn’t realize how much fun it could be as an adult who can simply look at it as a game that is a fairly accurate reflection of the frustrations of adulthood and, more importantly, as a game that can provide lessons to kids and time together as a family.
We played twice today. The first time, it was just the kids and I. It only took a moment for me to realize the value for a seven-year-old. He had to read, to count money, and occasionally make change.
L dominated us, and the Boy was hemorrhaging cash to a degree that he declared he was going to quit. We talked him down, but then K returned home and we set about to preparing and eating dinner.
Afterward, the kids wanted to play again, so we sat down as a family and began. I had a little strategy in mind that I wanted to test: quality, not quantity. I bought a bunch of properties quickly, then traded at exorbitant cost to myself three or four properties for the final street to make the orange set:
New York AvenueI then set about to building them up to two houses each as quickly as possible. The result: I was getting a couple of hundred bucks every few cycles of the board.
The Boy took a similar route: he ended up with all the railroads and soon was rolling in money.
Poor K was getting hit left and right: bad luck with Community Chest/Chance cards, bad luck with the dice (she must have landed on the luxury tax four or five times), and soon she was down to little cash and few unmortgaged properties.
Then I bought one more house for each of my properties and drawing $550-$600 from every poor player who landed on one of them. K finally landed on one, and it just about wiped her out.
Her reaction: she laughed. Our reaction: we laughed with her.
On our walk this evening, then, we were able to help E see that the most important thing in a game like that is just to have fun. “It’s just a game!”
The Boy was the goalie when it happened — the break, through the pack that always orbits the ball, past the last defenders who have spent most of the year looking on, that left the Boy basically one-on-one with the attacker.
From the moment the break started, I fear for the worst. And a few short seconds later, there it was. The first goal of the game. The only goal of the game. The team’s first loss. With E manning the goal.
I knew he would be distraught about it. “I’m no good at defense,” he declared.
The question is, will this affect his love for the game? Can we help him move past it? How long will this bother him? These were the thoughts I rehearsed on the way back to the house.
By the time we got home, there was no real mention of it. No mention of it for the rest of the day. But what about Tuesday, when it’s time to go to soccer practice?
“We don’t say that to anyone, though, because we don’t want them to laugh at us.” The Boy was describing to me, as we drove home from his school, a new game he and some of his friends had invented. Apparently, they have a graphic design company (of course, he didn’t use that particular term) because they all love drawing, and this weekend, they all have “a lot of work” to get done for the firm. However, they’ve kept it a secret from their non-drawing peers to avoid mockery.
How much of this potential mockery would become actual mocker, I do not know. E is sensitive, and simple, one-time, childish comment from a peer might feel like persistent, tormenting mockery to him. Still, I found his words both encouraging and discouraging. On the one hand, they suggest a certain awareness of what’s out there, an understanding that the world can be a nasty place that doesn’t smile on things that appear out of place. That’s much better than a simplistic naivety. On the other hand, he deals with that by hiding that part of himself from others to avoid it all. Of course, he’s just a second-grade boy: I don’t expect the kind of emotional fortitude that would lead someone to say, “Look, we enjoy it, and that’s all that matters,” to potential tormentors.
When he got home, he talked to Papa about it and a few other things. He always has a captive discussion partner when talking to Papa: it’s the number one duty of grandparents, I suppose. Parents can say, “Not now, sweetie — I have to X” but not grandparents.
Afterward, they built a few paper airplanes together.
“You probably need to take the Boy: he’s getting fussy about it,” said K as we were making plans for the busy day ahead. Who would take the Boy to his summer reading academy and who would take Papa to meet with the estate liquidator? Originally, I was going to do the former, but K’s comment made me realize she was right.
The program, developed by Clemson University, has bounced around conversations with various mothers, and it comes highly recommended. E’s not a bad reader, we thought, but he’s still a developing reader: there’s always room for improvement.
The Boy had his own opinion about it. He did not want to go. “I’m a terrible reader!” he lamented during the drive over to the university center. “I read so slowly. And A, he’s reading XYZ” (can’t remember the book, but I’m reading it to the Boy now) “all by himself!”
“You don’t need to compare yourself to A; just compare yourself to E.”
“But there’s no other E. How can I compare myself to E when I’m the only E I know?” He’s at the age that I’m not quite sure whether he’s joking or not. Sometimes I get it wrong, and he gets mildly frustrated that I didn’t catch on and play along.
We got to the university center and found probably a dozen kids waiting with a parent or two. He nestled into me as we stood there, which is common when he’s in an unfamiliar situation, and I was beginning to worry anew about how it would be when I tried to leave. After all, it was a nearly-two-hour course, and I didn’t want to sit there with him when I had so many other things to do. But those worries were for naught: he settled into the classroom easily, and when the teacher dismissed the parents after the various, expected preliminaries, he was completely calm when I walked over to him, hugged him, and said, “Have fun.”
I knew what he was thinking: “I won’t have fun! I don’t like reading!” We’d had this conversation in the car, too.
“I think that’s just because you’re not so confident about your reading.”
“Maybe,” he conceded.
“This class is designed to help you build your confidence by giving you new tricks for reading,” I explained.
So when I went to hug him goodbye, I was expecting a bit of panic, a bit of frustration, a bit of reluctance that just wasn’t there, which made it all the easier to leave and do the various chores around Nana’s and Papa’s place (at what point do I stop call it “Nana’s and Papa’s place” and just “Papa’s place?” Probably never, because it will always be “Nana’s and Papa’s place”) like replacing a couple of broken door knobs and sundry repairs to get it ready for selling.
I got back to the class with five minutes to spare, just as the teacher began making final announcements: “And I would like to the parents of K, W, R, and E before you leave, please.” The short version: she’d done preliminary testing on everyone today and felt that our kids would be better served in the rising-third-grader class.
As we walked out, I asked E, “She was taking quickly; did you understand everything?”
“Yes.”
When we got back to Nana’s and Papa’s, E burst in and told K immediately.
The Boy so often suffers from his lack of confidence in some things. He realizes he’s just not as fast as many of his friends; in soccer, he sees that he doesn’t play nearly as well as some of his teammates; and reading — well, he’s never felt great about that.
Maybe now, he does.
The Boy watched a documentary with Papa about the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. His verdict: “I think I want to be a paleontologist now.” He thought about it a moment before amending it: “Well, I have just been thinking about it since yesterday, so that might change.”
Still, this evening after dinner, he was keen on going fossil hunting. After I told him he couldn’t just randomly dig holes in the backyard — “We have a dog to do that; we don’t need more.” — I suggested we look in the creek. We found nothing, as I expected, but it didn’t dampen his enthusiasm. “After all, we found some really cool rocks.”
That we did.
The Boy, like all children, imitates what he sees. When the folks on his favorite YouTube show, The Axel Show, tried using a stone as an ax, he did the same thing.
“I’ve been making spears,” he explained. “I think I’ll sell some of them on Ebay.”
He’s come up with his own design as well — the two-ended spear. By “own design,” of course, I mean something he’s never seen. “This way, I can attack like this and like this,” he explained, waving the strick around furiously.
The Dog has her own interest in sticks.
It’s all the Boy has been talking about for the last few weeks.
“Daddy, can we get a hatchet?”
He was thinking about buying it with his own money; he was thinking about splitting the cost with us; he was thinking about it, talking about it, probably dreaming about it.
Today, we finally got it. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to pay any of his money for it because he’s got his eye on another Lego set, but when, after buying nails, concrete screws, pegboard hooks, and other things on the list, we finally headed over to the gardening section, his excitement brought a smile to both K and me.
The highlight of the afternoon, then, was teaching him how to use it.