Tag: the boy

The boy experienced the extreme emotions of the thrill of accomplishment and the agony of big mistakes. Unfortunately, the big mistake happened after the thrill of accomplishment and that’s the foot his school day got off on.

Did I mention this happened over a game? Clash of Clans to be precise.

It all started with a seemingly innocent offer. I told the boy he could check on his village and play for 15 minutes this morning. The nice thing about the game is you don’t need to sit in front of it for hours and hours. A few minutes spent at a time can be sufficient to keep your position in the game moving steadily forward.

He started playing and immediately went on a raid for his Clan. He won the raid easily and earned a bunch of stars for his Clan. This is a status marker within the game and he was rewarded with 50 gems for his efforts. This was his thrill of accomplishment moment.

I headed up to take a shower. Several minutes later, the Wife appeared and said the boy was hysterical because something had happened to his gems. She had brought the iPod, as a safety precaution, and in the background I could hear the wailing and lamentations of the boy.

First, a word about gems in CoC.

Arguably, they are the most precious resource in the game. They can be earned, in small amounts, through completing different achievements in the game. They can also be purchased via actual money on a credit card. The game is a timer based game. Everything takes time to be built and upgraded. Gems allow the timers to be shortcut, so if a defensive unit typically takes a day to build, it can be built immediately for some number of gems. Gems also are the only way to get builders, arguably the most important character in the game. The builders are used to create a village and upgrade its parts as a player advances in level. Everyone starts with 2 builders, but another can be had for 500 gems. Having more builders means being able to advance more quickly through the game.

Alright, back to the boy.

My own play had convinced the boy to start working towards getting a 3rd builder. Prior to my participation in the game, he had been spending his gems to complete building projects more quickly. Now, he was saving them for a 3rd builder.

The boy mistakenly traded 150 of his gems for gold this morning. I’m not entirely sure of the sequence, but it was a bungle on his part that cost him all of the bonus gems he’d gotten earlier and then some.

This being a completely unimportant video game and all, the boy was completely inconsolable. His initial reaction was tears. Lots and lots of tears. And screaming too, as well as not a little bit of wailing. There was probably gnashing of teeth. You know, the full gamut.

This crisis occurred 15 minutes before school, which is not nearly enough to to allow the strong emotions associated with such a momentous event to run their course. He was still in tears when I finally loaded them into the car and he was stewing in a nasty fury when he got out of the car to head into the school.

Hoping to try and break his fever, I told him “Your friends won’t be impressed when you get in there. Don’t make things worse by making another mistake that’s more costly than the one you made in a game.”

I’ve been in his shoes before. Both when the trigger was something completely stupid like a video game and when it’s been something far more significant. I’ve had that response of fury at myself for making the mistake. It’s the confusion created as the mind tries to come to grips with the fact that it’s a mistake that cannot be undone. I know the “self-immolation” that goes on as you try to figure out how such a thing could have come to pass. I also know that all the consoling in the world will not convince him that the game is not that important. Simply put, it was important to him and his emotions need to run their course.

Thus, the tact the Wife and I took was to merely to try and contain him and to keep him from doing something he would find even more regrettable. Thankfully, the lass knew better than to try and chip in and she politely kept her distance from her distraught brother. We didn’t try to tell him it was no big deal, though we did try to emphasize it was only a game. For the most part, considering the raging emotions he was dealing with, he allowed better judgement to prevail, the occasional door slam not withstanding.

The temptation to repurchase the gems for him is strong. They are not that expensive (~$5 for 250 if memory serves). But that would undermine the larger lessons available. Being a parent sometimes requires us to fix things. Other times, it requires a life lesson to play out and we can just hope that he learns the right things from it.

Technically, the boy earned his Junior Black Belt a couple of weeks prior to Friday. Friday was the day he was officially granted the belt, though.

He was rightfully proud of the achievement. Four years of training, patience, and not a little frustration finally culminated in a moment he’d been seeking.

The instructors hold a graduation for all students whom earn a new belt. This particular graduation was “The Junior Black Belt Show” as there were 4 new JBB’s including the boy in addition to all the other graduates. It was a nice chance to showcase to the lower belts what they had to look forward to as well as allowing the JBB’s to shine in front of the lower belt levels. There was a pretty clear contrast in the abilities and I’m sure the instructors were pleased to see it. It’s one thing to tell a kid “stick with it and you’ll get there,” it’s another to actually show them the money, so to speak.

When it was done, the instructors already started planting the seeds for the next level of achievement. They challenged the boy to become a better sparrer as he works his way through the remaining full black belt curriculum.

He’s managed this far. I’ve little doubt he’ll be up for the remainder of the challenge.

The boy and his friends have become invested in Clash of Clans.  I won’t say it’s the latest mobile game to take the world by storm, but it’s definitely popular.

I’d avoided it myself for my usual reasons- I can’t play video games casually.  It’s basically an addiction thing for me.

I blame the father at karate a couple nights ago.  When it was seemed it was just the kids, I was able to shrug it off.  But seeing him playing it and talking with him about it made it too tempting for me to resist.

The boy was excited to see me playing, for his part.  He’s been full of advice and suggestions ever since.  The only thing that stopped him was going to school.

I’m tempted to say nothing good can come of this.  But we shall see.  Having something silly in common with your kids isn’t a bad thing to have.

A couple of days ago, the boy’s martial arts instructor had a meeting with the parents of students who are up for their black belts. He made a comment that stuck with me: “The enemy of excellence is ‘Good Enough'”. He went on to say that many of the students probably weren’t going to like them very much over the next couple of months.

The boy got his first dose of that treatment today in his class. They were practicing their forms and the instructor told him and several other students that they weren’t putting enough effort into it. They continued practicing, and the instructor continued to ride the students, pointing out mistakes, flaws, missteps. He even made a comment to the effect that he could tell they hadn’t been practicing.

Unlike past instances of this sort, the boy weathered the storm well, but he was upset when he got class. Interestingly, it wasn’t for getting called out the couple times he had been during class. He was upset because he’d made so many mistakes.

That comment coming from him was, frankly, kind of stunning. In past instances, he’d made excuses or directed his anger at the instructors. Sometimes, he’d take it out on the Wife or I. Here and now, though, he was accepting that he hadn’t been good enough. A more sure sign of maturity I cannot think of.

Excellence is achieved not because someone is “awesome” at some task naturally. Rather, excellence is achieved by never stopping trying to improve. The drive for that standard can come so much externally. Ultimately, drive for excellence come from within and never accepting “good enough.” The boy has shown plenty of signs that he gets this when it comes to school. Perhaps now he’ll begin to accept it for other things as well.

The boy has been missing a pair of gloves for, well, most of the Winter now.

They are a fingerless glove with his name on them. The Wife actually got 3 pairs of them: one for her, one for the lass and one for the boy. She labeled them all so there would be no arguments about whose was whose.

Labeling them also had the side effect of letting us know who took care of their gloves.

The amusing thing is that, at some point this Winter, each pair of gloves was lost to its owner. The lass lost hers back in January and the Wife found them. The Wife lost hers and I found them, sitting on the bottom of our coat rack. The boy lost his and no one found them.

Until today, when the boy discovered them in his backpack.

“Didn’t I tell you to look there when you first lost them?” the Wife asked.

“Yeah, you did and they weren’t there,” the boy insisted. “I don’t know how they reappeared, but they did.”

“I know what happened…” I started. I looked him straight in the eye and went on “The Glove Gremlins got them. Glove Gremlins are famous for stealing gloves and using them, then returning them to a spot where you’ve already looked. It’s actually a good sign they returned them since it must mean that warmer weather is coming.”

“Huh?” the boy asked.

I continued “Glove Gremlins are close cousins of the Sock Gremlins, who go into drawers and make sure socks are either mismatched or missing their pair. I hate Sock Gremlins…” I trailed off.

“Wait. Are you being serious? Are there really Glove Gremlins?” the boy asked.

At that point I was tempted to do with something like “Alright, you got me. There are no Glove Gremlins, but the Sock Gremlins are their for sure. They leave a fowl odor behind that smells like…” But I didn’t. Instead, I tried to play it straight.

“Are Glove Gremlins real? Do you think I would make something like that up? Who would come up with something so ridiculous as Glove Gremlins?” I asked.

“You would,” he replied as we turned and walked away.

Oh well, guess he knows me well enough by now. But I had him going there, for just a moment.

I think one of the boy’s favorite moments of the day are the few moments when we tell him “Goodnight” prior to bed. During this time, we get a chance to torture him a bit with the threat of tickling.

To say the boy is “ticklish” probably doesn’t do the word justice. The mere thought of being tickled is enough to tickle him. Looking at him the right way can be enough to tickle him. Even mentioning the word can cause him to start involuntarily squirming.

Naturally, we try exploit these traits to the fullest extent we can.

Personally, I’ve found that the threat of being tickled is more entertaining than actually tickling him. The anticipation of being tickled can become almost unbearable for him at that point. He will jerk at the slightest movement by the Wife or I, grab at an arm or hand to fend it off before the tickle attack begins. He giggles constantly, closing his eyes and then squinting them open to see where the attack might come from.

Of course, in order to make the threat viable, he has to be tickled occasionally. We actually have to be careful at that point because he can flail so wildly and react so strongly, it wouldn’t be out of the question to catch a shot to the head. Usually, the Wife or I will use our size advantage to squelch his flailing a bit to keep things safer.

I have no real point to his post. It’s mainly just an observation I thought worth noting. One of those traits of childhood that might otherwise be lost to time as he grows up.

While the boy was getting ready for school this morning, he happened to glance at the thermometer and saw that the outdoor temperature was 3 degrees. His reaction?

“YES! No outside recess today!”

My reaction, “Huh?” I was only halfway through my first cup of coffee, so I wasn’t sure what I was hearing.

“If the temperature is less than 20 degrees, we don’t have outside recess,” he explained.

So, I’d heard right. The boy didn’t want to have recess. That seemed, completely wrong.

He went on to explain that the 4th grade boys had gotten in trouble because of the actions of a few. Apparently, “the few” were throwing snowballs. Not at anyone, mind you (and the boy says he wasn’t involved), just throwing them out into a field. The teachers then yelled at the boys, rounded up everyone (including some 3rd graders whom the teachers told “Blame the 4th graders, it’s their fault”) and cut the recess period short.

This isn’t the first time the boys in his grade have been singled out for this kind of treatment under seemingly flimsy or even dubious circumstances. There have been other lunch related incidents where, in the Wife’s and my judgment, it was merely the action of 4th-grade boys being 4th-grade boys.

That’s not to say that 4th-grade boys are cherubs or entirely without fault. I’m well aware that I’m getting 1 side of the equation here.

Recess was, quite possibly, my favorite thing about elementary school. That was the one chance during the day to run around and be basically free of the classroom until I got home. I can’t imagine it not being a favored time for any 4th grade boy. And yet, here’s the boy saying just that. For the moment, he’s more worried about getting in trouble at recess than having fun.

I’ve read often about this notion of “a war one boys” but I’ve often dismissed as a result of oversensitive political types trying to whip-up partisan frenzy. But some of the things the boy has had to deal with this year in how teachers and his school have dealt with disciplinary items bring the notion a lot closer to home. The simple fact is, I’m starting to not trust the school’s judgment where these things are concerned.

And that’s a problem. How it gets resolved remains to be seen.

A little over a week ago, the boy scored his first hockey goal of the season.

This past Sunday, he scored 2 more and helped lead his team to a victory over the other top team in his league.

The first goal was the more pedestrian of the two, but demonstrated some of his growing understanding of how to play offense. He camped out in front of the goal and a teammate fed him a pass. The boy finished the play from there.

The second one, the boy created all on his own.

There was a scrum at center ice, with a bunch of players poking at the puck. This happens a lot in these games. Typically, the teams as a whole are smart enough to figure leave a few players out in case the puck squirts out unfavorably.

In this case, the boy was on the outskirts of the scrum. Occasionally, he’d half-heartedly poke his stick into the scrum. To my eye, it initially looked like he was loafing. Instead, he was waiting for an opportunity or, more correctly, trying to create one.

A few seconds later, he had it. He’d reached in a poked the puck out and towards the opponents goal and he was able to pounce on it before anyone else could react. He got to the puck first a punched it ahead into the offensive zone, splitting a couple of defenders. At that point, there were 3 players who had a chance to get to the puck, to opposing players and the boy.

That’s when the boy hit a gear I hadn’t seen from him before. I was situated behind the goal and could see the three of them racing for the puck. The boy simply powered ahead of the two defenders and caught up to the puck at full speed half-way into the offensive zone. At that point, it was him and the goalie with no chance for anyone to catch him. He steered the puck towards the center of the goal, coasted in close, and then lifted the puck into the left-side of the net, cleanly beating the goalie’s glove hand.

That score pushed his team to a 4-2 lead with half of the third left to play. While no lead is necessarily safe in hockey at this level, this one was and proved to be the final score.

Aside from his goals, I’d still say it was his best game of the season. He was more assertive than I’d seen him before. When he was on the ice, he was constantly flying to the puck, especially putting pressure on opposing players with the puck. When they were in the offensive zone and a teammate had the puck, he worked to get open for a pass and frequently went to the front of the net. He was clearly playing with confidence and a purpose, like he finally understood what to do, where to be and when to get there.

When the game ended, I congratulated him on his goals, particularly his break away. But I also to time to emphasize that he played well all around, hustling around the ice and skating hard every moment he was out there. At this point, he seems to be getting better with each game. I don’t know if he can keep it up, but if he does he’ll be a real asset to his team when the playoffs come up in a couple weeks.

The boy and I were killing time while the lass was at her dance class. He was reading and I was checking some thing on the web when I offered to work with him on his math. He’d asked me if we could practice it some more this morning. I think he’s getting bored with the current math curriculum at school.

I’d been helping him learn how to do long division as well as perform multi-digit multiplication. The nice thing about these two are the reinforcing nature of their operation. In order to multiply multi-digit numbers, he has to know his single digit multiplication cold, plus he get practice with addition. Same thing for division, which covers the other 2 operations.

The experience working with him was most unpleasant.

He griped about the problems. He was constantly looking for short-circuit answers rather than practicing the algorithms for performing the multiplication or division. He snapped at me. He kept making simple mistakes with his multiplication and addition. He kept forgetting the steps to take.

The Wife called while we were doing this stuff and she almost hung-up on him.

Mercifully, the time arrived for us to go get his sister. So I told him we’d try again after dinner.

When that time arrived, the difference was amazing. No grumpiness or moodiness. He remembered how to perform the operations. When he made a mistake, he took the correction constructively and without complaint. The simple math errors were gone and the only mistakes he made were process ones. And even those were associated with the curve ball problems I gave him, which I wouldn’t have bothered with earlier. In fact, I was actively trying to simplify things earlier, whereas now I felt I could increase the challenge a bit for him.

It still amazes me the difference a little food can make with them.

“Dad, did you ever play on uneven teams? Is that something that happens all the time?”

In typical the boy fashion, he posed a question completely out of left-field. No segue to speak of, no hint it was coming. Not that this was a subject that I have difficult dealing with. It would just be nice to have a heads up for once.

So the deal is they were playing Capture the Flag. When the teams got formed, all the fast, athletic boys were on one team while the boy’s team had a couple of girls and other less athletic boys. Frankly, it was a fairly classic situation on school playgrounds around the country that I’m sure has been happening ever since the first recess was held at a school. In this particular case, the other team formed because they are a group of boys that hang together a lot and they basically just declared themselves all on a team.

The problem came up because the boy put up a stink. He started arguing with the players on the other team and he ultimately ended up calling them “big, fat, sore losers” which, in my book, rates about a 2 on the insult scale. But, it’s a new generation and apparently that’s pretty serious stuff. I’m also not quite sure the other team was the “sore loser” in this instance, but I’ll ignore that.

So the games were played and ultimately the incident was resolved when a couple of the offended boys told their teacher about the incident and the boy apologized.

So what was the boy after? I think mainly, he wanted some kind of affirmation that he was in the right. He wanted to know that he’d been correct to confront the other team like that. But, I also think he suspected he could have handled it better.

One obvious angle was him losing his temper and calling them names. But that was easy and even he understood he shouldn’t have done that. Another possible angle was sportsmanship. Yet another possibility was to remind him the best way to deal with people you think are cheating is to just beat them.

He’s heard all that before, though. So I wanted to come up with a different angle.

I asked him if, if he complains about all the “best players” being on the other team, how does he think that makes the players on his team feel? By arguing so hard about the unfairness of the teams, he was basically saying the players he had on his team were worthless. I went on to try and explain that to be a leader and to try and get the most out of teammates, he couldn’t start by insinuating they were worthless.

He was quiet for a bit.

Which was a good thing, because I knew that meant he was thinking about what I’d said. At that point, it was the best I could hope for.

Today, it was silverware that got the boy’s temper to flare. Certainly, spoons and forks can be difficult. Having to pick them up with your fingers and then manipulate them to put food in your mouth can be pretty tedious stuff. Then doing it over and over again until a meal is complete is just asking for trouble.

Just ask the boy.

He was already a bit sour, likely for a couple of reasons. First, he’d just completed a hockey game, so he was low on energy. Low-energy is always good for weakening the coping mechanisms when things start going bad. He was also upset because his dinner didn’t taste exactly like he expected it to.

So when he dropped his fork on the floor, it was a perfectly reasonable response for him to scream at it and then start stomping around. He eventually picked it up, marched to the sink and slammed the fork into the sink. He certainly taught that fork a lesson. He grabbed another fork out of the drawer and went back to his seat.

Several seconds later, the familiar clatter of silverware hitting the floor rang out. The boy was even more infuriated this time. Once was bad enough, but having it happen a second time seemed to be almost unbearable. He repeated his antics and when he sat down, he put a scowl on his face that could have curdled milk.

And that was when I laughed.

I couldn’t help myself. He was sitting there with a mouthful of food. His face was hovering only a few inches above the plate. He had a death-grip on the fork. His brow was furrowed and he chewed angrily. Frankly, I wouldn’t have believed it possible to “chew angrily” until I saw that face. So I laughed.

My first thought when I did it was it would upset him even further. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the boy wasn’t without a sense of self-awareness though. He saw me laughing and his scowl actually turned into a smile. He tried to look away at that point, but it was too late. Apparently, some part of him realized he’d gone overboard a bit and was now correcting.

Even better, that was it. His rage disappeared and he completed the rest of his meal without incident. I guess once you’ve laughed at yourself, it’s impossible to keep up the pretense of anger at the world. Or silverware.