Picture of This Day

I awake to find Kiernan playing soccer out on the lawn with Sandi on another beautiful post-Thanksgiving day in Virginia.


Saturday, November 26, 2011
Gloucester Pt., VA

Picture of This Day

What's the perfect activity for the day after Thanksgiving? Why playing on the beach and searching for treasures with Pap-Pap, of course.


Friday, November 25, 2011
Gloucester Pt., VA

Picture of This Day

Relaxing with Uncle Mason on a beautiful Thanksgiving afternoon.


Thursday, November 24, 2011
Gloucester Pt., VA

Prehistoric Aquarium

We have a wonderful huge roll of butcher paper.  It was a gift from Sandi and Pap-Pap a good while ago. It's good and useful for when we have a couple of boys over and they all feel like drawing together. I love it.

Of late, however, Kiernan just wants to draw on his cheap sketch paper. A couple of days ago he started a project of sea creatures. These are modeled on prehistoric sea reptiles, but they are creatures of his own design. He's ending up with a large piece, yet he does not want to start with a large piece of paper. What he wants me to do is tape together pages from his sketch pad. So I started by carefully taping together six pages. He drew a bunch of creatures. Then I added pages to it and he drew more.Then he asked for three more.

I kind of like the reasoning here. Writing happens page by page. Word by word. Imagine if you were tasked with writing a novel and were given three hundred blank pages, already bound, and told to fill those pages. Thunk, right there on your desk. Intimidating, no? But say you're given a page at a time, or three pages. "Just fill these pages. Go on. You can do that." Well yeah, I can do that!

He's created a poster-sized mural and is excited about adding to it, and he's doing it bit by bit. I love that. I also love that he's making up the names himself, as he goes, but not out of thin air. He's referencing his various dinosaur books and cobbling together names of real animals for his creations. That's how we get such wonderful names as Opthalmodon, Protochelys, and Insectospondylus. These are names he made up, but he did so using research.

Furthermore, he loves to introduce each creature to us, and he knows how big each creature is, and this is consistent and relative. So Opthalmodon is as big as our house. Criptosaurus is two-times as big as our house. And Ceresioclidus is three-times as big as our house. He also allows for depth of image as a function of size portrayal, so he can have a creature that is supposed to be small appear the same size as a larger creature because it is closer on the paper. So Insectasquid might indeed be much smaller than Megaceras, but it appears similar because it is closer to the viewer. We don't know how to draw images in perspective yet, but he envisions it in his mind.

I've said it many times before and I'm sure I'll say it many times to come, I love the way this kid's brain works.

[Here he works on a different project, a page-mural of flying reptiles. I love pictures of him doing stuff like this. Intent and concentrating. Beautiful.]

And after all...

Tonight as we talked about our days and weekends, we asked Kiernan about his trip to the Science Center. He said his favorite part was the Flying Monsters movie, which surprised and delighted me. I loved that part too. For one thing, it was a 3D movie I actually liked. For another thing, we bonded during it. But there were other parts of the adventure I liked better.

Like what you see above. Here we are in the little aquarium part of the center. We started up on the top floor, out in the open where you get to see the effect of wave motion on the kelp systems of the ocean.

Here's Kiernan observing the tank from that top floor with his friends Oliver and Mason. It's hard to capture what they're seeing with a camera, but here's my best attempt:

Kind of hard to tell through the glare of the tank glass, but there's a mesmerizing school of fish there that kept swirling around in a cyclone-like pattern. Around and around and around.  Fascinating and cool, but it felt a bit like watching a fish tank from the top. So Kiernan's friend Oliver insisted we head down "into the tunnel" to better see the fish. We told him we'd get around to it. He persisted, politely. We repeated that we would get to it. He insisted, again politely. We relented.

Once down there it was clear that Oliver was right. It was a much better view.  The boys grabbed these little placards showing all the fish and other life that could be seen in the tank. I have a better picture of this on my phone, but this one will have to do.

They parked themselves there and tried to identify every creature they could. Kiernan loves to do this at aquariums. Doesn't matter the size. This one at the Science Center. Various tanks at Disney World. The huge tanks at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. The every day tanks at our favorite pet store, Kahoots. Doesn't matter how many times he's done it. He loves to look at the list of what animals should be in the tank and find every one.

I'm so happy he has found a friend who wants to do this too.

How cool is that?

A Day Off

No school today because of Veteran's Day. One of the moms plans a trip to the California Science Center to see an IMAX movie and kick around for the day. I'm reluctant at first. The Science Center is way downtown and I've got a ton of things to do. Plus, I prefer to preview movies before taking him to a theater to see them. Plus, it's a 3D movie and I hate 3D movies. Plus, I don't think he's gonna like wearing those glasses. Plus, plus, plus.

I do a quick Internet search about the movie, Flying Monsters, and find out it's dinosaur--sorry, flying reptile, not dinosaur--related, and David Attenborough is involved. Kiernan was a pterosaur--Pteranodon to be exact--for Halloween and David Attenborough rocks planets, which should go without saying. I dither for only a moment longer and then commit. Friday at the Science Center with a bunch of seven-year old boys. Oy. Oh well, Dad. Take one for the team.

I don't tell him about the specifics beforehand. I just let him know before bed Thursday night that I've got a surprise for him for Friday. He wakes me up bright and early and his first words are, "Dad! Time to get up! What's the secret surprise?" Through the haze of waking up I tell him we're joining a bunch of his friends at the Science Center and seeing a movie called Flying Monsters but I don't know what it's about. He bounces off the walls as we get ready.

Upon pulling into the parking lot he sees the banner on the side of the building. He exclaims...

"Dad! It's about pterosaurs! I see Dimorphodon! I see Tapejara!"

He can't be more excited and I know I've made the right choice. Yeah, there's a lot of other things I should be doing today. So much to get done. But that exclamation makes it worth it. No matter what else happens this day, no matter that the day will totally wipe me out...it's worth it just getting to hear that tone in his voice.

There is no end to the things this kid will teach me.

Goodnight Africa, Night 111213

I skipped a couple of nights, it seems. I have excuses. I shall not share them. Instead, here's a field trip picture.

The hand you see is that of one of the educators at this week's 2nd Grade field trip to a place called Tree People. The educator is calling on Kiernan to answer a bunch of questions and thus win the first of five prize rings for his class group. The educator selected him based on his singular ability to smile without teeth...

...and Kiernan had to answer a few questions about what trees need to grow. This would be repeated with other students over the course of the session, but Kiernan was the first to do it.

He aced it.

For the rest of the field trip he got to wear the Seed Ring.

Goodnight Africa! Can't wait to have you back home!

Picture for This Day

Please excuse the blurriness of this picture, I snapped it late in the afternoon and today was an overcast day.

He got annoyed with me a little before this. Tuesdays after school are Oliver days, that is to say his best friend Oliver comes home with us after school on Tuesdays and the two of them get to frolic like mad for a couple of hours. After Oliver's mom picked him up Kiernan wanted to do a variety of things I said "No" to, like playing with a neighborhood boy and watching TV. As a result of my "No" answers he decided he was bored.

I simultaneously love it and hate it when he says, "I'm bored." I hate it because I just hate that statement. I think I always have been annoyed by it; I subscribe to the lyrics of the late 90s group Harvey Danger, who said in the song "Flagpole Sitta": If you're bored then you're boring...


I was teaching Health to 9th graders around the time that song came out, and so I heard the statement "I'm bored" an awful lot, and my annoyance calcified into full-on hatred. Not for the freshmen, mind you. They were teenagers. What can you expect. No, just for the statement. So when Kiernan says he's bored my knee-jerk reaction is a flash of anger. Or used to be. Nowadays I get a kind of glee out of it, because unlike some parents who feel responsible when their kid is bored and feel guilty and start tap-dancing, I just put it on him. "Figure it out," I say.

I've come to a peace about this. In fact, I kind of like it when he says, "I'm bored." I see it as an opportunity. A little part of me wants him to be bored sometimes. This is a chance for him to figure out what it means to entertain himself. Which, incidentally, he never fails to do.

Deprived of the easy solutions of watching TV or playing with his neighborhood buddy (the latter which he gets to do nearly every day), he sat down to draw. He did so grudgingly at first, of course, but in no time he was lost in what he was doing. What you see in the picture above is part of a monster project he's doing. The specific drawing above is a monster called Sea Terror and it's sort of a mini-project within the monster project, because Sea Terror is going to be huge and is going to take up at least seven sheets of paper. In that picture he's working on the torso and, in case you cannot tell, fully engrossed in what he's doing.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Goodnight Africa, Night 10

This week we're lucky to have Nana here for a visit.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Goodnight Africa, Night 9

He's not often crazy about having his picture taken, but he's been a real sport posing for these Goodnight Africa pictures every night. So tonight I told him he could make whatever face he wanted to make. "Really?" Surprise filled his voice. "Sure."

Thus, demon spawn.

Oh well. Could have been worse. And it kind of fits my state of mind tonight, truth be told.

October 24, 2011