Cello update

Jamie continues to work at cello. We're starting to realize, and we suspected this, that it's going to be a struggle, especially with practice. Jamie can be really dogged when he wants to (see posts on baseball), but there are some challenges with this. I think it has to do with his tendency to not want to do things until he is a master of them. We have seen this with him since learning to walk, which he refused to do until he could run, and learning to read. He would not work to sound out letters the way Connor does, but instead waited until in essence he had memorized a huge number of words, or gotten to the point when he could sound them out intuitively, so that when he did start reading he jumped quickly to an advanced level.

The problem, of course, is that this won't work for cello. At least not initially. I do wonder if once he gets through this face of getting the basic mechanics down, he might also move forward quickly. One of the other obstacles is that he doesn't like working on the mechanics by themselves. He wants to play songs. I'm hoping that this will serve us down the road as well. He seems to think in terms of the entire unit rather than each other sections. Things have advanced in the past couple weeks as his posture has advanced enough that his teacher is letting him use the bow, and he can pluck out two songs pretty much in their entirety.

So stay tuned, as it were, for more progress reports.

Did you mean?

So Sarah, technologically savvy as she is, has joined the twenty-first century and got herself a smart phone. Among many things, it has had the effect of pleasing the boys because they get, under special circumstances, to play Angry Birds. The first night we let them do this, each one would play while books were read to the other. Connor was so excited he could hardly stand it, and as he played he kept muttering "Angra birds, angra birds, angra birds".

It is astonishing to see the skill with which he has adapted to using the phone but sometimes he gets in trouble. To keep a grip on the phone he has to really wrap his wee hands around it so that sometimes he inadvertently hits a button and is navigated away from the game. This displeases him and we are called in. This happened last night. I was in the other other room but I heard a series of anxious/angry noises and went into check it out. I soon saw that he had somehow activated the voice recognition function, which had kept a record of his utterances. It looked about like this:

"Did you mean: ooooo ooooooooo?"
"Did you mean: oo ooooooh?"
"Did you mean: ooooooooo?"
There were about 15 variations of this and then:
"Did you mean: hell yeah?"

Not quite sure what produced this last one.

Watch out ladies!

Connor is in this funny stage between being big boy and a little guy and it often comes out when we play with friends where there is a range of ages. He actually is quite skilled lately at moving between older and younger crowds. He keeps up pretty well with Jamie and his buddies, but has gotten really nice with younger kids, and actually is able to be something of a leader with them and to show some real patience.

Other times, of course, he loses it a bit. We were over at our friends' house last night, and they have a little girl who is 2. While the grown-ups were eating dinner, he came in and announced that she had been beating him on the head. "Well, Connor," her Dad said, "she shouldn't do that, but you need to learn that girls can be dangerous." Connor thought about that for about a half-second and answered confidently, "Well, I know karate!"

Addendum

(by mommy) A very sweet addendum to Leo's last post about the boys sharing a bedroom is a recent habit they've developed. Connor climbs into Jamie's bunk after we put them to bed, and they giggle and talk, and then Jamie reads Connor books. Their choices have included "Grandma and Me," "Elmo gets homesick," and "The Jorge Posada Story."

I realize some brothers do this sort of thing often, but ours have never had a particularly affectionate relationship, even when they get along well. So we are pretty much loving this.

Can't go to sleep with 'em, can't go to sleep without 'em

The boys are still sharing a bedroom, Jamie on the top bunk, Connor on the bottom. In theory we are going to move one of them to another room at some point but I don't see this as particularly immanent. I'm sure Connor would be very distressed to be alone (on nights when he won't be quiet (most) one of the threats that sometimes works a little is to move him out of the room by himself). But interestingly, Jamie seems to really like having his brother there too.

This is somewhat hard to detect because there is inevitably frustration. Jamie loves to read in bed. Connor, who I would add is doing great with his reading these days, however, wants to talk. There then begins a cycle of Connor talking and Jamie frustratedly yelling "Connnooo! BE QUIET". Then we yell at Jamie to be quiet, and on it goes. Even when the light goes out Jamie often complains he can't sleep or hear is music because of Connor, so this goes on.

But a couple of nights as they've been going to sleep Connor has emerged from the bedroom to ask some question (this often happens) and Jamie has started calling to him. We assumed at first this was frustration that Connor was going to get them both in trouble, but when we asked him he said, "I like having Connor here. I want him to come back." Displays of affection from the older brother are rare, but very sweet when they happen.

Fall ball

A quick update on the baseball life. It has sort of come to rule our existence again. Fall ball is a bit less of a time commitment, in theory, but because Connor has started, we seem to be at the fields about as much as we were in the spring. Jamie has been doing great. It's really fun to see how far he has come and he can definitely hold his own out there. He's been in a bit of a slump lately because he's finally gotten to the point where he really swings the bat hard and he has had to get used to timing his swing better because it's moving through the zone so much faster. He's had a number of hits this year, but Wednesday was the first time with the new swing that he really connected and he drilled the ball between the line and the third baseman. By far the hardest hit he's had. What's fun is that he is very self-motivated and really loves playing. Last night while I was helping to coach Connor's game Jamie found a couple of boys and they went off a played a game on their own, which I love. I think that too much is made sometimes of the imposition of organized sports over spontaneous "sandlot" playing, as if they were exclusive. I'm sure Jamie never would have felt confident enough to do this without playing Little League.

Now, Connor. Well, he has his moments, but it's a bit of a battle. I think the main issue for him is not so much coordination as attention. Which is to say he doesn't pay any. Something about getting on the baseball field seems to spur the silly mode in Connor (not that it takes much) and he goes into a total wiggle, spinning around, rolling on the ground, doing everything but looking at the baseball. But he has fun sometimes and he is certainly not the only one of those kids to be distracted. Basically if you put a bunch of 5-year-olds around a big expanse of dirt, there's only one real outcome, it's just a question of how long it takes.