During Valentine's week, while signing his name on
packets of heart-shaped gummies to give out to his classmates in preschool,
Knox commented, “I don’t like girls.” To which I said, “But I’m a girl.” And
thus he adjusted his statement to, “Unless the girls are mommies.” I loved this
response. Perhaps I should have felt more special if he had said “except for
you,” but it was made more enjoyable by him admitting that he likes mommies as a class of people. For example, my friend Erin, who
dotes on him frequently and takes time to listen to his long drawn out stories
when we’re leaving church or if he is over at her house playing with her sons’
toys. He really likes Erin, and probably knows her better than he knows his
aunts based on how frequently he sees her. Knox also loves his preschool
teacher, Miss Jen. The first time I took him over her house for a playdate with
her son, Alex, who is his best friend in the class, I stayed for the first hour
talking and hanging out, then made a quick run to Walmart to do my grocery
shopping and was back in about an hour. She told me he stayed with her while I
was gone, rather than joining Alex and his siblings in the basement where they
were all playing. Kids are fun and all, but mommies never take the dinosaur you’re
playing with out of your hands while you’re still using it.
I think Knox’s favorite part about mommies is that they read to him. He loves to be read to, and it was the only
way for the preschool teachers (mommies) could get him to un-pry himself from my leg and
submit to four and a half hours of preschool for the first six months of the school year. I’m sure he enjoys the parts of
school where he gets to play with the toys or play group games like Duck, Duck,
Goose and learning about nature and animals, but I think his absolute favorite
part of school is when one of the teachers reaches out to him with “Knox, do
you want to read a storybook?”
I keep bringing up his love of
books as a reason for him to want to learn to read, an endeavor that he’s been
making slow and steady process at, but treats like a terrible chore, the burden
of being four and a half. Rye had letter recognition and letter sounds down by
age two and a half, partially through natural ability and partially to being
the firstborn who got lots of time for going over such things with me during
our looooong days at home together. I remember thinking his preschool program,
while considered quite vigorous, was still probably boring for him as he already
had the letter sounds down. But since raising Knox, who tries and is interested
but doesn’t have the same visual memory as Rye, I now see why preschool spends
so much time on these basics. In the third quarter of his four-year-old
preschool program, Knox was likely to get through a mixed up deck of flashcards
and get 23 out of 26 letters right on the first try. It’s not always the same
three that he will get wrong, but he still seems to get confused, or bored, or
tired, and not get 100 percent yet. Sometimes it seems like there’s a sort of
“Wheel of Fortune” disk with all the letter names and sounds spinning around in
his head, and wherever that wheel stops spinning will get called out as the
answer. (Rye is sort of like this with math problems.) Knox feels that if he
keeps saying “R,” one of these times he’s bound to be right.
One day this winter, Knox came home
from school and noticed I had a new handmade paper sign on the door, not the
usual one that says “Shhh, nap time!” that I put up on a daily basis so that
the neighborhood kids don’t disturb us between 1 and 3 p.m. Knox paused at the
front door, staring at the sign, and read the top line out loud, “Rye will
not.” At that point I got the door unlocked and pushed it open, and Knox was
not curious enough to stay out in the cold and try to read the next two lines:
“be home until 4 today.” Wanting to hurry him upstairs for his nap, I read the
rest of the sign to him, but enthusiastically congratulated him for having read
the first line himself. “See that buddy, when you use your sounding-out skills
you can start reading signs for yourself!” He gave a big hearty Knox smile,
threw his coat on the floor, and ran upstairs to his bed.
Rye had started reading on his own
by wanting to know what signs said, as in road signs and yard signs and
business signs and every other kind. We would have thought that was very
strange except we had friends with a son a couple of years older than Rye who
had used signs as his gateway to desiring to read as well. For Rye, his love of
signs was sort of an obsession that ruled his brain for about three years, then
it became just part of an overall obsession with “construction demarcation,”
which also celebrates the usage of cones, traffic drums and traffic barriers as
wordless ways to tell people what to do. And telling people what to do, the
authority that comes with signs and traffic demarcation, is what we think Rye
loves so much about it. Thankfully, now that he is eight, Rye is also branching
out to an interest in castles and medieval history, landscaping and
horticulture, and chess.
I’m glad that Knox loves mommies,
and I hope he will continue to love mommies even after he learns to read on his
own. And this mommy can’t wait until we cross over that developmental
milestone!
