1) chair crashing
For the past two nights we had a game after dinner. I’d sit in one of our bean-bag chairs. My now-three-year-old son rushed toward me — usually starting in the adjacent room, and he’d crash into my arms, and I’d tip backwards. The bean-bag chair allowed for a more-or-less slow motion falling backwards onto the floor. My son was almost delirious with delight.
As we progressed, he started to identify the tipping point, and after crashing into me, and my starting the slow tipping, he’d clamor up as high as he could onto my chest to reach it as quickly as possible.
Sometimes he’d strike too low, and I wouldn’t tip backwards, and once I said jokingly that he hadn’t eaten enough kasha. He immediately went to the counter, where the left overs from dinner still stood, maneuvered a spoonful of kasha into his mouth, and, still chewing, crashed into me again. Of course, I feigned a devastating impact. Proud as could be, he repeated the process. Mouth full, he’d call out to his mom, asking if she saw how I fell over. My wife said she never saw him eat so much kasha. Later he drank some water to test its effects on the impact. Still later, a sip of water combines with a sip of juice.
2) computer literacy
We try to keep Danylo’s screen time to an absolute minimum. Today, he climbed onto my lap while I was writing emails. Often this turns into a problem because he can’t restrain himself from banging the keyboard to moving the mouse, and I have to decide between interrupting my work or upsetting my son. (I usually choose the latter betting that he has to learn sooner or later.) Anyway, today he showed remarkable restraint, first asking what I’m doing (“writing an email to your grandmother”), and then asking if he could watch, and then climbing into my lap.
I was impressed how long he sat there. Eventually he asked what this “plus” was, and I didn’t understand what he meant initially and asked him to point. He was referring to the “I” shape that the mouse turns into when hovering over a text field. Next he asked was the sticks were. It turns out they were scroll bars, and I showed him how they work. I also told him that this object was a mouse, and that that the little thing on the screen was a mouse pointer, and I showed them how if you moved the one, the other would also move. He said “how interesting” (“iak tsikavo!”). :-)
