fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
I've neglected photos for almost a month now -- almost nothing new added to the Lightroom catalog.
I've been taking pictures -- a few of them.
They've just been sitting on the memory card in the camera.
Plus, I've been writing and thinking about politics and religion...
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...
We polished the nails/axels, cut and weighted the car so that the center of gravity is in the optimal location, rough-sanded, and talked about goals for the derby next week.
"I'd like to get at least third place," the Boy said.
It's a good goal: realistic, modest. We'll see.
Part of it was laziness, but we’ll chalk it up to Polishness: we finally took down our Christmas tree today. We’d been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks, but we didn’t adequately work it into our schedule.
Or we can use K’s Polishness as an excuse: Poles always put their Christmas trees up later (sometimes, only a couple of days before Christmas) and take them down later.
The Boy and I chopped it up in the afternoon. “This is so satisfying,” he said. For us all, in different ways…
It's a different tournament this year. There are fewer courts this year: five instead of eight. This means fewer teams in the building, so fewer players, fewer parents -- reduced risk, in short.
They won their first two games in straight sets. They didn't have much problem with either team.
As often happens, though, the third team was a different story. Our girls (and single boy -- long story) lost the first set something like 25-22. Not a devastating loss, but a loss nonetheless.
They started the second set strong and before we knew it, our team was up 19-12. "Surely this is a done deal." Nope. They ended up losing 26-24, which means in the second half of the game, they were consistently outscored 2-1.
It's a question of experience, of gelling together as a team. It's only their second tournament, and many of the points they lost were from silly, unforced errors. They'll weed those out with time, with some experience.
And the Boy got his soccer uniform for the spring season.
The Boy loves to spend money. He has a million and one ideas about what he’s going to buy, and it changes from day to day. We protected his first communion money and steered him toward spending it on something useful: a new bike. However, his allowance is a different story.
This week, he decided he wanted to buy a prank kit. He spent $15 on kit that included
Four items that probably cost a total of $2 to make, and he paid $15 for it. K advised him that it was not the best way to spend his money. It was especially ill-advised since the last time he bought a whoopee cushion, it burst the first time he sat on it. (I always thought the idea was that someone else sat on it, but I guess I was wrong.)
Today, at dinner, he had an epiphany: “I wasted that money!” The realization caused great stress, but K reassured him: “If you learned a lesson from it, it’s money well spent.”
The Boy sometimes has trouble getting work done in class. I say “sometimes” but in fact, it’s more like “most of the time.” He’s easily distracted; he takes his time sometimes; he gets off task. The end result is a fairly common occurrence: we spend some time during the evening getting caught up with his work.
We worry about his ability to keep up with things return to “normal” (whatever that might be) and teachers are no longer so very forgiving. We worry that we might hear suggestions of “ADHD” and, more ominously, “medication” from well-meaning, concerned teachers.
I don’t recall ever having any significant issues like this growing up, but I also wasn’t surrounded by electronics and instant gratification. It must put a strain on the attention unlike anything we ever experienced growing up.