matching tracksuits

fun in threes, sometimes fours

the boy

Still Shooting

Tuesday 10 March 2020 | 0 Comments

The kids have grown positively obsessed with shooting in the backyard — the Boy, his bb gun; the Girl, her bow and arrow. They really have no interest in trading.

Today’s adventure: find the arrow that ricocheted off the fence post and soared into the wild. (Slight exaggeration: it didn’t go more than thirty feet away, and was never in danger of landing in a dangerous way.)

The Girl fired it; the Girl found it. I would have half-expected her to give up sooner than she did. She’s dealing with frustration better than she was a few years ago. But she loves jumping as much as she always has:

The discovery of the day: the bbs bounce right off the archery target.

We could pick them up and reuse them, just like the arrows…

Sunny Sunday Afternoon

Sunday 08 March 2020 | 0 Comments

More Shooting

Saturday 07 March 2020 | 0 Comments

Giggles

Tuesday 03 March 2020 | 0 Comments

When putting to bed a 7-year-old, the giggles are sometimes inevitable. Just about anything can set them off. A giggling 7-year-old is usually a joy, but it bedtime there's a touch of gray to it as well: the kid needs to go to sleep, but it's so much fun just to lie there giggling together.

Tonight the word "nipple" the boy giggling and he couldn't stop. "Such a funny word!"

I put my index finger to my lips to shush him.

"Daddy," he said, "you're trying to shush me but you still laughing."

"I know," I laughed.

In the end, I had to leave. I knew he would never get and I would never stop laughing if I didn't.

There was an added tenderness to that moment from a passage I had read earlier in the evening in a book by Paul Auster. One of the characters is a man named Peter Stillman who's father had literally locked him up in a dark room from the age of three so he would forget English and revert to the natural language of God.

Needless to say, it didn't work.

The only thing the father's cruelty accomplished was to create a scarred man who could barely speak.

No father would behave way. Depravity is possible but not to that degree. At least we tell ourselves that. Insanity is the only explanation for such horror.

It seemed to me then that I was not only having a sweet moment with my son but also giving him an extra helping to make up for other children's horror. As if that would help. 

Shooting in the Back Yard

Saturday 29 February 2020 | 0 Comments

In the afternoon, after almost all the day’s necessities were behind us — shopping, a photoshoot at a local church for the diocesan newspaper, a soccer game (that I didn’t attend because I stayed behind to keep an eye on Papa, hence the lack of photos) — we went out to shoot L’s bow and arrows. K had gone to drum up some clients for her new venture in real estate, but the kids and I were, for all intents and purposes, done. Sure, I still had a consultation call with a client for a web site I’m building for her, but that was easily put off to the evening.

The Girl hadn’t lost her touch. Which is to say that she didn’t put a lot of arrows near the center of the target, but she didn’t miss the target entirely — which was the case when she first started shooting.

For the Boy, though, it was a different matter. He hit the target a few times — many shots fell ineffectually short, but he did hit the target a number of times. The problem was, though, that the bow was just a little too big for him, so he was not able to get enough pull on it, so not enough energy went into the arrow. So every single shot that did hit the target bounced off.

Understandably enough, it was a source of great frustration.

“Daddy, I can’t make any of them stick!”

What to do when your boy is frustrated and wants to quit? Make a joke of it.

“It’s almost like the target is against you, like it has a will of its own. Like it has some kind of Jedi power. ‘Nope,’ it says as your arrows strike. ‘Nah, not this time,’ it says the next shot.” And so on. Soon he was laughing and making his own jokes when the arrows flopped off the target.

“That one slammed into reverse and backed up!”

Tuesday Evening

Tuesday 18 February 2020 | 0 Comments

Carbs

Thursday 13 February 2020 | 0 Comments

The Boy was eating dinner -- spaghetti and meatballs because of volleyball practice and the need to eat by five -- and asked if he could be excused.

"Eat a couple more bites of spaghetti," I said.

"But I ate all the meat!" he protested. "Now it's just carbs!"

"Well, you need some carbs, too."

"I've had a ton of carbs today!" he insisted. "Bread with lunch! My cereal in the morning!" A pause. "Daddy, what are carbs?"

Categories

Wednesday 12 February 2020 | 0 Comments

"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.

Discovery

Monday 10 February 2020 | 0 Comments

The Boy discovered an old sugar lamb from Easter -- last Easter or perhaps the previous one.

It had turned various unnatural colors and looked almost moldy. How long does it take sugar to mold? Does sugar mold?

So maybe it wasn't last Easter; perhaps it was even further back. I've no idea.

I just came home and found him working on it -- cutting it with random blows from the knife.

It's one of those random events that I might think of at some unexpected time when the Boy is not the Boy but the Man, and K and I are wondering where the time went...

The constant thought of parents...

Soundtrack

Tuesday 04 February 2020 | 0 Comments

The kids and I stumbled into a new little game this evening. The Boy and I were playing cars, and I'd taken my phone with us to listen to some music. He made a request for "Kid A," a Radiohead song that he finds amusing.

As the music played, I asked him, "Which of these cars goes with that music?" He picked one out, and we talked about why it seemed to fit.

And that was the game...

The Girl heard us and came into E's room to join us. Some of the choices were obvious: a Billie Holiday song led to fingers straight to the '40s roadster in the collection; Creedence Clearwater Revival pulled everyone to the pickup truck; a Gorecki string quartet led to the oddest car in the collection.

The real blessing of it all was not only that we were encouraging the use of musical and visual imagination but also that we were spending that time together -- the three of us. It's a rare thing these days with our crazy schedules.