Monthly Archives: January 2013

When in doubt, sound it out – or just take a wild guess

My son is starting to be able to put the sounds letters make together to form words. This is a joyous, proud, and maddening time for his parents. It is hard to hold a single emotion from one moment to the next when our budding little reader is playing with the intellectual Flubber commonly referred to as sounding it out.

We are certain the boy is a genius when he correctly reads a word we thought beyond his knowledge of the pot-hole-laced rules of English pronunciation. In the next instant, we become convinced that Kindergarten is nothing more than a pipe dream for this daft child who just sounded out the letters of a simple syllable, then blended them to form a word completely foreign to the sounds he just uttered.

In our hearts we know that he is neither genius nor daft. He’s a kid who is on solid academic footing when he is focused. He is also a kid who is four. Consequently, he is often tempted by disinterest in thinking a problem through when it is more convenient to take a wild guess and move on to playtime.

This laziness is as natural as it is maddening. Without it, parenting would probably get to be too easy; parents would go around bumping their swelled heads into each other as they waited a minute for their gifted children to become doctors specializing in the treatment of concussions.

My son and I were looking at a group of portraits of people he did not know. Beneath each, the person’s name was spelled out. My son wanted to know who they were, so I asked him to sound out one of the names. The one I chose was Mary.

He began, “Maa, aah, ra, ee.”

“Now put it all together,” I said.

“Mary,” he replied without hesitation.

“Good job!” I had thought that the Y at the end might give him some trouble, since Ys have been known to make various sounds in different situations. But he tore right through it, making me just a tiny bit proud. We moved on to the name Adam. I thought this one would be easy after Mary.

“Aah, da, aah, ma,” he read.

I was already counting this one as a win and trying to find the next name we would try. “What’s it say, when you put it together?” I asked, almost as an afterthought.

“Henry!”

That high-pitched noise bystanders heard next was made by the hot air of parental conceit rushing out of my head through my ear holes.

Adam and Eve Currier and Ives lithograph

Eve laments the time wasted in trying to sound out the hard-to-read and easily tempted Adam. If she had only followed her instincts and gone with Henry, things certainly would have turned out better. (Image: Currier & Ives)

Let’s keep playing Uno until your eyes glaze over!

Our four-year-old likes playing Uno. This is the card game that evolved from the old Crazy Eights we used to play with a traditional deck. Uno has several more specialized cards; it is more sophisticated than our old game and my boy loves it.

The sad part is that he has trouble finding people who want to play it with him. Whenever he asks, “Who wants to play Uno?” everyone looks the other way and pretends they didn’t hear him. It’s not that Uno is such a bad game. I imagine it could be a pleasant pastime, to those who stand any chance of winning. But any game loses its appeal when you know you are bound to be defeated. In our house, no one can beat the four-year-old at Uno.

The boy beats me; he beats his mother, he beats his aunt; he just plain beats everybody. And he doesn’t even seem to try that hard. I don’t know if this phenomena indicates that he is a particularly bright kid or just an average one who routinely takes advantage of the low wattage produced by the dim minds of the rest of his family.

Sometimes it even seems as if he’s trying not to win, which makes me especially proud of the fact that I still can’t beat him. He makes no special effort to hide his cards from his opponents. In fact, he will cycle through his cards right in front of you. It doesn’t matter what you know about his cards; he’s not going to play them in the order his conventional, inside-the-box opponent expects anyway.

card game quarrel

“Quit showing all your cards! How can I have a fair chance of winning when you keep showing me your cards?” (Image: Frederic Remington)

Knowing what he has in his hand at most times, it’s still hard to follow the brilliance in the way he plays his cards. He plays whichever card strikes his fancy, often without considering all the possible plays in his hand. Sometimes he will use a wild card to change the color to one he does not even hold. This diabolical strategy is beyond my ability to fathom. I can’t figure out how it comes around to working out for him, but it always does.

It would be tempting to believe that he is somehow cheating his way to dominance over me in this game, but all the evidence points to him cheating in my favor, if at all. The one thing he does kind of fudge on is not always declaring “Uno” when he is down to his last card. But this oversight is not to blame for his winning streak. When playing against him, one should assume that, if he has not won yet, he is one slim card away from victory.

When he does lay his last card down, he doesn’t gloat over his victory. He merely pays a smiling homage to what was inevitable. Then, as you try to slink away unnoticed, he innocently speaks the words that clutch at you like a garden of nettles: “Let’s play again.”

playing cards on boxcar

“I’ve got a great idea! After I win this game, let’s play again!” (Image: Bain Collection)

Can you crawl to the kitchen and get me some juice?

Some things are more enjoyable when done with one’s children. Being sick is not one of them. You can hardly enjoy being sick at all when your kids are sick too. It just about ruins the whole experience.

Four-year-olds forget their manners altogether when they are sick. They don’t want to sleep in their own beds, and they will make sleeping in yours next to impossible for you if you let them insert themselves there. And you will let them insert themselves, because in your weakened state you are prone to bouts of empathy, and they can sense this.

On our first night of family illness, I let my son sleep in the bed with me. His mother, who was slightly less ill, and exceedingly more wise, than his father, opted to sleep on the couch. She made a speedy recovery.

A sick four-year-old in your bed is a sprinkler system for germs. Even though my son covers his mouth during waking hours, he made no bones about coughing directly into my face in the bed. Rolling over saved my face, but it did nothing to prevent his charming little sneeze droplets from alighting upon the back of my neck. I also discovered that, even in the throes of illness, I can be remarkably nimble when it comes to dodging  puke.

Sick children need their juice. They need it now and they need it where they are. Sick parents might have very wobbly legs, but that is no excuse for not crossing the room to slide a boy’s cup of juice two inches closer to him so that he does not have to roll over to reach it.

Sick children have a great many needs, none of which will wait until Daddy is feeling just a little bit better. I feel fortunate that Mommy was able to tend to the sick infant’s needs without much help from me. This left me free to attempt to keep my legs under me until the preschooler had all of his needs met, or until he realized that I wasn’t trying to cough up a lung just to mock him.

father in bed

In olden times, when the father got sick, the children busied themselves knitting warm garments for him instead of tormenting him with their sundry juice requests.

He got better quicker than I did. This was a relief; all of his sick neediness was replaced by healthy neediness. There were lots of Christmas toys to be opened. Just getting the modern toy out of its box is a half-hour, labor-intensive process, requiring no less than three separate tools. Rescuing toys from their intricate webs of packaging is one of the primary reasons why dads exist. I was happy to help my son liberate his toys, from where I lay on the floor, even at the risk of falling asleep with scissors in my hand.

Both of the boys are well again. I am nearly so. For their sakes, I hope I get back to 100% very soon. It is an unfairness to them, having to jump and climb all over a chronic complainer who is forever whining about not feeling well enough to take a sharp knee in the gut.