The video shoot (heard round the world?)

This weekend Maddy and her friend teamed up to do the final stages of a social studies project together. A few weeks ago they decided to write a script about the Boston Massacre and then make a movie of it.

Yesterday was shoot day. They enlisted several of their friends and their siblings. Sam was conscripted as the romantic lead (a British soldier) simply because we have a redcoat uniform that fit him when he was five. {This is why his jacket sleeves go to his elbows in the photo below.} Lauren was the director/cameraperson. I alternated between bossy backseat director and observer, depending on whether the cast was behaving or not. {Some would say this is my role on a daily basis.}

I was impressed by their gumption. Usually school projects feel like just as much my homework as the kids' but they did the whole thing. They laid out a whole project schedule, including reading the book, writing the script, and filming the movie. They arranged to meet and type it up together on the computer. They scouted locations, set a time and place, and coordinated casting. They managed to make it really fun for everyone involved.

I tried to attach a clip here but our slow internet connection whined and complained and fell on the floor and did a tantrum so...alas. {I'll have to see what I can figure out. Or switch internet carriers.} In the meantime, here they are getting ready before heading out to the park to film the carnage.

In other weekend news, it was the spelling bee at the elementary school, which is just about the closest to a slice of Mayberry as you can get around here. The 4th graders compete in teams of 3 and it is the first year of elimination. As in, you spell the word wrong, you're out. Sam and his friends had a couple of practice sessions here before the big day. They are AWESOME spellers. I have to admit to a little goeth-before-the-fall pride in imagining just how well they would do. And I always feel so sorry for the first team out, you know?

Well, guess what? They were the first team out. With each word, they would all spell it out on paper, agree on its spelling, then take turns saying it out loud in the microphone. On the third time through, they got the word triangle. They were all cocky--heh! we got triangle...what do they think this is, kindergarten?--and then the one saying it out loud got too excited and skipped the "a." Poor guy. Poor team. They were good sports about it but spent the rest of the spelling bee sitting next to me, whispering how they knew every word that came through. {Well, yeah, guys but you missed "triangle" remember?}

Hands of jazz

Wearing a sling on his injured arm has had its drawbacks for Sam.

As we were all in the kitchen getting ready for dinner, Sam said "Oh! you know what happened to me today?"

"No, what?"

"In school we had a performer come. At the end the lady called on me because she thought I had a question."

"Why did she think that?"

"Because I did jazz hands."

"What?" [laughing]

"Well everyone clapped at the end and I didn't want to be rude but since I only have one arm I can use, I just kinda shook one hand in the air. You know, jazz hands. It was so embarrassing. She thought I had an important question or something."

When did Sam learn the term "jazz hands"?
{We do lightly make fun of jazz hands now and then in my family...
maybe he overheard this?}
Why does this make me laugh so hard?

{Yes, it is the gesture for clapping in sign language...

does he think instead that they are jazz handing?}

Pushed past the point of boredom

Sam the reluctant passenger, May 2007
Can't you just feel the errand joy?

Both of my daughters have music lessons on Thursdays. Sam, lucky lotto winner of the birth order, has been dragged to his sisters' lessons since he was a newborn. You would think that he would have adapted to this reality, would have grown up assuming that being lugged to listen to lessons was just par for the weekly course, especially since now he has lessons of his own (on Wednesdays, however). But no. Really. NO.

Something in his y chromosome (I theorize) rears its head and roars anytime we introduce the idea of going. I've tried lots of measures (read: bribery) to make it palatable: go for a snack during the lesson, to the library, to the bookstore, let him play with my cellphone games, my computer, encouraged coloring and writing and drawing. But, because it is framed by the fact that someone is MAKING HIM DO IT, even these activities are greeted with tepid reception at best.

Last week I was too exhausted to go and find something to do for the 30 minute lesson (plus I needed to multitask and get some of my mandatory books read). I simply parked the car, opened a book, and sat reading. There are stages of grief, stages of child development, stages of labor, sleep, cancer, pregnancy. For Sam, there are definite, clear stages of boredom. See if these sound familiar to you:

• Growl/moaning: Boy-whining, I think you could call this. He starts doing a closed-mouth, gutteral moan that says "This isn't what I want to do right now." Also heard when I ask him to pick up his room. Or go back and scrub behind his ears this time. 5 minutes.
  
• Fidgetiness: Crawling up to the front seat, and back. Opening and closing the glove compartment, flipping through books and slamming them. The boy is making attempts at finding something to do but they are half hearted. 5 minutes.
  
• Flailing: Flopping around in an exaggerated way, sighing. This stage is intended to get parent to come to his aid or at least pay attention. 2 minutes, because he is asked to stop.
  
• Complaining: Notice the delay of actual words until the 4th stage. This is because he is a boy. For girls (at least in our family), this stage comes first and is more prolonged. 5+ minutes.
  
• Breakthrough!: Having pushed through the pain, boy suddenly decides to find something to do. Clearly the parent is not going to help. He gets out of the car, goes over to the grass, and spends the rest of the time looking at the clouds, humming, making up stories, picking the grass and studying it. It did my heart good to look over and see him, elbows out, hands behind his head, stretched out on the grass. Wish I had my camera with me...my own little boy blue.
  

However, it'd be nice if next time he takes a shorter route to the sunny side of boredom...

Hair halo

Sam's been begging to grow his hair longer so we've been going with it for a while--after all, it is summer. But the boy has multiple cowlicks (darn you, cow who licked him!) that aren't cooperating so well. No, this isn't static electricity, it's his bed-head every single morning.

And the planets hovering? When we first moved in, Greg suspended our planet mobile from the light fixture in the stair landing until we could find a better place and it's stayed there ever since. It's rather growing on me now, kind of like the sticky plastic salamanders that ended up staying on the ceiling of our dining room for years in the other house.

Sam's been enjoying putting little lego guys on the mobile now and then. Poor guy...he looks so angry to be stuck out there on Saturn's rings. What's a pirate lego guy to do?

In praise of late bloomers

I love late bloomers, all varieties. My grandpa took up painting just a couple of years ago and sends us watercolor treasures, scenes from Italy and France and Utah. I linger over articles about authors late to the publishing world, taking small shards of hope from their against-all-odds optimism.

My kids didn't get teeth until they were 9 months old and that was perfectly fine with me. Sam's now almost nine years (next month) and he's only lost a couple of teeth, the two almost invisible ones in the bottom center. {Poor boy, he's going to be in 4th grade with the gappy front tooth smile, up to 5 years later than some of his friends.} And Maddy still cherishes her doll Emily with the fidelity of a mother, long after dolls have lost their cool for most of her friends. Everything in its time, I think to myself, privately happy to extend the moments of childhood and allow them their own timetables.

With that in mind, please do not be shocked when I tell you something.

Sam just mastered riding a bike.

Are you still reading this? Are you not shocked with the depths of neglect this boy has had to suffer at the hands of his parents? Truthfully, we've tried. For the past several summers we've taken him out. But, used to the ease that some things have come to him, he didn't like it, dug in his heels and refused. You know that saying about horses and water and drinking? Try young boys and bicycles and riding. Then, we had waited too long and Sam didn't want to be seen learning how to ride a bike, he wanted to do it without the pain of trial, mistakes, and potential embarrassment.

Hmmm. I recognized this trait. And it worried me. I recognized it from my own life, from times when I stayed in the boat rather than learn how to water ski in front of people, countless other times when fear of other's opinions trumped fun and experience and trial and error and joy, for crying out loud.

But I also recognized it from my own reading. In my research work* I have been drawn to interesting findings by Carol Dweck on the developmental importance of failure and persistence in the face of barriers. She's found that, more important than believing that you're smart is believing you're hard working or able to work to become better. She's also looked at the effects of different kinds of praise (from parents and teachers), discovering that praise about traits (being smart, beautiful, naturally athletic) means less (and is in fact at times counter-productive) than praise about effort. In short, the difference is whether you think that your abilities are inborn or developed because it influences your philosophy about whether effort is worth it.

This lack of bike-riding was a splinter in Sam's view of himself. He stayed home from the scout bike rodeo and avoided playing with bike-happy friends. For a while, Sam seemed to think people either could bike or they couldn't and there wasn't much point in trying. But this week, with the aid of a positive and patient dad and much negotiation, he agreed to work at it for ten tries. And then, mid-week, he started rolling his bike out to the front of the house on the sly, doggedly working solo on that tricky starting moment where you lift both feet to the pedals and push. Today he's zipping around the neighborhood, all glee and I-did-it-ness.

Yeah, I love those inspiring, audacious, late-bloomers--octogenarian novice painters, middle-age debut authors, and especially nine-year-old bike riders.

*just if you're curious: my proposed work is focusing on early interaction patterns between infants/toddlers and parents that influence these self views and subsequent motivations/curiosity/persistence/resilience.