Cute · Things · They · Do

Toby and I have both had a very tough time with seasonal allergies this year (him worse than me, I think), and I'm pretty fed up with it. I've decided to investigate the desensitization shots, and told Toby about that plan, figuring I'd leave it up to him whether he wanted to pursue it to. His first reaction was "no way", and that he prefers having allergies to getting shots. Then he went to observe that there are some benefits to having allergies: if your nose is stuffy, you can't smell farts or corn dogs. On the down side, you can't smell good things either. He then mused that if you see something that looks like it would smell good, you could get a tissue and blow your nose. But then, what if someone farts?

(That conversation was during a walk to school a few weeks ago, with Rafe, who thought it was all hilarious.)

At Toby's 10yo check up, we asked his pediatrician for a recommendation for an allergist. There's one who can see both Toby and I, and we have back-to-back appointments scheduled for July. Toby is interested to know what he's allergic to, and figures he'll decide about the shots when he learns how many are required.

Last week, Toby was telling a story and came out with the form costed. That led us to a discussion of irregular verbs. When I brought up brang he was surprised to hear that it's not considered correct, but also insisted that he would never use it with I (as in, I brang the donuts), only with other subjects. Not sure if this is really his pattern or not, but it was interesting that he thought it was.

Toby's teacher has been giving him specialized math homework, drawn from 6th or 7th grade level workbooks. Recently, there have been a lot of word problems, and one had Toby stumped yesterday: It said, "So-and-so's favorite show is on four times a day on channel 33, and lasts a half an hour each time. What proportion of channel 33's programming does the show account for?" (Not sure of the exact words, but the meaning is right.) Toby was adamant that he didn't have enough information to answer this question. The missing piece was that 33's total programming is 24 hours/day.

4'10", 90%ile for height. 20/20 vision (or possibly better), and normal hearing. All's well in Toby-land!

This morning, as I was getting ready for my race in the hotel room, Toby and Rafe were playing some sort of game, where Toby would say a time (like 2:30) and then Rafe would add "hundred" to that, as in "two-thirty-hundred". Then Toby would what that makes (e.g., 4:10). After a few rounds, Rafe paused the game to ask him why it was working like that. From Toby's response, he seemed to believe that Rafe thought that "two-thirty-hundred" should be 3:30, and he explained that one hundred minutes is one hour, plus forty minutes. Both kids seemed surprisingly interested in this game.

Reflecting back on the weekend's events over dinner, I asked Toby which would be better: being able to teleport to the end of the race and win it in impossibly fast time, or running himself and beating his PR. He said running himself. Then Rafe said: "Teleporting, because then you can teleport." We all thought that was a good answer.

This morning we finished our second family 5k race (the first one being Thanksgiving weekend of last year). Like last time, I'm signed up for the half marathon tomorrow, and was thinking this would be a nice easy warm up run. Once again I ran with Toby and Vijay ran with Rafe. Both boys did really well: Rafe beat his previous time by 4 minutes, and Toby beat his by 12.

Toby and I adjusted our strategy: rather than running together until he wanted a break, he sprinted out ahead and I eventually caught up when he slowed down (and promised not to pass him in that case). Once he gets ahead of me, he likes to keep me from catching up for as long as possible. That leads him to run more, in addition to being in better shape after training hard during basketball season. He also ran all but about .01 miles of it this time, compared to much more last time.

For my part, I felt pretty awful during the first half mile or so, and began to worry for tomorrow's race. Toby was wearing my Garmin (also motivating for him ... wonder where he gets that?), but when I finally caught him (a bit past the mile 1 marker) and learned he'd done that first mile in 8:03 I felt much better.

Had a really frustrating experience with BofA tonight: They detected potentially fraudulent email on our credit card account and made it more painful than necessary to deal with it. Net result is that the card is canceled, which, due to the stupidity of their web set up, means I can't log in to the account online.

I had tried to log in in order to send a somewhat irate email to customer service about the experience, and then ended up calling again to complain in person, since I couldn't log on to the website. Both kids were listening as I made that call, I think somewhat worried about how upset I seemed.

At one point in the conversation, I had to say the credit card number. I've made a point for the past few years of not letting the kids see or hear that number, since I figure with their affinity for math and sharp memories they could probably memorize it too. So when they heard me saying it on the phone, they both covered their ears, not understanding (yet) that that number is now dead.

The kids are playing in their first USCF (US Chess Federation) rated tournament next Saturday, so I just registered them for USCF memberships. That reg form asks for expected high school graduation date, so I had to figure those out. Toby is class of 2020, Rafe is class of 2023.

(I asked Toby over dinner what his high school graduating class was. He asked us whether you graduate after 11th or 12th grade, and then observed that 2020 seems further away from now than 2002, even though it isn't. We agreed.)

Rafe usually gets his homework done (in a matter of minutes) at aftercare. The exceptions are reading homework (English on Thursdays, Japanese over the weekend), where he has to read to us, and one variety of Japanese writing homework where I'm supposed to test him. I think LSA could do that one, but either they don't, or he'd rather do it with me.

Today, exceptionally, he had some math homework to do at home. It involved finding 3D objects with faces matching various polygons, tracing those faces, and then labeling them. We pretty quickly resorted to the tangram pieces, and while Rafe was playing with them, he named the parallelogram in Japanese: 平行四辺形. I said parallelogram out loud (referring to the same piece) and then asked Rafe if 平行四辺形 meant parallelogram. He said yes, with confidence, so later I asked him how he knew that 平行四辺形 and parallelogram meant the same thing. He explained that in his classroom, there's a poster with the names of different shapes on it. I asked which language, and he said in Japanese. So I asked if someone had told him that 平行四辺形 and parallelogram mean the same thing. He said, no. So I asked how he knew what a parallelogram was. He said because *I* had just said so.

I was really curious about the internal structure of 平行四辺形, since it was clearly (from the length of the word and shape of the syllables) written with many kanji. I had already guessed 四 (four) and 形 (shape). It turns out that 平行 means parallel and 四辺形 means four-sided shape.

A bit later, working on the hexagon, he asked me:
Mom, why don't they just make it 六角　(rokkaku)?
me: Because 六角 (rokkaku) means six-corners, 六角形 (rokkakkei) means six corner shape.
Rafe: Yeah, but then there's 三角 (sankaku, three-corner, 'triangle'), 四角 (yonkaku, four-corner 'square') ...

He's got a point there! Checking the dictionary online, I see that 四角 is actually pronounced shikaku, not yonkaku as he said it, and 六角 (rokkaku, six corner) does mean 'hexagon'. Maybe
the longer form is more common for hexagon, or maybe the teachers like using it because it ends with the same 'shape' morpheme as things like 平行四辺形.

When Toby got home from baseball, I asked him if he knew what the pieces of 平行四辺形 meant. He knew that 平行 means parallel and guessed that 四辺形 had something to do with four and shape.