Combie: def.

M-ito came up with this one.

“Combie” – What is my son after spending too much time on the DS or computer… a computer zombie or a “combie.”

DS i XL Grenade

Sometimes you just have to jump on the grenade. If you’ve been reading along with this blog you know my opinion of the DS and it’s not very high. I like people games instead of computer games. It’s not that I dislike computer games – I love them – but not to the extent that kids play them today. There is a disconnect occurring between children today and other children. They’re playing games too much by themselves and with a computer and not interacting with others. We’re social animals and this can’t be good for the upcoming generation. So that’s the set-up.

The camera zooms in on my face. It’s Sunday morning and it’s my birthday. No wait. Rewind. Go back to Saturday afternoon. The day before. I’m home after yoga class (a good day with 19 people and good pranic energy in the room). Mom-ita and M-ito are out shopping for various things including my birthday gift. The phone rings. It’s Mom-ita.

“M-ito has a gift all picked out for you,” she says cagily.

“Okay… ” I say, waiting for what sounds like is coming after. I’m picturing some Warhammer figures (a new game we’re playing together at a shop in Manhattan), or something yoga-like, maybe a cool stuffed animal that he will get soon after he gives it to me.

“It’s a DS,” she says quietly and waits.

“A what?” I ask.

“A DS i XL. He says you’ve always wanted one and that if you get one – you and he can play the game together at the same time.” She waits again. “He said you need the DS i XL version because it’s a bigger screen and you can’t see the small screen very well.” I think she’s trying to hold back laughter now but I can’t tell.”

I rack my brain. Have I ever told him I wanted a DS? Have I ever told him how much that would mean to me? If I did, and it’s possible, it was only to make him feel better because I would never in my life think that I would get one without someone forcing me to play with a gun to my head. Perhaps I have overstated that a little.  I took a deep breath and exhaled. We have only M-ito. “Of course,” I said. ”That’s very sweet. I’ll take the XL and I’ll jump on the grenade. It’s my turn. You’ve been playing Harry Potter on the Wii all summer (and loving it I should say because Mom-ita loves to play the Lego games) so it’s my turn.”

Now she laughs. “This is your iPad, you know,” she says when she gets her breath back.

“Thanks,” I say. An iPad. Oh that hurts. She did that on purpose.

M-ito couldn’t wait so I opened my gift that night.

Fast forward to the next morning, October 3, birthday morning.

I sleep until almost 7:30am and it’s wonderful. The bed is so warm beneath the comforter. The wind is blowing outside and making the shades move back and forth. M-ito is staring at me from a few inches away. “Happy birthday,” he says, eyes full of mischief. “Let’s play your DS.”

And with a hug, a heartfelt sigh, and a smile, I say, “Yes. Let’s play with my DS. I’ll need your help setting it up.”

Forty-nine  years on this planet and still counting.

When I Was Little…

“When I was little,” M-ito begins, which always gives me a chuckle, ” I used to think you’d go to first grade when you were one, second grade when you were two, third grade when you were three…” At this point I have to admit I got the sequence and checked out for a moment – started to think about work and yoga classes – then checked back in a few moments later. “… tenth grade when you were ten. Eleventh grade when you were eleven. Twelfth grade when you were twelve.” M-ito laughs a little with me as if to say, Can you believe I used to think that? Then he says, “Can you believe I thought that?”

I shrug. “Crazy isn’t it?”

Yearbooks

We are finishing dinner. I’ve just found out that M-ito and all his classmates are given a yearbook at school and that it is a ritual to get signatures from your friends and classmates during this whole week. M-ito is excited about it and it makes me smile. He says he wants to get the headmaster’s signature.

“I know exactly what I’m going to write in my friend’s books,” he says.

“What?” Mom-ita asks.

“To my good friends, for G-ito and J-ito,” he begins, “and to my best friends, for Mik-ito and K-ito.” He smiles as he looks at us. A settled smile it is. He has made friends this year and has both good and best friends.

Last year at this time all was in chaos. We were changing schools and we left on unhappy terms with many parents and with much disappointment in faculty. I just reread my entry from one year ago, June 7th, 2009, Classroom Blues.

It is a year later and my son has found a home base for the next six years, and so have we.

Pegged – A definition

“Pegged” (def) noun – hitting a player as they are running towards a base in baseball or kickball. When used with in a baseball it is hoped that the ball being used is soft (foam) and not a hard-ball – otherwise injuries will follow…

“You can peg him with the ball to make him out.”

or

“Peg-him!”

or

“You’ve been pegged!”

Hot Dogs in my Hair

We’re in the car together, all three of us, heading towards Austino’s for his pick-up before heading in to school.

” Mom-ita,” M-ito says, ” you know in art we’re drawing portraits of each other. I’m drawing a portrait of N-ito and he’s drawing one of me. Some people are still on the sketching part. Mom-ita, I gave him a suggestion. N-ito is kind of drawing my hair like this -” in the back seat I could see him place his hand on his bangs and move it downward to the ends of his hair, “and it looks like I have hotdogs in my hair. You know. So I told him to please not draw me with hot dogs in my hair.”

A few minutes later we have Austino in the back seat and we’re all off to school. We play some improv games like make up a commercial for a crazy product like a sweat scraper, a squirrel whacker, or an orange scooper. Many of the products explode. All can be ordered 24 hours a day because there’s always an operator standing by, and many of the products are from Ronco.

Still, nothing compares to hot dogs in your hair.

The Shy Child

Here’s another poem M-ito’s teacher showed us at parent teacher conference. This one made us all cry, each for different reasons. The punctuation and line breaks are all his.

Shy

I am always shy

when I meet people

I always make

a shy face

but when I

get used to people

I am not shy at

all

I wish I could change

how I am shy

but I cannot.

What does this mean to me as a father? Have I gone wrong by having a shy child? Would I rather have an outgoing, rambunctious child? I love my son just the way he is but these questions come up for me as a father. Did I somehow make my son shy or is he hardwired from having two shy parents? Is it in the genes? I was shy also (and continue to be) though I see already my son is way ahead of me in being able to express who he is and what it feels like to be him. That ability to express himself like this at his age amazes me. He is an introspective child and that is a wonder.

I remember when he was younger he was the slow-to-warm-up child. An hour into the party he would finally let go of my leg and start to enjoy himself, just as the party was over and all his friends started to leave. He’s grown so much since then in his abilities to socialize and make friends, but like with so many of us, it’s hard to him to do. This poem is such a reflection of his starting in this school and pushing himself to make friends this year – and he has. None of his teachers would say he’s a shy child now because he is so much a part of the 2nd grade and so well-integrated. But his view of himself is on paper in front of me and it is both beautiful in its honesty and sad at the same time because it’s painful what he is expressing. Don’t we all wish better for our children? Is being shy a bad thing? I don’t think so, but it’s hard not to get caught up in the sayings, like the early bird gets the worm, and the emphasis on being assertive to get what you need. The loud child gets the attention at home and in the classroom. But some of us are just not hard-wired that way and we have to learn other ways to exist. Shy is good, even if it’s harder. Perhaps that should be made into a mantra and chiseled into Sanskrit for all the world to see.

Aparigraha Lessons

It (aparigraha) means non-possessiveness or non-hoarding and it’s a yogic concept right out of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

Last year at parent teacher conferences in First Grade I took a look at the interior of M-ito’s desk and found it filled with papers, old homework, half-finished drawings, used and new tissues, and all the way at the back there was a sandwich of some sort, wrapped in sarran wrap. I don’t know how old it was and neither did M-ito. Neither of us wanted to see what it looked like so it just got thrown out.

“In case I was hungry,” M-ito said, when asked,”Why?”

Last week at parent teacher conferences in Second Grade, at a new school (which we are amazingly still happy about) we found that our son was hoarding pencils. He picked them up whenever he found them during the day and put them in his desk. He had quite a few of them from 3/4′s of a year’s tidying up of pencils. He told us, “I’m hoarding pencils,” with a big smile on his face. One of his friends was hoarding scissors, the same way. I’m glad M-ito was only hoarding pencils. The kids at M-ito’s school all have pencils, scissors, notebooks, folders, and pens (when they get to them) given to them by the school. There’s no competition over styles and designs, no extra cash to lay out for these kinds of utensils of student work. It’s all in the tuition. Gulp. So M-ito’s collection of pencils is not differentiated by these things. Instead each is differentiated by whether a pencil is sharpened or not, how many times it has been sharpened which determines its length, and finally how much of an eraser is left – maybe he also codes them by the size of the bite marks left on them – I don’t know. My son collects pennies too – wheat pennies only. It’s a hold-over from my grandfather who was a trainman, and myself who collected in his footsteps.

I believe he’s going to give all the pencils back to his teacher at some point. At least that’s what he said when I asked him. At least he’s helping to keep the floor clean. Gotta give that to him.

Incense and Peppermints

We’re eating dinner. Mom-ita has made chicken burritos. M-ito has taken a bite. He really likes these burritos and there aren’t many things we cook that he really likes – tolerates, yes, but really likes? That’s another story. He takes a bite and says, “This bread is crisp. I am incensed that it is crisp.”

“Where’d you get that word from?” Mom-ita asks.

“Schoooool. Schoooool,” M-ito says, making a funny face.

I watch while eating my own burrito.

“Is it one of your spelling words?” Mom-ita asks.

“It’s an A-plus word,” M-ito says.

Later that evening, M-ito is sitting next to me in the living room, his Ds on his lap. A light on the side of his machine changes from green to red. “I’m incensed,” he says, “that my DS has run out of batteries. I’m incensed.”

I put my arm around him, smile, and go back to reading my book.

Active Listening

“M-ito,” I said to my son this morning, ” Mom-ita and I have been fighting a lot lately, have you noticed?” We were sitting at the table eating breakfast. Mom-ita was off to work at my office, teaching. I was staying at home with M-ito, who was on winter break.

“No,” he said, chewing on a piece of humus and toast.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, we have and it’s because I haven’t been listening well to Mom-ita and doesn’t have anything to do with you. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t think you’d done anything wrong.”

“Okay,” he said. “What do you mean you haven’t been listening well?”

“Just like you don’t listen to us very well-  to Mom-ita and me –”

“I do too.”

“M-ito… “

“Well,” he said, “you don’t say much other than eat your breakfast and things like that… “

“And that’s not too important,” I finished for him.

M-ito nodded.

“I see,” I said. “But you know when Mom-ita speaks we both need to listen because she says things that are important, right?

He nodded.

“And that’s all I’m saying. I need to focus more and listen better to Mom-ita. But that’s me, not you. You understand?”

“Yup,” he said and picked up another piece of toast. “Can I watch another episode of Dino Squad when I’m finished?

And so it goes…