Notes on growing up

This week, Leo has begun to draw more coherent pictures. He’s drawing identifiable faces and objects. He did a whole series of “this is the inside of a zebra”, fish, and other animals. The weird thing was that a week later, he still knew which was the fish or the zebra or whatever. Every day when I pick him up from school, the bulk of the boys are climbing on Leif (the big male teacher), the few girls in the class are playing house or dressup, and Leo is at the art table, where he’s been for the last hour. He’s gluing stuff, drawing stuff, making tons of art to take home. He loves little bits of beads and sticks and colorful stuff that he shoves into his pockets and uses for art projects. I’m going to have to get big boxes to store all his creations. At home, he makes styrofoam creations with toothpicks and skewers and colorful paper.

Thursday, he started writing words. I was amazed. He wrote MOM and NO. He gets upset when he writes the letters badly. He wrote QOOM.

Today we went to the UMC bowling alley for Jay’s birthday party. Leo had little interest in the bowling after a couple tries, and it took minutes for the ball to reach the pins. One time, I had to walk down the lane and push the ball in as it had stopped. We got a ramp and then he managed a strike! But he was mostly interested in the video games. So after much begging, I finally took him over to the South Park pinball machine. The birthday boy was also bored, so I let him play some shoot-em-up game that he was begging to play. Leo did so well with the pinball (he’s not too good at pulling the pin to shoot the ball up but he controls the flippers really well) that he was playing for a good 10-15 minutes, just getting bonus after bonus and flipping away.