Writing for Beans

I mean that title literally.  Sometimes when I'm outside at night, alone or perhaps walking the dog, I'll look up into the sky and speak out to the stars.   Mostly to Orion.  On a clear winter night I'll greet him, ask him how goes his hunt.  I don't expect him to answer.  He's a bunch of stars after all, and just an imaginary figment of connect the dots in my head.  But I cannot see that pattern and not think of Orion.  At this point, it's the single constellation I can always pick out in the sky.  I used to be able to pick out a bunch, and maybe if I concentrate, I can divine in the sky the big and little dippers.   But mostly, just Orion.  So we chat, he and I.  Well, mostly I.  Orion's  a good listener.  And yes, it's an odd behavior, and I know it, but on a cool crisp clear night, I don't care.  I'm enjoying myself, staring up in marvel at the stars in the heavens, and taking in that beauty.

I think it's a sign I don't spend nearly enough time outside in nature anymore, and so I'll take it even in tiny doses walking up from the street to my front porch.

Past few nights we've been out with the boys past sundown.  Easy to do in the winter I guess, what with the short days and all.  But as I carried my son in from the car I caught him staring up at the sky.   So I stopped.  Held him up close to my head, and pointed out Orion to him.  I told him about the great hunter in the sky, and pointed out the three stars that to me are easiest to pick out in the sky.  I tried to draw the outline of the rest of the constellation, but that's kind of hard to do for a four year old while holding him up to your shoulder and hoping he can sight properly down your arm.

The next night, due to circumstances, we were once again out later than usual for us, and as I was bringing the Little Man in from the car, he looked up and said: "Look at the belt."  I looked at where he was pointing, and sure enough he'd found Orion's belt.  It made me quite happy.  Then he said: "Can we stay outside and count the stars."  Which made me laugh, because it was so innocent and fun, and I let him look for a while longer before dragging him inside to get going on the bedtime routine.  I can't wait for the first time we can get somewhere far away from the light pollution in our area and really show him what the night sky looks like.  Though it's not so bad as a city where we live that you would be hard pressed to be able to count all the stars in the sky, I know from my summers out at my uncle's farm that there is so much more to see in the sky than we suburbanites get to experience.

There's nothing quite like watching someone experience something to remind you how simple the joys in life can be. 

So what about you, what constellations do you know?

Heard in the Greaves household just the other night:

Me: No
Litlle Man: Yes
Me: No
Litlle Man: Yes
Me: No
Litlle Man: Yes
Me: Purple (A subtle attempt on my part to break out of an endless loop.)
Little Man: (without missing a beat)  Green!
Me: Purple!
Little Man: Green!
Me: Purple!
Little Man: Green!
Me: Purple!
Little Man: Green!
(And it goes on from there....)

I had no idea that my son and I were apparently part Drazi, nor that we were from different factions.   My wife, playing the role of Ivanova, stopped the fighting by announcing that dinner was ready. 

I have been reading the Neil Gaiman book, Odd and the Frost Giants to the Little Man for the past week or so.  I seem to be able to nudge him into letting me get through about a chapter in a sitting.  It's tough for a three year old to sit for the story that long, without the pictures for him to follow along with.  There are some pictures, quite stunning art work, interspersed throughout the book.  But it's just not quite enough to hold his interest.  Or rather, there aren't enough of them, and so I'll get about a page or so later in the book, and he'll reach up and flip back the page on me so he can see the picture. 

Now, I have no delusion that he's going to grasp all the subtle clues in the book as to who some of the characters might actual be, before the reveals happen.  In fact, even though we learn names for them, and he remembers that they have names, he has a hard time remembering the animals' names.  And yet, he does get some of the story.  I remember when I flipped one page early in the book, to a picture of  Odd and his family, Little Man identified all the characters in the picture without prompting.  (A bit more impressive when you realize that by the time you get to the picture, you've gone past that scene in the story, and, he is only three.)   Overall, the story probably is too old for him.  Perhaps not by not all that much.  No question that he's still at an age where picture books are integral to his enjoyment, but with this experimentation, I can tell that he's ready to handle much longer stretches of text than many of the books on his shelf now.  I'll have to figure out what kinds of books next to acquire to keep him interested, though, it seems for the moment that it won't be too hard to do.

What is quite gratifying these days is that when he wakes up in the morning, instead of running out of the room to come get me or my wife, he grabs a book or two off the shelf and starts reading to himself.   I'm certain there are some words he actually does grasp as words.  But mostly, I think he does one of two things.  Memorize the stories, and just use the pictures as kind of mental reference points along the way.  Or, sometimes he just makes up stories to go with the pictures.  This seems to be happening more frequently with the French books, as those don't get read to him as often as the English ones.  (What can I say, my French is pitiful, and after a long day, it's hard to force myself to struggle with a foreign language that I'm simply not proficient in, never mind fluent.)

The Young One, on the other hand, is still at the stage where his entire goal regarding books is as a teething device, which limits which books I put within his reach.  A feat recently complicated by the fact that he can now perform a steady army crawl to get where he wants to go.  A marked improvement over having to roll wherever he was hoping to go, since he has much better aim now.  He does enjoy sitting and listening when I read too, but his attention span is negligible, as one would expect for his age.  I wonder just how long before I'll be able to witness the Little Man reading to the Young One as my older brother Steve used to do for me as a child.  That should be some interesting eavesdropping to be sure.

Last night, while we were sitting in the basement, trying to decide what to make for dinner, my son started to perform this strange little dance, where he put his hands behind his back, and then slid his feet backwards, one after the other.

I looked at that and asked him:  "Little Man, are you trying to Moonwalk like Michael Jackson?"

 

Without missing a beat, he replied coyly,  "Maybe."

My wife, recognizing exactly where my son picked up that particular phrase and intonation from burst out laughing.   Hoisted on mine own petard I was there.

On the other hand, while giving him a bath, I clapped my hands in particular rhythm, one that would be quite familiar to anyone who ever went through the Bergenfield public schools and particular who ever participated in the music program.

He looked up and said:  "Ti ti ta."  (Which is the second part.)   I was flabbergasted, because I last tried to get him to learn Ta ta ti ti ta  weeks ago, and even then only one or two nights before giving up due to lack of perceived interest on his part.   I'm constantly amazed by this not quite two year old.  Then he turned around and started singing Alouette. 

Okay, next up on his lesson plan.  Do re me.   Okay, first, I think I need to get my voice back in tune, I think I'm dropping flat.  Ick.  But he loves music so much I want him to enjoy it as much as he can.
 

So last week, the Little Man composed his first poem.  He was at the park, on the on the swings.   I wasn't there, so I'm reporting this second hand.

------

I do swing
Fone ring ring ring.

------

I think he's a better poet than I am.

The other night, while going through the bedtime routine with the Little Man, I just happened to hum a few bars.  Honestly, I didn't even recall what it was I was humming at the time, I just did it.  My son, however, recognized the song, and started to say "Tape"  (No, not like scotch tape, but pronounced more like "ta -puh" and clapping his hands.   Which my wife recognized and started singing along.   It's a little song in french that my in-laws like to sing with him.  I believe it goes like this:

Tape, tape, tape de mains
Roule, roule, gentil moulin

(All errors in french, are mine)  There are hand motions that go with it too.  Namely clapping on the first line, and a kind of rolling motion of the hands one over the other for the second.

Now, it's not like he can sing the whole song.  But the fact that he responded to the tune, and started to "sing along" and clap was just fantastic.  They really can absorb everything you throw at them, it's just amazing.

So, recently I noticed a particular behavior of my son, that just makes me in awe of humanity and our capacity for creativity.   In one of the various books that we read along with him, there are little flaps to open up and see what's underneath.   In one of these books, there's a cabinet, and behind one of the flaps/doors is a box of cookies.   He sees this box, says "cookie" and then pretends to gingerly pick up the tiny dot meant to represent a cookie, and pretends to eat it.   Along the same lines, if he gets an empty cup or bottle, he'll pretend to take a sip, and then go 'Ah!" like it was so refreshing.   Both of these actions are completely unprompted.   In fact, neither my wife nor I can figure out where he got these ideas from.   I guess it's possible that at some point I might have done the refreshing "ah" thing after taking a drink, so it's could be an action he stowed away to mimic later.   But pretending to eat miniature cookies just kind of blows me away.  At just under a year and a half he demonstrates a fully formed imagination.   Wow, who knew it started so early?

And to top it all off, he's got a new word in his vocabulary.  One that makes his dad happy to hear.   Book.  He's known what a book is for a while, he'll happily hand you one and sit in your lap so that you can start reading one.  (He'll only let you get through the whole book if its short or he's getting sleepy.)  But now he'll pick one up and say  "Book!"  And that makes me happy.   Now if I can just convince him that books aren't meant to be torn apart...
 

Fire  burn, and caldron bubble.

That's a phrase I've been teaching the Little Man.  I figure, why not start with the good stuff.

Actually, he's got a part of that down.   Bubble.   Sort of.   You see part of the bedtime routine is to take a bath, and he just loves the water.   A month or so ago (perhaps longer, my sense of the passage of days is a bit off kilter recently) my wife picked up a bottle of bubble bath, which also came with one of those wands so that you can blow bubbles.  We added that to the bath routine, and recently, when its time to get into the bath, he's been saying "babum".   Which is his version of asking for the bubbles.   It's quite distinct and repeated often, so it's not just a chance thing, it's quite intentional.  And it's used in context.  IE, if I bring out the bottle of bubbles, he'll say it.  Or if I say the word "bubbles" he'll say it back to me.

Tonight, as I was blowing bubbles at him, I noticed that he was trying to scoop them up off the surface of the bath, and eat them.  I find that kind of surprising, since the other day, I tried to make a real "bubble bath" with lots of suds, and he ended up with an accidental mouthful of bubbles, and that ended the bath right quick.  So shock beyond shock, tonight, he was trying to eat the bubbles.

I don't know when the last time you might have blown bubbles, with a simple wand.   There is something unabashedly fun about the experience.  Something wondrous, even  now at my age, watching the bubbles flow out of the wand and twirl off into the wind of my breath.   Depending on the mix of water and soap, I have nights where I can blow enormous bubbles that could encompass a grapefruit, other times I can only produce small ping-pong sized bubbles at best.   I've watched bubbles bounce off the surface of the bath once, twice, before settling on the surface on the third contact.  I watched bubbles collide in mid-air and form radical shapes that remind me of molecule diagrams from college chemistry.  Sometimes the collision bursts both bubbles.  Sometimes they bounce off each other, sending each on a complete new trajectory.  Most just land on the surface of the water, either to burst or slowly, collect into little islands.  When enough mass together it gives the whole of it a honeycomb appearance.   That rarely lasts long, because the Little Man considers it his duty to disrupt those with fierce intensity.   I alternate between the two distinct challenges of seeing how many bubbles I can flood the air with on a single dip of the soap, with trying to see how large a bubble I can manage without bursting it.    Both, made more challenging by the happy child waiting to burst that large bubble, or make me laugh so that I lose my breath mid-stream.

If it's been a long time since you've done so, go pick up a small jar at the local dollar shop (or equivalent) and go spend some time blowing bubbles.   Spring is finally in full swing; the weather is pleasant enough so that it's neither freezing cold, nor sweltering hot.   (At least here in New Jersey, your mileage may vary.)  Give yourself even just half an hour to recapture one tiny piece of youth that might have stolen away as you grew older and let the responsibilities pile up so.  Take it back, and revel in watching a shiny, floating, swirling sphere that glints with a flash of captured rainbow.  Watch them dance on the wind, for as long as they can before they burst.  Set aside your cares for a while, as you have some old, simple, fun.