So much interesting discussion on my last post! Do check out the comments.

Such doubts we have about video games! Which makes sense: it’s something that we parents didn’t grow up with, which many of us don’t understand, yet it’s becoming a basic part of childhood for many of our kids.

People always fear the unknown. And the media plays on fear. Stories that feed our fears and amplify them attract readers. Which is why it’s easy to find so many stories on the negative aspects of video games. How they’re addictive, how they keep kids from learning.

I respect any parent’s decision to keep video games out of their kids’ lives. But I respect that decision even more if the parent has really explored the issue first. Both sides, negative and positive. I think the truth is that most parents have only looked at the negative side of gaming. Or maybe, like me, they’ve allowed gaming, but they haven’t been happy about it. For me, the positives have only revealed themselves slowly, over the years.

But I think we’re doing our kids a disservice not to look at the entire picture of gaming. Because our kids are growing up in a different world, and there’s a good chance that video games can help prepare them for that world.

(I’m hoping that my friend Carrie L. will read this post and comment. Recently she had a conversation about gaming with a twenty-something young woman who works at Google–a Stanford grad, I think– and the conversation really changed her perspective.)

If you’re willing to explore the positive side of video games, my readers and I have some recommendations.

I mentioned this one in the comments. It’s a book I just found at the library, on the positive aspects of video and computer games: Don’t Bother Me Mom–I’m Learning! by Marc Prensky. It’s fascinating. I especially like that it promotes discussion between parents and kids about what the kids are doing when they play games.

Reader Carrie sent a link to this episode of Science Friday, from just the other day. It’s an interview with Jane McGonigal, who wrote the recent book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. I haven’t read the book, but I think you can get a pretty good sense of where she’s going with it in the interview. Compelling stuff. (You can listen or read a transcript.)

My friend Molly also sent an NPR link, from Morning Edition: Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills.

No one commented specifically on what T said in that last post, but I’m still fascinated by it. (I think the video game topic makes us parents just throw up our arms and get panicky.) T was using video games as a metaphor for how to learn. The fact that he thinks of video games this way makes me realize how much I’ve underestimated their value.

“I like learning the way I do when I play video games.”

I asked him to tell me more and he said this,

“I don’t like someone telling me exactly what to do, but I don’t like being in the dark either. I like having my path clear, but my goal unclear.”

In other words, he likes knowing which way he needs to go, but he also wants to discover in the process. That strikes me as a very creative, meaningful way to learn. Video games gave him this metaphor–wow!–but he wants more of his learning to be like this.

It’s also been interesting to watch how video games play out in T’s life. Often, he’ll play onscreen for a while, and then he’ll turn off the game but continue to play it “live”, moving around the room, re-enacting scenes and acting as one of the characters. He’ll extend the story as he pleases. He’ll also sit down and draw characters from the games, and then he’ll dream up his own characters to add. Or he’ll take an idea from a game and write (or dictate) his own story. Playing the games is just the beginning; T’s own imagination fleshes out the game worlds, and invents new ones. (Are video games T’s only source of creative inspiration? Not in the least. I’ve written about how the ancient Greeks are a current passion for him. Although that passion was certainly fueled by his playing of Age of Mythology… Games and books and learning and life are all wound together for him.)

Because writing is a particular interest of mine, I’ve read lots on how gaming can engage boys with literacy. I have several recommendations: Boy Writers by Ralph Fletcher; Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men by Michael W. Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm; Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture by Thomas Newkirk. All point out how we miss an opportunity if we don’t allow boys’ fascination with games to become fodder for their writing. If boys can bring their excitement towards games to their writing, their writing often bears the same energy and passion. And for boys who don’t have a drive to read and write, gaming can provide motivation.

Do you have a sense of how much kids write when they’re playing video games–at least older kids who play more complex games? They often communicate with others as they play together online. Many post questions on forums for help, and some write game reviews.

I turned up an interesting tidbit while researching an article I’m writing. It came from this transcript which interprets writing test scores from the 2007 NAEP. (The National Assessment of Education Progress, also known as “The Nation’s Report Card”.) I’m not a fan of standardized tests because I think they can undermine how and what we allow kids to learn on an everyday basis, but it is interesting to look at them as a means of considering group shifts over time.

“According to our 2007 results, the gap between male and female 12th-grade students is getting smaller. Twelfth-grade boys are improving their scores at a faster rate than 12th-grade girls. However, the gap has not changed for 8th-grade students. Eighth grade boys and girls are improving at about the same rate.”

The transcript doesn’t offer an explanation for why twelfth-grade boys’ scores are improving, but I have an inkling. My guess is that in the last few years, boys have been writing more than ever before in daily life, with texting, Facebook and gaming. People like to dismiss this sort of writing as lazy and error-riddled, but they fail to see the bigger picture: the more you write, the more comfortable you get with writing, and the more your writing improves. I’m guessing that older boys are gaining a facility with writing from their everyday lives, and it’s spilling over into their school writing. My guess is that twelfth grade girls have already developed a certain level of written literacy for school–as evidenced by their long-running higher-than-boys writing scores–so their real-world writing isn’t making as much of an impact. Also, on the whole, they’re not doing as much gaming, and hence may not be writing casually as often as the boys. (The fact that eighth grade boys didn’t have the same increases may have to do with the fact that younger boys, in 2007 anyway, probably weren’t doing as much casual writing as the older boys. Just my hypothesis.)

Literacy is only one benefit of gaming. The books above offer many other benefits: collaboration skills, ethics, creative thinking, economic skills… There’s a lot to think about. H was the kid who really had to educate me on all of this. And when I consider his filmmaking interests, I realize that they are closely tied to all the time we allowed him to explore with the computer, both with games and with playing with applications like iMovie and Garage Band. H developed skill and agility on computers that led to real-life interests and plans.

I don’t mean to sound as if I’m saying Video games are great! You should let your kids play them all day! Not at all. One thread that came up again and again in the comments is the notion of balance and moderation. I’m right there with you on that. Quite honestly, it would be much easier to simply forbid gaming, or to let my kids monitor themselves. Monitoring kids on games can be a real pain. So much time spent researching the “right” games, so much time spent telling kids it’s time to get off. So much time. But I’ll keep monitoring this way. I think we all learn from our conversations about moderation. I’m helping my kids to learn balance; they’re teaching me to respect something that matters to them that I don’t fully understand. It’s worth the time.

I think that we parents sometimes look nostalgically at our own childhoods, wishing our kids could have the same freedoms that we had: freedoms to ride bikes across neighborhoods, to play unsupervised in creeks and fields and abandoned buildings. (Michael Chabon’s essay The Wilderness of Childhood is a beautiful exploration of this.) But I read somewhere recently (oh, where did I read it?) that kids today get their freedom in their lives online and on screens. I suppose that those of us from earlier generations would find this notion unspeakably sad. And I think it’s important that we try to find ways for our kids to develop freedom and independence in the real world. But I wonder if most kids today would find that notion of screen freedom depressing. I don’t think so. The virtual world is part of their real world, and we oldsters may never fully understand that. But I think it’s important for us to try. We can offer the best of our own worlds to our kids, but they’ll be more likely listen if we let them do the same for us.

Recently Mr. T took a circuitry class for homeschoolers. Although the class sounded interesting, T didn’t love it. For part of the class there were experiments that the teachers had set up, each with a diagram and a supply of parts. Kids were supposed to build the circuit on the card and to test it.

T didn’t want to do that (although he did it anyway.) He really wished the teachers would just set out the supplies and let kids experiment freely.

T explained, “The teachers put out the stuff and tell us what we have to do and how to do it. I don’t learn like that. I like to figure things out myself. I like to decide what I’m going to do.”

And then he blew me away with this:

“I like learning the way I do when I play video games.”

Any of you who have been following me here for a while know about my waldorf guilt (more here) and my mixed feelings about video games. It’s been interesting having two boys who are absolutely drawn to video games. Especially one who’s almost ten years older than the second. H refused to let me write off video games; he demanded that I allow them, that I approach them with an open mind. So it’s been many years—first with H and then with T—of negotiating the play they’ve desired with limits I could live with.

It’s been an education. My boys have taught me that time spent on games is not just mindless entertainment. It’s changed the way they think; it’s nurtured their creativity. And although I never expected it, gaming has provided my boys with a model for learning.

Just a few days after Mr. T made that video game comment, I happened upon this quote while re-reading a section of A Whole New Mind. (If you were at my house right now, I’d foist the book on you, yet again.) Daniel Pink quotes James Paul Gee, a professor who wrote the book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy:

“The fact is when children play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they’re in the classroom. Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about connecting and manipulating them.”

Interesting. But I guess I didn’t need a book to tell me that. My nine-year-old already has it all figured out.

This is a question that often comes up, when I talk to parents about taking dictation from their kids.

I understand the concern. I’ve had the same worry myself.

But remember this: if you’re taking dictation from kids, you’re helping them see the value of expressing themselves in writing. The usefulness of having a written record of their thoughts.

And eventually, they’ll start writing on their own.

It will probably start small.

A title to a drawing, maybe. Or a caption.

(This one cracks me up. It’s the last page of a battle comic. Note that everyone is head-stabbingly, eye-crossingly dead. I was wondering why he wanted to know how to spell Mondays…)

They may give names to characters drawn.

Or keep a list of favorite Pokemon cards.

Next thing you know, they’re jotting down statistics as they play video games. (Cue up my waldorf guilt.)

I didn’t ask Mr. T to do any of this writing. Usually, I didn’t even know he was doing it. I just found it lying around.

It took me a long time to believe this, but now I do: if you don’t bug kids about writing, if you don’t force them to do it, if you value writing in your home, if you’re willing to write for them occasionally…they will come to writing on their own. At their own time, in their own way. H. liked to make elaborate Calvin-esque Keep Out signs for his bedroom door. Lulu liked to keep lists of her Beanie Babies, and to write out fancy daily schedules for her school days at Hogwarts. And that eventually led to other, more advanced writing. 

So don’t discount those Pokemon lists, or the Beanie Baby cataloguing. And don’t feel like you have to assign writing topics or penmanship practice pages. Barring underlying issues like dyslexia (which I promised my friend Susan I would acknowledge), kids can learn to write as organically as they learned to talk. They really can.

The latest episode of my waldorf guilt. 

If you haven’t been reading along, these are the posts in which I wring my hands over how un-waldorfy things can get around here, and how I tend to feel guilty about it. Or try to justify why I don’t feel guilty.

I’ve been feeling less and less guilty lately. Brought on by a confluence of different ideas from different people.

First was Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs. I’ve already raved on and on about this book, so I’ll spare you. (Although if you can get your hands on the audiobook version, which Chabon reads, you must.) In my reflection on the book, I wrote this:

“There’s something about the way Chabon combines his Pulitzer Prize-winning style with the most base cultural references that captivates me. In his essay on Legos—one that had particular resonance for me as the mother of two Lego-loving sons—Chabon writes, “Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble upon along the way.” That making something new of what you have been given by your culture is a big part of Chabon’s genius. It’s precisely what he does in these essays, again and again.”

And one could certainly argue that Chabon made something new of what he was given by his culture when he took his lowly childhood love of comic books and fashioned it into a Pulitzer prize-winning novel.

Second was my reading of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. I’m planning to write a post on the book soon, so I won’t say much yet. But holy sheep dip, this book has so many implications for educators–for homeschoolers especially–about the skills kids will really need in the future. So many of Pink’s ideas are what I and a world of other homeschoolers have intuited over the years, but what a joy to get such heavily-researched validation!

Third was yet another insightful post by Lori at camp creek about not limiting what our kids learn from. (You may have already clicked on my link to this post in the sidebar–if not, go read!)

Which all led to the morning when Mr. T was trying to come up with a project for our homeschool history fair, based on his interest in Norse myths. I can’t remember who came up with the idea first–it may have been my suggestion after I saw how he was “enacting” a video game by jumping across the family room furniture. But somehow the idea formed: he plans to design his own Lego Wii-style game, based on Norse mythology.

map of the nine Norse worlds

Now he won’t be actually making a playable game, of course. But he’s imagining levels and drawing pictures and narrating to me what happens in each. And we’re thinking of begging his big brother to help him make some stop-animation films for each level.

Here’s what he has so far. My waldorf guilt must warn you that there is a lot of virtual punching involved. But if you can hang in there, I’ll explain what I think the kid is getting from this.

map of level 1

LEVEL 1: THE BATTLE OF YMIR

Object: Defeat Ymir

First of all, go to Ymir and punch him three times. He will jump to a ledge. Beware, he’ll throw icicles down! Also, jotuns will fall from the sky. They’ll only take one punch to defeat. 

Remember, don’t go into Ginnungagap or the sides of the board or you’ll die.

Go under Ymir’s ledge and pull down a lever. More ledges will come out of the wall. Jump on them to get to Ymir’s ledge and punch him three times. He’ll jump to a new ledge and the one you’re on will explode. You’ll fall to the ground.

Then, go under Ymir’s new ledge and step on one of the three red squares. Your teammates will step on the other red squares. Then Ymir’s new ledge will come down. Jump on to it and punch him three times. He’ll jump to the ground. Punch him three more times and the level will end.

Tips:

How to get the magic box: in Free Play, be Loki or a different character that can jump really high and jump on to the island in the middle of Ginnungagap. Collect the floating box.

If you win:

You unlock Odin and his brothers and you can be them in Free Play.

How this level is based on Norse myths:

Well, there really wasn’t any levers, red squares, floating boxes, jotuns falling from the sky, or an island in the middle of Ginnungagap. Really, there wasn’t any Lego things whatsoever.

What there really was were the characters of Odin, Loeder and Hoenir, who were brothers and the first of the Aesir gods. There also was Ymir, who was the first of the jotun race, or a frost giant. Odin and his brothers really fought Ymir and they did throw him into Ginnungagap. I didn’t put blood in because I didn’t want it to be too violent, but there was blood in the story. Ginnungagap was a giant pit in the middle of Niflheim and Muspelheim, the first of the nine Norse worlds.

Nifty fact:

The Star Wars planet Mustafar was based on Muspelheim.

First, I have to tell you how incredibly excited Mr. T is about this project. He thinks about future levels endlessly, and begs me to take more dictation. So there’s deep immersion.

Second, there are lots of writing skills at work here. After I wrote Level 1, he said, “Now do the dot-dot thing.” 

I knew what he was getting at. “You mean put a colon in?”

“Yes, a colon.” And he came to check that I did it right. On the next line, after I typed object, he said, “Now put a colon.” 

How can I not be charmed by an eight-year-old who requests colons in all the right places? 

I asked him if he’d consider adding the How this level is based on Norse myths section (hoping to make sure the project looks somewhat educational for the homeschool fair.) Mr. T was happy to. He said, “Can the narrator be funny in that part?”

“What?” I didn’t see that question coming.

“You know, funny. Like this.” And he proceeded to narrate the section above, influenced, I’m pretty sure, by the disclaimer page that follows each Magic Schoolbus book. My favorite part is Really, there wasn’t any Lego things whatsoever. (I’m not fixing his grammar at this point–he’ll learn to use the right verb tenses in time, but for now I want to keep intact his eight-year-old voice.) I love how he’s picking up the notion that one can write with personality and humor, even in nonfiction. 

“Oh, and I want to add a nifty fact.” A nifty fact? I have no idea where he got that phrase. From National Geographic Kids? From one of the many behind-the-scenes books on comics that he’s read? When I asked where he got this particular nifty fact, he ran upstairs and brought down his Star Wars encyclopedia. Surely wii games and Star Wars books are just the sort of “crap” that Michael Chabon writes about; my kid is using crap to learn how to make his informational writing captivating. 

He’s using just the sort of right-brained thinking that Pink writes about to put this project together. He’s researching Norse myths and considering the wii games that he likes to play. Then he’s applying his research to design a game that takes into account those myths while also being entertaining. Silly as his project may sound, I’m convinced that these are the types of skills the kids of today will need in the future. It’s not the content that he’s working with that matters so much, it’s the thinking skills involved.

If content like wii games is what captivates my kid, I’m willing to go with it. And, surprisingly, I don’t feel even a smidge guilty.

For my little project this month, I read  Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son by Michael Chabon. I loved this book. I think my copy now bears more blue and green highlights than any of the essay collections I’ve read this year. 

random notes:

Judging from the blurbs and praises on the back cover of the book, Chabon’s prose is widely considered some of the best of his generation. His writing is smart, lyrical, and writerly. And it manages to be smart, lyrical and writerly while containing references to Squeeze Parkay margarine, Wacky Packages, and the Planet of the Apes television show from the 70′s. I find this irresistible. Chabon is a writer of my generation, and he writes about that generation like no one else. Look at what he has to say about Captain Underpants.

“If I withdraw my approval of Captain Underpants–if I tell my son I will gladly supply him with good books and comics but that if he wants to read those damned Captain Underpants, he’ll have to pay for them himself–that withdrawal creates a gap, a small enchanted precinct of parental disapproval within which he can curl up, for a minute, for the time it takes to read a crass, vibrant, silly 120-page book with big print, one that he paid for himself, and thrill to the deep, furtive pleasure of annoying one’s father.”

There’s something about the way Chabon combines his Pulitzer Prize-winning style with the most base cultural references that captivates me. In his essay on Legos—one that had particular resonance for me as the mother of two Lego-loving sons—Chabon writes, “Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble upon along the way.” That making something new of what you have been given by your culture is a big part of Chabon’s genius. It’s precisely what he does in these essays, again and again. (It’s the same sort of creative, culture-twisting that I love to see my kids fiddle with, that I’ve written about in my Waldorf Guilt posts.) Chabon gives hope to a woman of his age who aspires to write, but worries about the conceit of such an intellectual aspiration given the amount of time she spent watching Brady Bunch reruns as a child.

The parenting essays are my favorites here. Since I attempt to write about parenting myself, I don’t know how I’ve made it through almost a year of this project without reading essays on parenting (other than a little rereading of Anne Lamott). Chabon has now spoiled parenting essays for me: the writing of others, and my own work, especially, is now bound to wither when compared. He writes about the world I knew as a kid, with those Wacky Packs and Linda Carter as Wonder Woman and the De Franco Family singing “A Heartbeat (It’s a Love Beat)”; he writes about the world I know now, with Captain Underpants and crappy kids’ movies and neighborhoods where kids can’t wander alone and teenage daughters with blossoming bodies. Observing his kids and himself as a father, he is both scaldingly honest and sentimental. He looks at his world from quirky perspectives that seem to have a little or a lot to do with his childhood love of comics. He can be witty and crass and irreverent and still convey those pangs of the heart that only a parent can know.

There’s other good stuff here, too, some of which I can’t wait to have my husband read (especially the essay about men faking competence—I get fooled all the time, I’m guessing now.) I’m not sure I needed to know so much about Chabon’s sexual history, but then again it’s hard not to follow along when someone is sharing his or her sexual history. Especially when the sharer is a Pulitzer-award winning writer.

One of my measures of an essay is its ending. I want an ending to wow me, to take all that’s happened earlier in the essay and elevate it somehow, so I feel wind-blown and shaken up and compelled to pause for a minute and reread. I don’t want an essay to be straight memoir–I want art, and a carefully crafted ending is part of that. Many essayists seem to miss that point, or don’t care; their endings are just taped-on tying-ups. Not Chabon’s. He gets it. His endings wow. Every single time.

a few lines to love:

From his essay on how men can get labeled “good fathers” for mere meager acts of fathering:

“The father on a camping trip who manages to beat a rattlesnake to death with a can of Dinty Moore in a tube sock may rest for decades on the ensuing laurels yet somehow snore peacefully every night beside his sleepless wife, even though he knows perfectly well that the Polly Pocket toys may be tainted with lead-based paint, and the Rite-Aid was out of test kits, and somebody had better go order them online, overnight delivery, even though it is four in the morning. It is in part the monumental open-endedness of the job, with its infinite number of infinitely small pieces, that routinely leads mothers to see themselves as inadequate, therefore making the task of recognizing their goodness, at any given moment, so hard.”

I wonder if he came upon this insight himself, or whether his wife had something to do with it. Hmm. Well, I like it either way. And the particularity of the Dinty Moore in a tube sock, too.

In his essay D.A.R.E., he writes of his son asking if he has ever smoked marijuana. Chabon replies that he has.

    “How many times?” my son said, eyes wide.

     So far, even blindsided as I had been by the abrupt onset of this conversation, I hadn’t violated the guiding principle my wife and I had decided on for its eventual proper conduct: I had been honest. But now I had a moment’s pause before replying, unwilling to pronounce those two simple words: one million.”

Two more simple words: so funny.

On Lego people, properly known as minifigs, which hadn’t existed in Lego sets when Chabon was a kid:

“But what I most resented about the minifigs was the scale they imposed on everything you built around them. Like Le Corbusier’s humancentric Modular scale or Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the minifigs as they proliferated became the measure of all things: Weapons must fit their rigid grip, doorways accommodate the tops of their heads, cockpits accommodate their snap-on asses.”

I can’t help but appreciate a writer who glides so easily from Le Corbusier and Leonardo to the snap-on asses of Lego people.

On the freedom of his childhood:

“I could lose myself in vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors’ yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates’ houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of Popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers.”

You know how I love details. Chabon does them better than anyone. Look at that description of the bike! His details are so precise that research must be involved. And don’t you like the Popsicles, and the potentially dangerous fathers?

From an essay on the father of his former wife:

“We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whisky and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I’ve ever found.” 

In previous installments of this project, I’ve written about how I admire long lines when written well. Chabon has lots of long lines. Lots of long lines. In fact, this one is rather short, relatively. (The first line of the essay “Normal Time” goes on for over a page. I would have shared it here, but I didn’t want to type it.) Convoluted, complicated sentences are part of Chabon’s style, and it’s interesting to study how he uses them. In this particular line, we start with the names of football players and then suddenly get whisked along a string of sensory details to a poignant ending we hadn’t anticipated. The line works just like memory does. (The last line of that essay works the same way. If you have the book, check out that ending. Definitely a little heart-breaking.)

Here’s one from that essay “Faking It” on how men fake competency. Exhibit #1: pretending he knows how to hang a towel rack. This is how he starts the essay:

“At one time there was a pair of hooks on the back of the bathroom door from which one could hang a couple of towels, but people used the towels as vines, webbing, and rope for games of Tarzan, Spider-Man and Look! I’m a Dead Guy That Hung Themself, and now, to serve four children there remained one wall-mounted towel rack with only two bars.”

Gee, I thought it was only my kids. I wonder if Chris will be pretending to know what he’s doing when he replaces the door stop that fell off the back of the bathroom door because Mr. T likes to stand on it and swing the door back and forth when he is Indiana Jones or Snorlax or Wolverine or whomever he is when he stands on that door stop and swings. I love Chabon’s last line of that essay too:

“By the way, the towels are still hanging from the rack in the bathroom. And I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter on the tiles.”

The essay “I Feel Good About My Murse”, on how Chabon caves to carrying a man-purse, is hilarious. 

“Three children followed the first, each with his or her diaper bag, and as fatigue, inattention and habit took over, I stopped noticing if I was carrying the Esprit or the Kate Spade or the (forgive me) Petunia Pickle Bottom in embroidered lime-green Chinese silk. I had the diaper bag over one shoulder and a kid in the opposite arm, and I was pushing a stroller full of groceries, and some other small child was dragging along behind me hanging from the back pocket of my jeans, and at that instant as I left the store, I felt like it would be a lot easier just to drop my wallet into the diaper bag with my keys, and my cell phone, and my New York Times Review of Books than try to shove it down into my pants.”

The Petunia Pickle-Bottom bag just cracks me up. And I’m exhausted myself as I get to the end of the second line; I get why he breaks the ultimate rule of man-code and doesn’t put his wallet in his pocket.

Here are a few lines from an essay on his wife. Another crazy, long set of lines to admire. (I can’t believe I’m typing all these in. None of my other essayists have tortured me so.):

“And since that afternoon in Berkeley, California, standing along the deepest seam of the Hayward Fault–no since our first date–this woman has dragged, nudged, coaxed, led, stirred, embroiled, mocked, seduced, finagled, or carried me into every last instance of delight or sorrow, every debacle, every success, every brilliant call, and every terrible mistake that I have known or made. I’m grateful for that, because if it weren’t for her, I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It’s too much bother. It’s dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don’t speak English there, it’s too far away, they’re closed for the day, they’re full, they said we can’t, it’s too much bother with children along.”

And, of course, the next line is “She will have none of that.” I love how much fun he seems to be having with that string of verbs, and the list of instances. And then how he segues into his first-person litany of excuses.

Okay, one more, just because I don’t think I’ve captured enough of the poignancy that I admired in so many of these essays. Here’s one of those masterful endings, on an essay about throwing away his kids’ art:

“Every day is like a kid’s drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.”

Whew. I could go on, but I’ll stop myself. Michael Chabon lives about five minutes from me; I’ve seen him, from a distance, at the farmer’s market, at a kiddie matinee, running down College Avenue. If I ever see him again, maybe I’ll get up the nerve to tell him how much I liked his book.

the plan for december:

The plan for December is to stop making myself so crazy with plans, and to stop writing such wordy posts that take too much of my time. I’ll end this project reading Adam Gopnik, because he’s the one who inspired the project in the first place. To cut myself some slack, I’ll just focus on his essays on Thanksgiving and Christmas, from his books Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate.

If your kid loves Wolverine, go with it.

Find the comics at the library; buy some for his birthday.

When trying to choose a gift to make for that birthday, decide on a freezer paper applique of “young” Wolverine. Trace the outline from a comic when he isn’t looking. Do not swear when you cut the wrong microscopic lines in the stencil with your X-acto knife on the day before his birthday. (You meant to do it the day before that, but you’d caught the stomach flu from your kids, which might have had something to do with scraping throw-up from carpets with a bench-knife in the middle of the night, two nights in a row. But that’s another story.)

Be pleasantly surprised to find Wolverine books at the library with interesting content. Reading to him about Stan Lee’s history at Marvel Comics, find yourself intrigued. 

When your kid wants to be Wolverine for Halloween, brainstorm how to make adamantium claws. Decide on pencils and paper mache. Buy fingerless gloves and black hair spray.

Ignore your waldorf guilt when it whispers that newly-minted eight-year-olds should wear less violent costumes.

When he takes off the claws at your homeschool Halloween party, and is left with just a black ducktail and sideburns, and he shouts to you across the park, “Mama, make me a sandwich,” note his resemblance to Elvis.

Go hear Michael Chabon give a reading at your favorite local bookstore. (Try not to feel smug when Chabon notes that it’s his favorite local bookstore.) When he reads his heart-kneading essay, “The Loser’s Club” and uses Stan Lee’s rise at Marvel Comics as a metaphor for the role of audacity in art, try not to nod your head too vigorously. You know what he’s talking about! Thanks to your Wolverine-loving kid.

Despite all my Waldorf guilt, there are still some Waldorf-y traditions we keep. For years now, in the week before Easter, the kids and I have made and planted an Easter garden.

We take an old pan, and fill it with soil. We add a “tree” cut from the branch of a real tree, a dry pond, some gravel paths and a cave which H. made long ago, when he was about five. Then we scatter wheat grass seeds throughout, sprinkle on a little more soil, and water the garden.

We add a caterpillar to the cave, and leave him there in the dark, waiting to metamorphose.

It makes for an austere, colorless lenten scene, which is just the effect we’re after. Because, in a matter of days, everything will change.

Working with Mr. T yesterday, I realized that after more than ten years of making this Easter garden, this is probably one of the last times one of my kids will want to help me. It’s a little kid activity. Then again, it’s a tradition, and maybe I’ll be able to wrangle some help, simply for old time’s sake. Either way, I’ll probably keep up the tradition on my own because the garden so beautifully symbolizes Easter, with a simplicity that may work for little kids, but with a depth that can reach anyone.

I’ll post pictures in a few days, to show how our garden transforms.

No, the Bon Jovi lover is not me. I wasn’t even a fan during their late 80′s heyday. (Although I did manage to make my ultra-fine hair pretty big back then, with help from Sebastian Shaper Plus.)

The Bon Jovi fan is my seven-year-old son.

How did this happen, you ask? Well, in another incitement of my waldorf guilt, in November my two older kids pooled their money to buy Guitar Hero World Tour. And as much as I despise having a gaming system in the house, this game has less to despise. The kids play virtual music. Together. My favorite band incarnation is H on drums, Lulu on guitar and Mr. T on vocals. It wasn’t long before Mr. T was perfecting his own favorite song: Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer.”

It’s pretty funny hearing your seven-year-old traipsing around the house singing, “Oh, oh we’re halfway there, oh oh, livin’ on a prayer…” But not funny enough for my jokester of a husband. He had to intensify the situation. One day in December he took Mr. T out to do a little Christmas shopping. Mid-morning he called from his car.

“I bought him Slippery When Wet.”

“You bought what for who?” I asked.

“You know, Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi’s big album. For Mr. T. We’re playing it now. He loves it!”

And so he does. He’s loved it over and over and over again. At high volume in his bedroom, jumping on and off his bed. Shouldn’t he be listening to They Might Be Giants or Ralph’s World? Or The Beatles, at the very least?

Of course, if you’ve learned anything about my youngest after reading this blog, you know how much he likes to talk. So for over a month our talk has had Bon Jovi references. Many references. And as I take part in these titillating discussions, I realize that Mr. T is actually learning a few things. Consider:

Music history: We spent the Christmas Eve drive to My Charming Husband’s parents’ house in a full-family discussion of whether Bon Jovi was considered hair metal. Were they better than typical hair metal bands? Weren’t they more in a class with Van Halen? Were they hair metal? (My guitar-playing husband–who never has been a metal fan, I’ll have you know–nevertheless insisted that Bon Jovi was not on a musical par with Van Halen.) So then we had a hair metal shout-out: Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Night Ranger, Ratt, Motley Crue (sorry, I’m not searching down an umlaut character on Motley Crue’s account). Stryper led to mention of Christian metal; then we had to acknowledge hair metal predecessors glam rock and heavy metal. Next thing we knew, My Charming Husband was talking about German metal, a category I didn’t imagine actually existed and the whole conversation pretty much disintegrated from there. Bring on the Christmas carols!

Current events: Mr. T came home from an evening at my parents’ house and told me that when he asked his Grammy if she liked Bon Jovi, she said yes because Bon Jovi did lots of good work for others. Really, I wondered? Bon Jovi? We quizzed Grammy over Christmas dinner. Turns out she’d mixed up Bon Jovi with Bon-o. (Silly Grammy.) Which led to further discussions of Rockers Who Do Good Work.

Music appreciation: Mr. T loves to nettle the rest of the family by insisting that Bon Jovi is better than The Beatles. At first we tried to give him concrete reasons for why this isn’t so. (Music. Lyrics.) But then we tired of his adamancy and just started nodding our heads sarcastically. Then one evening, during a nightly wrestling match between him and My Charming Husband, Mr. T decided it was a battle between Jon Bon Jovi and John Lennon. When it became clear that neither was winning, Mr. T stood on the couch and insisted that he’d morphed into a new mega-wrestler named Jon Bon Lennon. And then he pummeled his father.

Singing to his Mama that she gives love a bad name.

Etymology: At one point we explained to Mr. T that Jon Bon Jovi’s real name was John Bongiovi, which is Italian. And I told him that bon means “good” in French, and assumedly is a variation of the Italian word for good, buono. “What does giovi mean?” Mr. T wanted to know. “Can you google it?” So we did, and discovered that it’s a conjugated form of the verb giovare, which means “to be useful” or “to be good”. “That’s a lot of goodness,” Mr . T said. “What’s with all the Bon bands?” He was referring to one of my new faves, Bon Iver. So we googled Bon Iver and discovered that the name is a variant of bon hiver, French for “good winter”. (We also discovered some other interesting backstory which included mononucleosis and a Northern Exposure episode.) Fascinating stuff.

Yep, that’s why we homeschool: even mediocre hair metal bands can be learning opportunities. (Although Mr. T has moved on somewhat. Yesterday he was singing a different Guitar Hero song, Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker”. Luckily, I suppose, he wasn’t singing the original lyrics: I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker. No, he was substituting names of the Hindu deities he’s been learning about: I’m a Brahma, I’m a Rama, I’m a Parashurama. I tell you, there’s never a dull moment around here.)

When H was six or seven (could it really have been nearly ten years ago?) he was obsessed with Pokemon. Obsessed. He studied the cards constantly, memorized them and then followed me around, asking questions like, “Did you know that Metapod has more hit points than Bulbasaur?” or “Did you know that Tentacruel’s ability is liquid ooze?” (These days when H complains about Mr. T nattering on, telling his imaginary stories, I remind him of his Pokemon days. I don’t think he quite believes that he actually talked like that.)

Of course, as a homeschooling mama I am nothing if not resourceful, so I capitalized on H’s obsession. I wrote down his Pokemon stories, helped him make Pokemon books, invented Pokemon word problems with him. By the time H finally moved on from that obsession to baseball cards over a year later, I was so tired of Pikachu and all his friends that I was happy to dismiss them from my brain forever.

So imagine my horror at our last homeschooling park day, when I saw Mr. T sitting with another seven-year-old and his collection of Pokemon cards, studying them for over an hour. Heaven help me, I thought, here we go again…

I was sure Mr. T would want to rush home and dig out his brother’s thick-as-the-Oxford-English-Dictionary binder of Pokemon cards. But no. Mr. T is not his brother. He doesn’t have a fascination with statistics, nor a mindset that borders on obsessive. He doesn’t even like to follow game rules. What intrigued him wasn’t the Pokemon game itself but the idea of a multitude of imaginary characters. Characters that can evolve into other characters. When I mentioned that H once made up his own Pokemon-style characters and cards, which he called Zamblasto cards, Mr. T’s eyes lit up like they’d been sparked by Pikachu’s thunderbolt tail.

He quickly spread himself and his supplies across the kitchen table and began drawing his own characters and their evolutions.

He made up abilities for them, and asked me to write them down. Check them out.

I especially like Surprising Scare in Dark Cave and Crack Open Balls of Power. Sort of like manga meets haiku.

One of my favorite parts of watching Mr. T draw is witnessing how it’s a process of animating his own imagination. Bringing it to life. He narrates the characters’ words as he draws, then has them interact, with lots of action and sound effects. Sometimes the scene gets so exciting that his very pencil comes to life, and starts zooming through the air, with plenty of “pshoo, pshoo” mouth noises.

Which all brings me back to the idea that sometimes my kids’ most banal interests can spark their best creativity. Which reminds me not to cave so quickly to my Waldorf guilt, and dismiss Bulbasaur, Mario and Luigi and all their compatriots. If that’s what fascinates my kids, so be it. Rather than pretending those characters don’t exist, I can realize their power in my kids’ minds–and I can put my arm around them and try to introduce them to my kids’ creative brains.

Even if it means I’m going to be regaled with hours and hours of stories about characters with abilities like Cannon Do-Dow, Honk-n-Zap and Haunted House Evil Liquid.

I bought this book to allay my Waldorf guilt.

I wanted to be sure I was doing crafty, Waldorf-y activities with my little guy before he gets too big. (And if you read my last post, you know how sentimental I am about that.) 

See all those little tabs sticking out of the book? Those are my Best Intentions, displayed in purple Post-It.

There are so many lovely ideas in this book. (And also on SouleMama, Amanda’s blog, which is not news to anyone who follows crafty, mama-written blogs.) One of my favorites was the idea of embroidering your child’s art. I was enchanted with the idea of capturing some of Mr. T’s hand-drawn characters in embroidery.

But. My craft quota is down, so down these days. I used to sew Halloween costumes on occasion, and curtains, and even a quilt or two. But as the kids have gotten older, life has gotten busier. I do a fair amount of knitting because it’s portable and something one can do in five minutes here, five minutes there. But sewing? Embroidery? My needles are dusty.

But I was determined to get to this embroidery project, before I had a kid who was too old to want his art embroidered. (I didn’t want it to be like the Magic Cabin doll I always meant to sew for Lulu. I guess there are always grandchildren…)

But guess what? I did it! In time for Mr. T’s birthday even!

Those two creatures are Scritch and Scratch, two children-turned-wolves who popped out of Mr. T’s imagination and have been starring in his dictated stories for months now. They were simple creatures to embroider, made up as they are of mostly straight lines.

It was easy, really: I traced Mr. T’s drawing on tracing paper with an iron-on pencil. I transferred the image to a piece of linen and embroidered it. I reinforced the patch with Therm O Web HeatnBond (but not the portion that would get stitched to the shirt; apparently stitching through this product isn’t recommended.) I ironed the patch to the shirt, and then stitched it on with my sewing machine, using a satin stitch. (Which is nothing more than a very narrow zigzag.)

I was going for the look of those Boden applique Tee’s that Mr. T loves–but which I only buy on sale, since they’re so expensive. But this one was much more of a bargain: it didn’t cost much more than the $7.50 baseball Tee from Old Navy, plus a few evenings of secret embroidery in the rocking chair.

And this one means so much more–it’s Mr. T’s art brought to life, and Mama’s guilt brought to rest. For now, at least.  And yes, when he looked in the gift bag on his birthday and saw his wolves, I got one big smile.

Take that, Waldorf guilt!