I should be working on school stuff right now, but as usual I can’t focus without a looming deadline so instead I’ll write a post about the kids. My apologies ahead of time if this just seems like bragging. I guess it is, but I can’t help but being proud of them. It’s in my job description.
Gwen keeps surprising me with what she’s learning, even though we’re surely not trying to teach her anything. We used to sing to her every night but she’s no longer interested and instead favors board books, like Hippos go Berserk or The Eye Book. She makes us read to her at bedtime and also first thing in the morning. She won’t get out of bed or let us change her diaper in the morning for less than 6 books.
She recognizes pretty much every letter of the alphabet now, at least the upper case ones. Also, she really surprised me the other day. One of the board books we have is called The Art of Shapes. On every page is a piece of modern art on the left side of the page and then an isolated shape from that piece of art on the right side, along with the word for that shape (triangle, square, etc.).
I grabbed the book off the shelf just to add to our repertoire. I don’t think she’d seen it before. I opened it up and started to read it to her but before I could begin she looked at the first shape and said: “square”. Then I turned the page and she said: “triangle”. Then we went all the way through the book and she, without my prompting, correctly identified a rectangle, a circle and even a cone. She got stumped by “cylinder” and “spiral” though so there was at least something I could teach her. She still has trouble with “cylinder”, but she has “spiral” down. To be fair, the picture of a cylinder in the book isn’t very good. I should find a plastic tube or something in real life and show it to her.
My favorite thing, though, is that at least once a day lately, out of the blue she’ll say: “Daddy” and I’ll say: “What is it Gwen” and she’ll respond: “I love you”. Awwww... And then I’ll take my eyes off her for a minute and she’ll go down to the basement and pour an entire bowl of cat food into the cat’s water bowl. Truthfully, she’s very tough to live with sometimes and she occasionally pushes my patience to the limits, but she is a sweetie for all that.
Simon is also surprising us lately. We’ve been doing math lessons most every day (although I’m not totally happy with Saxon math, and we’re thinking of changing). We mostly focus on simple single digit addition and subtraction and recently we've gotten a bit into telling time, weighing small objects and playing with tangram-like toys to do spacial relationship stuff. However, on his own and without us guiding him he’s been demonstrating a basic understanding of fractions, multiplication and division.
The other day he watched an episode of Cyberchase about fractions and afterward he brought me a piece of construction paper. On it, in crayon, he’d written: 148/160. He said to me: “See daddy, here’s how many gold bricks we’ve collected in our Star Wars Lego game (for the PS2). I asked him to tell me about it and he told me that the numerator (pointing that the 148) told us how many bricks we’ve collected so far and the denominator (pointing at the 160) is how many there are to get altogether.
He was excited because it told him how many more gold bricks we needed to collect. I was excited because he just correctly told me what a numerator and a denominator was.
Also, the other day he told me that “2 times 2 equals 4”. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was probably distracted by Gwen pouring cat food into the water bowls or something. But, last night we were out at Target and I remembered it so I asked him: “Simon, what is 3 times 4?” and he said: “12”. Then I asked three or four more simple multiplication problems and he got them all right. (He did miss “what is 4 times 6” though. He said “48”, but even that told me that he understood the basic concept of multiplication, because he got 8 times 6 instead. (if he’d said “19” or something I’d have figured he was just guessing. I don’t know where he’s getting this. It’s not from me. Either he just has his mother’s genes or he’s been watching more Cyberchase. Cyberchase ROCKS.
Finally, he’s been learning the concepts behind division because of his allowance. He gets $5 per week and he always saves up for large Lego sets that cost $50 or $70. So, when he sees something he wants he first asks how much it is, then he translates that into how many weeks it will take him to save for it. Then he recalculates how many weeks it would take Gwen to save up for the same thing (she gets $2 per week). We don’t call this “division” but he’s obviously understanding the concept.
And then yesterday he did something that told me that he’s the sweetest boy on the planet with a heart of gold (despite his occasional temper tantrums when Gwen touches his toys).
Here’s what happened.
One of his favorite shows on PBS is called Danger Rangers about a team of animated animals who rescue kids from trouble and then teach them safety tips. Yes, it is corny, but he loves it.
He asked me to help him send all the Danger Rangers a letter because he wanted to write to them. So, I made a fake gmail account for the Danger Rangers and we wrote them an email. He dictated it to me. He invited them to all come over to our house for a special play day on November 25th (he picked the day after consulting the calendar). He had it all planned out about what games and toys they would play with. So I wrote the email and sent it off to this dummy account I created.
But then I thought, wait a minute… he really believes they are real characters. I hadn’t understood that before. I’m not sure if I did the right thing here, but I chose not to tell him that they weren’t real. Instead I sent Barb a quick email asking her to check the dummy account and to respond to Simon as the Danger Rangers telling him that they couldn’t make it on that day because they were too busy rescuing kids who needed help.
An hour or so later Barb told me that she’d done this so I said: “Hey, Simon, let’s check our email to see if the Danger Rangers wrote back to us.” He was all excited. I read him the email thinking, wow, he’s going to love getting real email from his heroes! Instead, after I read it he crawled slowly off my lap, went over to the couch, pulled a blanket up over his face and started crying. My heart broke right then and there.
He was SO sad that the Danger Rangers couldn’t come to see him. He really thinks they are real. For better or for worse we’re not telling him the truth yet. The disappointment that they can’t come to visit is enough for now. Other harsh realities can wait until later, when he figures it out on his own.
But today is another day. Today he and Gwen are spending the day with our friend Housefairy and her four kids, who Simon and Gwen love hanging out with. If he can’t have the Danger Rangers, at least he has real life friends to make up for it.
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