[Backyard Sports] With My Son

With the summer weather in full blast (until I wake up at 5am for work and there's frost on the ground), the Dekearoon and I have been outside playing any sport you can imagine. Not that we really stop for the winter, which you will see in the pictures of the boy with a heavy coat on his back and a basketball in his hands, but the spring and summer is when we really get into our groove.

I wasn't lying.

Before we go any further, please be forewarned that this post will include a multitude of pictures. I love showing off pictures of my cute little dude. It's my thing. Live with it. That said, let's move on.

With a picture!

The miniature and I went down to the cafeteria of my old high school on a Saturday morning a few weeks back to sign up for the fall soccer club sponsored by AYSO. It will be his first organized sport and while I'm very excited about it and confident that he'll do just fine it still worries me sick. I just don't want him to mess up and feel bad about it. The look on his little face would break my heart. Of course I understand that it's a learning experience and that's the kind of thing that helps a kid grow, but he's still my baby, darn it.

I mean come on, look at those baby blues!

Enough with the fatherly worrying. We play soccer all the time out behind the house and it's generally our outside playtime starting point. From there we transition flawlessly into basketball with Deacon dunking like Air Jordan and Daddy shooting the three pointers from alllllll the way down town.

He even sticks out his tongue. Not pictured, sadly.

I'm a baseball guy and I was very glad to find that he picked up on it like he was a seasoned pro. I was even more excited when he decided that he felt more comfortable batting left-handed instead of on the right side of the plate, since that's just like Daddy. He liked hearing that too. Kid's got a heck of an arm on him (right arm, sadly) and he tosses it right to me, accurately, even from a decent distance away. When he first started doing that (before his 3rd birthday at that!) I was on cloud nine. It was honestly shocking to me that he could throw a ball that far.

HA! HA! HA! HA! I'm so clever.

Pictured: Future superstar. His words, not mine. Cocky brat.


That tee has gone further than the ball in the past.

We don't play football a lot, which makes the wife very happy. We do occasionally toss the ball around and he likes to play what my friends and I used to call "kill the carrier". There was an awesome pool version too, which involved dunking heads under the water and occasionally losing somebody right over the edge of our above-ground pool. Those tales can be told at a different time in a different blog.

We used this picture as part of a birthday present for my father last year. I swear I saw a tear.

Frisbee is one that needs work. We've played it before, but he's a bit afraid of the flying disc hurdling towards him through the air, so he generally turns around and it hits him in the back of the leg. My wife and I are going to have to come up with a plan to get his mind off the fear and back in the game. He throws it pretty darn well though.

I don't have too many bruises from errant throws.

The area he really needs to work on overall is the catching part of sports. He can throw a baseball, toss a football, fling a frisbee and put up a decent jump shot (that does need some work) but if he finds himself on the receiving end of a projectile he acts like he's the dodgeball team captain. His hand-eye coordination has certainly improved and he can catch a ball that's tossed to him, but if it isn't right into his hands he's not likely to make a reception. Kid's got no range.

Not even a fraction of the collection we've built.

Outside playtime with my Dekey is always a blast. Sweat flies, faces turn red, breathing gets heavy and baseballs hit Daddy in uncomfortable places.* I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon with my son than seeing him laughing as I chase soccer balls around the yard and feign being faked out before he slams his basketball so hard that the whole set up falls on top of him.

I really, really, REALLY love being a daddy.


*Yeah, yeah. It's a wiffle ball. A hard one though. Look at the pictures! No holes to slow it down!


- Nicholas A. Marsico

[Crashing Cars] With My Son

Deke and I have spent countless hours "playing toys" as he likes to put it. When he was younger, the little guy was absolutely obsessed with making sure all of his trucks and cars and helicopters and airplanes and motorcycles and spaceships and bicycles and boats and hovercars and unicycles and hot air balloons and wheelchairs and rickshaws and -- you get the point. He has a lot of toys.

His first toy, my sentimental favourite (I'll take a picture of the real thing later).

To finish the above sentence, he was obsessed with lining up all of his vehicles single file or side-by-side in as symmetrical a fashion as he could. I didn't help matters when I taught him to sort them by color and vehicle type. It was an obsessive compulsive dream, and he did NOT like when somebody moved a toy even the slightest bit. We have since moved past that phase, and now we play out entire scenarios and stories involving multiple cars and trucks, different people, places, activities and the like. I think the best one was what he started doing shortly after he had his first Slurpee. He would have his imaginary man jump in the car and take a nice drive over to 7-Eleven to order one Slurpee. There would be a pause and he would ask if I wanted one too, and I always said yes, and he would order one for me as well. He paid the cashier, got in his car and drove on home to deliver the cold and slushy joy.

We also had the obligatory races around the room, cops chasing the bad guys and rocket ship launches. Sometimes, however, we throw all of that stuff out the window and stop messing around. This is the time for destruction. Most toy cars survive the perilous onslaught of mischievous might, but sometimes a plastic truck that is more susceptible to the hazards of head-on collisions winds up scattered throughout the room.

Understatement.

It's not just mindless thuggery, though. We destroyed a truck that I happened to really enjoy, but upon seeing its insides an idea hit me. Let's turn this into an educational experience! It was one of those cars that you can pull backwards to essentially wind up before letting go and watching it move on its own, so the little gears and gadgets that made that magic happen became a lesson in simple mechanics. We're working on setting up a day worth of mechanical experiments to explore as well, with this example being the starting point that refreshes his memory on the subject. Such is the wonder of homeschooling. Frivolous toy slaughter morphs into a science lesson in the blink of an eye. Or the snap of an axle. However you prefer to word it.

- Nicholas A. Marsico

[Alphabet Games] With My Son

During an excursion to the big mall this past Saturday to see Hop, I brought my little family to Barnes & Noble for our customary last stop before plopping in front of the big screen. There seems to be something new and interesting every time we set foot inside any B&N (though I could do without the person badgering everybody about the Nook the second they walk over the threshold), and this time was no different.

This is the only thing I ever think of when I see the B&N Nook.

This time around my wife came upon a very cute-looking game called "Alphabet Squiggle". We were all very excited to play it when we got home -- Deacon even exclaimed that he would rather just skip the movie and try out his new game. We may have obliged him if we hadn't already paid in excess of $3 million for the tickets. Let's move on lest I begin a rant on the ridiculous price of movie tickets.

Deke is no slouch in the alphabet department. We've already covered the fact that he knows his numbers, but his ability to recite the alphabet and recognize any letter we show him is quite impressive. He's not perfect with handwriting (who can expect him to be... he's not even 5 yet), and this game has thus far been a very fun way of helping the process along. The basic idea is that you roll a die (like in the vast majority of the board games we all know and love) and move the amount of spaces that correspond with your roll. When you land on your space, you must write the letter and then get creative. There are two routes: write a word that starts with that letter or turn the letter into a picture. That's how we play.

Not bad, but my drawing scored more points.

If your drawing starts with the same letter as the one you landed on and wrote down you get to move two spaces ahead on the game board. Deke's drawing got him one extra space while mine garnered two:

This one was definitely deserving of the pat on the back I gave myself.

I foresee this game helping him a significant amount as he pushes further ahead in his journey to learn how to read. I think my favourite part of this particular outing was when he not only correctly identified "F" but also decided to let me know it made the "ffffffffffff" sound, and he did that without prompting. I was very proud.


- Nicholas A. Marsico


Other Sources:
Games That Help Kids Learn the Alphabet
Alphabet Games

[Making Smoothies] With My Son

It's not easy to eat healthy and stay in shape. When you're busy and stressed you end up without time and tired. One tactic I used when I embarked on my original weight loss program was blending up a bunch of fruit with ice, yogurt and milk or orange juice. These smoothies became a very good meal enhancer, for lack of a better term, as they curbed my appetite enough to help me eat smaller meals while filling me with energy and nutrients that helped me exercise harder.

When Deke saw a short feature about making smoothies on Nick Jr he decided that this would be his newest favourite treat. Fine with me. Delicious? Check. Nutritious? Check. Fun to make with a possibility of a large mess? Check mate.

As long as it's him and not me.

I have given Deacon free rein to use whatever ingredients (within reason) that he wants. Some concoctions:

-- Blueberry Blueberry Blueberry Blueberry Blueberry Vanilla
-- Banana Pineapple*
-- Blackberry Pineapple Orange Juice
-- Chocolate Chip Strawberry Pineapple

I'll be honest, the last one was my fault. I made a joke to my wife that Dekester overheard and he decided that chocolate chips would tie the whole smoothie together. It wasn't bad, either.

Right now Dekey tends to enjoy the smoothies as a fun treat rather than a healthy meal, but we love choosing the ingredients together and discussing what the combinations may taste like. He also enjoys learning different things about the fruits (the interesting core of a pineapple, the seeds on the outside of a strawberry, why some cherries have pits and some don't, etc). I've mentioned in the past that my wife and I are homeschooling Deke. One of the great things about homeschooling is that any activity can become a lesson (in fact by now most activities carry some educational merit) and it makes him want to learn.

What's more interesting? Poorly cutting out a traced strawberry-like shape and pasting weird looking dots that are supposed to be seeds or cutting through a big, juicy strawberry and studying the colors and putting different parts under a microscope?


- Nicholas A. Marsico

* It was more like banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana pineapple

Other sources:
MyPyramid.gov - Inside the Pyramid