Category: family

Hide-and-seek in plain sight

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We went to the park Sunday. Thing 1 and Thing 2 challenged Sweetie to a game of hide-and-seek, and Thing 2 (the 5-year-old) found the perfect hiding place:

The swings.

While Sweetie was looking behind trees and inside the climbing place, Thing 2 was swinging with the other kids, keeping an eye on her. Soon as she spotted him, he jumped down and ran to base.

I asked him later, “Where you trying to hide you were on the swings? You weren’t just swinging?”

“No,” he said. “I just knew she’d never find me if I was up in the air.”

What’s funny is that this is actually a thing. It’s called “selective attention.” The idea is that sometimes you’re so busy searching for something that you miss the thing that’s right in front of your face.

Here’s what I mean. Watch the video (it’s short) and count how many times the players in white pass the basketball to one another:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo%5D

(It probably works better if you don’t see it cold; they showed us this at a work retreat a few months ago, and nearly everyone in the room, um, miscounted.)

I don’t think they’re teaching this in preschool. Thing 2 somehow figured it out by himself, and, as a parent, that scares me, because he’ll be a teenager in 8 years, and if he’s this clever at age 5, then I’m doomed, I tell you, doomed!

Cool hand, Luke

Editor30 Comments

I finally let Thing 2 (the 5-year-old) watch Star Wars. We watched the original trilogy over a period of about a week.

We watched the movies together. I explained the parts he didn’t understand and, when things got scary, I told him to cover his eyes or reminded him that it was only pretend, and I fibbed my way through what I thought might be the really disturbing parts (I said they were only burning Darth Vader’s costume on the pyre at the end of “Return of the Jedi”).

I thought he’d have questions about Luke Skywalker being Vader’s son and Princess Leia’s brother, but he took both revelations in stride. His only question came a couple days after we watched “The Empire Strikes Back,” on our way home from preschool.

“Dad,” he said, “where’s Luke’s hand?”

“Well, Darth Vader cut it off with his lightsaber,” I said, thinking maybe I’d made a mistake and that he wasn’t old enough to watch the movies, even though most of his friends had.

“But he gets it back, right?”

“Well, they give him a new hand, remember? On the spaceship, at the end of the movie? They give him a mechanical hand.”

“But where’s his real hand?”

“It, uh, fell.”

He was quiet then, but he asked me about Luke’s hand again the next day and the next, and I then realized he wasn’t thinking about Luke Skywalker as much as he was Mark Hamill, who played him. He wanted to know what happened to the actor’s hand in the scene where it looked like it got cut off.

“That was just pretend. He just pulled his sleeve down over his hand so you couldn’t see it, but it was still there, like this,” I said, pulling my sleeve down over my hand.

He understood and demonstrated to Sweetie when she got home from work.

I thought everything was OK until a few days after we’d watched “Return of the Jedi.”

“Dad, what happened to the snow monster’s arm?

“What do you mean?”

“When Luke cut it off. He didn’t have any sleeves. Where’d his arm go?”

PHOTO: Luke’s mechanical hand, from The Empire Strikes Back. Part of last summer’s Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination movie prop exhibit at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Ala.

The vanity of a 5-year-old boy

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It’s been a tough week. We got 4 inches of snow Sunday night and Monday morning, which is a lot here in the South, so they called off school, and by Wednesday, Things 1 and 2 were getting a little stir crazy. They’d gone sledding, and we’d all gone out to eat and gone to Target, but still.

So, Wednesday night, Thing 2 decides to spin around and around in the living room as fast as possible. Sweetie and I turned our backs for a moment and heard a “thunk” and then a wail.

(Before I get into the gory details, let me say Thing 2, who just turned 5, is fine, really.)

So, we heard this “thunk,” and then a wail, and Thing 1, (the 10-year-old) said her brother had made himself dizzy and fallen over and bonked his head on the entertainment center.

I go over, and I’m checking him over, and I’m feeling for a bump on his head, and his hair’s wet. I look, and there’s blood.

I mouth the word “blood” to Sweetie, so she won’t freak out when she sees it, and I carry Thing 2 upstairs to the bathroom to get a better look.

He’s got a small cut, maybe half an inch. It isn’t gushing, but it’s bleeding a little, so I hold a wet towel against it while Sweetie checks the first-aid books. It doesn’t sound like we need to rush him to the ER, but I wanted a second opinion, so I asked Sweetie to take a look.

Thing 2 screams, “Noooooo! I don’t want anybody to see it!”

So, I doctor the wound as best I can, and I say, “Well, at least you’ve got a good story to tell ’em at school tomorrow.”

“NO!” he said. “Don’t tell anybody!”

“You embarrassed that you spun around so fast that you fell over and bonked your head?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

Last night, I gave him his bath and rinsed his hair without shampoo and combed it. He thought I was combing his hair just to comb it, but, of course, I was parting it around the boo-boo so I could get a better look.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” I said, even though it was something. “You want to see it?”

He ran over to the mirror and checked it out — and then used his fingers to comb over it.

“Can you see it?” he said.

“Nah,” I said.

“I don’t want anybody to see it,” he said.

“OK,” I said, and I instantly pictured him when he’s older, much older, and begins to worry about losing his hair.