Nate Nate

A Tale of Brotherly Love

With all the brother-bothering that goes on around here on a daily basis, it's nice to have the occasional sighting of actual brother-on-brother compassion.  This summer at the guys' camp, the 8 year olds got to pick a group to work on a month-long project with.  Nate, for reasons unknown but undoubtedly part mysterious and part hilarious, picked the dancing group.  Every Tuesday and Thursday, he rehearsed a dance with his group that they were going to perform at the end-of-summer shebang.  And he was very into it: he came home every day excited to show us the new moves he'd learned; he practiced with a diligence his piano teacher can only dream of; and he walked around humming the [awful] accompanying song, of which he knew all tune and no words, until none of us will ever be able to get it out of our heads. 

Unfortunately, however, the school schedules around here are not all aligned, and our school actually started a week before camp ended.  The upshot of this is that when we got to the big sendoff party, Nate discovered during the final rehearsal that the group had learned some new sweet moves since he'd been in school, and he didn't know the last few steps of the routine.  Understandably, he decided that he wasn't going to do it at all.  I mean, I'm all for making a kid follow through on a performance, but there's no way in the world I would get up to publicly perform a dance if I didn't know all the moves either, right?

[Note: It's entirely possible that Nate cleverly fabricated this part of the story in a moment of performance anxiety, but it all happened so quickly that we couldn't find out.]

Anyway, the performance was low-key; parents and friends of the kids performing wandered over to the area while the rest of the campers and parents continued with their picnic.  So in the moment, Steve and I walked Nate over to watch the group perform, but we didn't bring Jonah -- I just told him we'd be right back and left him eating pizza with the rest of the group.

Jonah, however, figured out that it was dance time.  He got up from his friends and came tearing across the park to find us so he could watch his brother perform.  Which is awwwwww enough, but then when he got there and asked why Nate wasn't dancing, and we explained that the dance had moved on without him, Jonah immediately surmised the sadness of the situation and put his arm around him.  In a world where they spend most of their together time trying to breathe on and/or karate chop each other, it was pretty sweet.

In happier end-of-year picnic news, Nate clocked his fourth consecutive "You keep us on time!" award.  Jonah, on the other hand, was awarded the "Reading Rainbow of Rishonim" award.  In other words, business as usual.

From the Mouths of Berkeley Children

Jonah: "Wait -- how do you know if you're Jewish?"

Nate: "It depends on your preschool."

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Nate: "Everyone likes ice cream!"

Me: "That's true.  If you don't like ice cream, you're probably a communist."'

Nate: "Or a Republican!"

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In unrelated news, I taped a History Channel documentary about the 2006 expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titantic for my five year old Titanic-ophile.  We sat down to watch it today, and while I dozed off about ten minutes in, Jonah watched it, fascinated, for over an hour.  It's really fun to hang out with a little guy who wants to study particular topics in such depth.  After we read the Magic Tree House Titanic story, we got the research guide and another kid-appropriate(ish?) nonfiction account, and Jonah is just really into it.  I can only imagine the morbid book report that will be coming some day soon.

Juxtapositions

Nate is sitting there working on a pre-algebra problem.  "Your friend goes into 31 flavors to get you a 2 scoop ice cream cone, but you forgot to tell him that you want chocolate and strawberry.  What is the combinatorial probability that he will randomly select those flavors?"  Because Nate was so recently a very little boy, we still have some very little boy things in the house, such that the first pencil he grabbed to work on this problem had Elmo and Zoey on it.  He solved the problem correctly, and he didn't notice the toddlerishness of his pencil.  I don't know, I found it striking.

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These guys are terrible at jinxing people.  I have no one to blame but myself, the fool who taught them the concept.  They seem to think it operates like an echo, so that if they just repeat what you said quickly enough, it'll count.  So someone is pretty much always squealing "JINX!!!!" with great enthusiasm, only to suffer great disappointment when he realizes that it was not a jinx.

Also, it's almost too easy to jinx them.  "Knock, knock?" I say.  "Who's there?" Jonah and I respond together, and then -- ''JINX!!" I shout.  Poor Jonah.  So then he tries it.  "Knock, knock!!" he singsongs.  I say nothing.  He starts to quiver with excitement and points at me.  "JINX!!!!" he screams.  Hours of fun.