Mark's Musings

A while ago, probably some time last summer, I had tried to get Alec to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It didn’t work. I’m not sure if it’s his personality, or if it’s my approach, but whenever I show him a book or mention a TV show he might like, his immediate response is “I’m not interested.”

Fast forward to last week. He has been assigned a reading project in which he is required to read a new book and write a book report on it. The cutesy-third-grade aspect is that the book report comes in the form of a sandwich, with each element of the sandwich (bread, lettuce, meat, onion, &c) a different aspect of the book report. So I took him to the library and he picked out some books. When he got home, I asked him which one he wanted for his book report.

He just looked at me for a moment, and then sheepishly admitted that all he picked out were a few Encyclopedia Brown books.

I saw my opening, and I took it. I told him that he was to go into his room, look through all the books in there, and find one he hasn’t read before. He came back with two books: one with Dragon in the title, and the other, Charlie.

“Which one do you want for your book report?” I asked.

“I’ll do Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” he said. “But it’s got 24 chapters and I need to read it in 14 days, so I have to read one or two chapters per day.”

“OK,” I said, hopefully without looking too happy, as parents being happy is the surest way to making kids feel miserable. “Better get started.”

I checked in on him a bit later, and he was already halfway through. I think this means that the only way I’m going to get him to read the good books is by tricking him into it. There must be a better way, but I’ll take my victories where I can.

We’ve been very blessed with Alec in many respects, one being his love of reading. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, he sometimes reads to distraction. Regardless, we love that he loves to read.

He limits his choices too much, though, but it’s hard to know how to handle it without turning him off altogether. As part of his school homework, he is meant to read 20-30 minutes every day. For the past few weeks, however, he has cycled through the same three Star Wars books (a couple of Clone Wars kid books, and a YA “Life and Times of Obi-Wan” book), so finally Julie and I have put our foot down: to fulfil the reading assignment, he must read something he hasn’t read before.

We went over to our bookshelf, where there are plenty of YA books mixed in with the heavier stuff. He spotted Pratchett’s Wintersmith and pulled it off the shelf. “This looks good,” he said. “Wait,” I answered. “Did you just judge that book by its cover?”

If Julie were there she would have facepalmed. Alec didn’t get it anyway.

He read a bit of it, but got bored. So I tried a couple of other books (Dickinson’s “Changes” trilogy, and Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”). He glanced at them and said “no thanks” without even considering what they might be about. Lesson learnt: describe plot before showing book.

So we went to the library last night. I showed him the children’s section where the fiction stacks are, and he started slowly scanning. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?” I asked. “Where are the Star Wars books?” he responded. Sigh. So I lead him over to the stack that has all the “series” books, and we found the Star Wars section. He grabbed three books without looking at them and said “OK, I’m ready”. Second sigh, next rule: “when picking a ‘series’ book, you can only borrow one at a time”. Now it was his turn to sigh.

Man, all these new rules, just popping out of mid-air.

Anyway, he chose one of the Star Wars books, one Secrets of Droon book, and then I said “OK, how about one non-series book?” He agreed to that, and I went to find Samantha to see what books she was choosing (oops, forgot to mention I brought her along). Anyway, within a few minutes he comes running up to me with Cooper’s “Over Sea, Under Stone”. I tried to hide my enthusiasm when I told him we’ve got that book at home. Then I said (having learnt my lesson), “How about a book where a couple of boys build a spaceship and fly to a new planet?” “Yeah!” Alas, the library had no Cameron at all. I know, right? So we had to submit an inter-library loan request for one of them. Hopefully he’ll still be enthusiastic when it shows up.

Of course, the first book he started reading was the Star Wars one (a Jedi Quest book). Nearly finished it too, in the 30 minutes allotted.

Alec, who is now 8, has been given an assignment to write a book report for school. Their definition of a book report differs from mine, fortunately, for all Alec needs to do is write down on separate cards the main characters, the setting, the problem that the characters were faced with, and the solution that resolved the problem.

Part of the assignment was to read a book he had never read before, so we used that as an excuse to go to the local bookshop and poke around in the kids’ section. While we were there, Alec spotted a “wizard chess” set, which is a chess set with the pieces in the shapes of the chess pieces from the first Harry Potter film. He’s a huge Pottermaniac: one day he stayed home from school sick with a fever, and watched the first film twice. He would have seen it a third time but he fell asleep. So naturally he wanted to get this set.

I didn’t know he could play chess, and said so. He assured me he can play. So I told him — and this is the part that I don’t know whether is cruel or not — that if he could beat me at chess, I’d buy him that set. He agreed, but then he thought about it and said that if he lost to me the first time, could we try again? Sure, I said, we can try as many times as you like.

We have yet to play, but I have a nagging suspicion that I’m being hustled.

Alec has recently rediscovered the knock-knock joke, and in fact has taught me one I hadn’t heard before. I don’t remember many knock-knock jokes from my youth, so when he wanted me to tell him some, I told him we’d alternate.

He started with a common one (knock-knock / who’s there? / ya / ya who? / what are you so excited about?).

I responded with a similarly common one (KK / WT / boo / boo who? / aw, don’t cry, it’s OK)

Then he told me one I hadn’t heard before (KK / WT / spell / spell who? / W-H-O!), except he accidentally spelled it H-O-W.

Then I wracked my brains for another one. Like I said, I can’t remember many from long ago. So I started thinking ‘…who; …who’ and came up with KK / WT / doctor / doctor who? / EX-TER-MI-NATE! He thought that was really funny, and later shared it with Julie. Her post-chuckle response was to ask if I taught it to him. Yay predictability, I guess.

Samantha tries to compete with Alec all the time, and knock-knock joke telling is no exception. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know the form of knock-knock jokes yet. She can repeat those she’s heard, but she also tries to make up new ones of the pattern “knock-knock / who’s there? / {word} / {word} who? / {word} I’m going to {do something silly}!” The {word} can be nearly anything: cat, blue, Zoë, shoe, whatever strikes her fancy; and {do something silly} could be “trip and fall” or “smack myself in the face” or “fall down, roll over, and get leaves in my hair”. We tell her that’s not a knock-knock joke and her response is to be briefly upset and then say “how about this one?”, followed by yet another of the same pattern.

Four nights a week, Alec has to read a book to us. It’s part of his homework assignment. He gets to pick out the book from school, and then he needs to read it and show basic comprehension (what happened, what was the setting, who were some of the characters, and so on).

Tonight’s book was one of the Amelia Bedelia stories. Amelia Bedelia stores are based around a woman who takes things literally. This particular one ended with a man asking her to heat up a can of soup, at which point she took a can of soup, put the can directly into a pot on the stove, and started heating that up.

I looked at Alec to see if he understood why this was not what is meant by heating a can of soup.

“That’s silly,” he said. My triumph was short-lived, however, as he added “she should have used a microwave.”

This is about as close as we’re going to get to a game console for quite some time, alas. But we were in Circuit City, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to let Alec try it out.

Alec discovered today that it’s hard to distinguish “Fly up high in the sky” and “Fly a pie in the sky” when spoken aloud.

We were driving home from daycare when he told me he wanted to fly up high in the sky.

“Fly a pie in the sky?” I asked. He burst into laughter.

“No, no, daddy. Fly up high in the sky!”

“Fly a pie,” I couldn’t resist saying.

“Fly. Up,” he said slowly and then paused. “High,” he concluded, aspirating the H as much as he could.

Samantha joined in. “Fly up! High!”

“Fly up high,” I said, carefully pronouncing each word

“Good, daddy!” Alec was excited I got it right.

“I think my way was funnier, though. Fly a pie”

“That was so funny,” he agreed, and giggled a bit.

I let the moment linger, absorbing it as much as I could, so that it could be savored when my kids are teenagers and I become an idiot in their eyes. They’ll say to me “Dad, why are you so dumb?” and I’ll respond to them “fly a pie!” That’ll probably just reinforce their belief, but I’ll recall this day and smile inwardly.

Alec is really good at reading these days. But he’s not as good as he thinks he is, and will sometimes gloss over words he can’t pronounce or has never seen before, and sometimes he’ll insert extra words that aren’t there.

We were reading a book about hibernation today and, in it, there is mention of ‘prairie dogs’. He’s reading along, doing a great job, but when he got to that bit, he said ‘pirate dogs’, and just kept going.

“Pirate dogs?” I asked. “Pirate dogs? What do pirate dogs say? Arrrrf?”

He didn’t laugh.

Every so often, the subject of relatives comes up. There are pictures on our walls with both sides of the family represented, and a response to a “Who’s that?” question will quickly generate more and more.

One exchange starts with Alec pointing to a picture of Julie’s mother and asking who it is.

“That’s Nana,” Julie says. “She’s my mother.”

“Who’s Nonna?” Samantha is compelled to ask.

“Nonna is daddy’s mother,” says Julie.

“No!” Samantha replies. “Nonna is my friend.”

A few nights ago we were going over all the relatives again, and we came to my sister Diana and her husband Rob. They’ve got twins, who we met for the first time a few weeks ago.

“Who’s Michael and Kyle’s mama?” Alec asked.

“Aunt Diana. And Uncle Rob is their daddy.”

“Uncle Rob?” he asked, incredulous. “He steals from people.”

I’d have done a spit take if I had been drinking something and I were the kind of person who did spit takes.

“What?” I said, not knowing exactly how to react. “Uncle Rob doesn’t steal. Who told you that?”

Julie looked at me. “His name’s Uncle Rob,” she said, and the lightbulb went on.