Foons!

One thing we have always loved about the boys are their funny mispronunciations of things. They are getting few and far between these days and they both speak beautifully. One of the few remaining is Connor's rendering of "hotel" as "hootel."

Jamie used to have a tough time with "sp" sounds, saying them as "f". We still talk about looking for parking "fots." Going through email archives I found this from March 2007, when he was 3. Sarah wrote:

On the way to school, Jamie said, "It's spring!" (pronouncing spring nicely). Then, "Mom, I can say SPOON. 'Cause I'm such a big boy." I said, "Jamie! How wonderful! Did you work on that at school, or with Daddy?" "I practiced in my room." And he really did say it perfectly! No more foons. 

In retrospect, it's totally Jamie, to practice something alone in his room until he got it right.

I got it!

So Jamie's been playing on a select baseball team since last summer. In one sense that sounds impressive and really it is. The kid who started playing when he was 7 was a million miles away from even being on a field with these kids. On the other hand, we are playing up in a 10U group and so have been getting slaughtered regularly. Jamie bears this all just fine and seems to know he is a little over his head and so plugs away doing what he can. He has actually adapted to kid pitching quite well. One sign of his improvement came last weekend. With this group he plays pretty much right and left field and has learned the position well.

In this case there were two outs in what had been a brutal inning, of which we generally have one a game. Lots of runs had scores, balls had been dropped, throws gone awry, etc. And then a ball came arcing towards Jamie in right. In his telling his first thought was "uh-oh, I gotta catch this, I gotta catch this!" Now keep in mind that he has never caught a fly of any kind in a game at any level though he's caught plenty in practices. Fortunately, the ball came pretty much right at him and he stuck is glove out and THUMP! in it landed for a much-needed out #3. There was much rejoicing. Really, there was.

Cello update

Well, he's done it again. We always said Jamie's usual method of doing things, that is to say not doing them at all until he was very good at it, wouldn't work with music, but weirdly he's managed it. He is suddenly flying through songs in cello at a rate his teacher referred to today as "almost unprecedented." He has now gotten through the songs that she had given him until the end of May to do and is still rolling. He was still in beginning strings the first month of this year and now she says she may move him to Performing Strings (the big show here) at the beginning of next year. Typical Jamie.

Really, though to give him credit, he has been quite dogged about it. He does not like doing review practice, and he does not like doing exercises, but he does like learning songs. He has been laboring away for the past month on Bach's "Minuet #2" and actually will pull out his cello unbidden and sit down to work on it. This song seems to have been sort of a turning point for him because he says he wants to play it because he likes it. Then the other day, he informed us that the only thing he wanted for his birthday and Christmas was his own cello. Seriously. His teacher laughed at this and said, "Ha, ha, your kids chose the most expensive instrument there is." Ha ha indeed.

Meanwhile Connor has started the upward march as well, passing two of the "Twinkle Twinkle" variations, and maybe another 1 or 2 today. The main Twinkle theme gave him some trouble because he got to the middle part and just kept looping it, so he would get stuck in Twinkle purgatory. Apparently, on one of his failed attempts, the entire class was rooting for him. His teacher said all the other kids had their fingers crossed as he started and there was a collective groan as he made the misstep. But he persevered too and has moved on. Hasn't asked for his own cello yet, but it's a matter of time it seems.