Category Archives: Little Weirdos

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)

A four-year-old does what a four-year-old has to do

There’s a law somewhere that states that if you hold an event for families, you have to do some sort of arts and crafts activity for children. We attend lots of family events, so my preschool son has created quite a lot of crafts.

The thing to know about crafts is that they don’t make good toys. No matter how fun they were to make, they will soon be forgotten. Consequently, most of the crafts my son creates don’t even make it from the car to the house when we get home.

Last night, after a long day of preschool and play, my son discovered a craft he’d made months ago. The back seat, like a receding glacier, coughed up an ancient paper mask from its store of long-lost artifacts. I remembered helping the boy glue plastic baubles to the paper mask. I’d imagined, as I’m sure the boy did, that this creation had been destroyed ages ago by the natural attrition that eats paper crafts.

boy wearing paper mask

The mask when it was fresh and new. Who would have guessed it would reappear months later to cause such anguish?

The child immediately began re-examining the already beat-up mask in the rough, destructive way of four-year-old boys. Soon, both eyeholes were torn to the edges of the mask. “I’m gonna throw this away,” he told me, his tone indicating that he expected me to protest.

“If you’re done with it, go ahead and throw it away,” I replied.

The boy was instantly offended, as if I’d demanded that he destroy a precious relic. “I don’t want to throw it out!”

“Okay. Keep it.”

“Daddy, I didn’t want it to be ripped.” This was said in a whiny voice. He was very tired. “I really don’t want to throw it away.”

“You don’t have to, but you really should have been more careful if you didn’t want it to get ripped.”

I had to turn away to tend to the baby. When I turned back to the four-year-old, the mask was gone. I asked him where it was.

“I threw it in the garbage,” he said in the resigned voice of a boy who, in his own mind, has taken a long step toward manhood by doing an unpleasant thing because he knew it had to be done.

“Okay,” I said.

Then he turned on the water works, leaving me wondering how this long-unwanted paper craft had suddenly been transformed into Old Yeller. He cried inconsolably, as if he had just returned from putting down his lifelong companion. Several unsuccessful attempts to calm him told me that he was beyond the point of reason. The only solution was bedtime.

old yeller movie poster

This doesn’t turn out well either, but at least the crying makes sense. (Walt Disney Studios)

Today, there has been no mention of the mask. The boy shows no sign that he is haunted by his decision to put it out of its misery. I suspect the mask has slipped into the same memory hole that has vacuumed away all of his other over-tired histrionics. I am the only one scarred by the memory of the night when a boy grit his teeth and did what man has to do.

When Virgos attack

My poor wife! She’s married to a Virgo and her first-born son is a Virgo. Talk about rotten luck! Well, actually, only the son is dumb luck. It was her own (questionable) choice to marry a Virgo. Some lessons you just learn too late.

Virgos are very particular people. We like things to be a certain way, and we will swear to God that there is a good reason behind our preferences. We can’t always explain the reason, but you should just trust us, because all of our exacting arrangements have worked out perfectly in the past, even if you don’t realize it yet. In spite of how much more efficient we have made your life with our helpfully rigid routines, you might still claim that we are not the easiest people with whom to share a living space. Go figure.

The boy Virgo has worn pull-ups to bed since he was two. He no longer needs them, being conscientious about getting to the bathroom if he has to potty at night. I know this because he gets me up too. My job is to guard the bathroom door in case any intruders have broken into the house for the sole reason of invading his bathroom privacy at 3 a.m.

blanket fringe out of place

Knowing there is one fringe bent back, he will not be able to sleep at all. This makes perfect sense, as it is nearly impossible to sleep and complain about trifles at the same time.

He baulks at the idea of wearing regular underwear to bed. You’d think he might be proud of this milestone, but he will not accept the honor. Regular underwear are daytime underwear; he wears nighttime underwear to bed. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s the way it should remain. It has nothing to do with pee; it’s the system – tried and true.

Every night, after I tuck in Virgo Junior, he wants Mommy to give him and hug and kiss, and more importantly, fix his blankets. There is nothing wrong with his blankets, unless you count, as he does, the one spot where a single fringe is folded backward. Don’t worry that all the blankets will be twisted into knots after five minutes of his sleep-thrashing, just make it right so he can overcome this obsession for one more night.

Arrangement of toys

He has not used the Mickey Mouse airplane in over two years, yet it must remain parked between the Little Tikes emergency vehicle and the also obsolete rocking horse. It’s the law.

We have a playroom in the basement. While Virgo Child is certainly no neat-freak about his toys, many of the larger items have exact spots where they are to be parked. Yesterday, my wife cleaned out many of the toys that my son has outgrown, moving them to a different part of the basement.

Later, he and I went downstairs to play. He spent 15 minutes locating all of the old toys and replacing them into their assigned locations. He pushed all of the newer toys my wife had put in their places into a big, messy pile on an unclaimed parcel of floor. When Mommy sees the results, I hope she understands her mistake.

It’s not easy being a Virgo. People should trust our methods by now, but for some strange reason, they don’t. It can be very frustrating. Mommy doesn’t know what it’s like to be a Virgo, and one day this may cause her to explode. We can’t help it that she’s one of those high-strung signs.