Flying moon bears

I try to avoid telling people all of the new little things my young sons do. So many parents seem to bombard friends, family, and strangers with stories of "Oh, little Johnny said this!" or "You'll never guess what Felicity did today!" The trouble is, most of these stories bore me. Despite what you might think, your child is not a unique snowflake, and their actions are not unusual. All small children say silly things. They are still learning language, exploring the world around them, and have a limited understanding of the culture they live in; of course they are going to say things that are unintentionally funny. And those things that you think are unique and precious? These things are, in fact completely common experiences.

On further reflection, however, I now think dismissing these things just because they are commonplace is a mistake made by a young man who has a tendency to take himself far too seriously. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's not valuable. Thinking about this, I was reminded of fundamental exercises in sports or music. Just because one is expert at something doesn't mean one ignores the fundamentals. I'm sure Neil Peart warms up with various drills and patterns, just as I did when playing percussion in high school and college. Georges St. Pierre may make his living as an accomplished fighter, but I'm sure he does physical conditioning, bag drills, and other fundamentals just as I do to maintain his technique.

In that light, perhaps these "common" experiences of small children saying silly things or doing something funny are some of the fundamental exercises for us as a species. They should not be dismissed just because all kids do them, or just because all parents laugh and feel compelled to tell everybody what their son or daughter did. These are things that renew us as individuals, that keep us from becoming bitter, jaded humans burdened by the stress and weight of the world, the fundamental exercises that help push us to be "the best of humanity".

That overly-analytical introduction out of the way, you wanna hear about the cool things my kids just starting doing?

A few days ago, I was taking care of the boys for the evening while Hanna was off getting some well-deserved time to herself. Over dinner, we were talking about this and that; Duncan and Tristan get better at language every day, and it's getting so that you can actually have interesting conversations with them, so long as you don't mind discussing colors of various objects or anatomy at some length. At one point, inspired by a recent reading of Blueberries for Sal, they decided they weren't boys, they were bears. This in itself is pretty cool; not only are they getting the "joke" in the book, they are starting to imagine things from books -- events and ideas outside their own direct experience.

But it gets better; while I was carrying Duncan out of the bath later that evening, he announced that he was "flying!" This by itself wasn't really noteworthy, either; like most parents, Hanna and I have played "flying" games with them by swooping them around in our arms since they were born. "So, you're a flying bear now?" I asked him, continuing the conversation from dinner. Duncan confirmed this. "That's interesting," I told him, "I've never seen a flying bear before; where do flying bears live?" Then Duncan gets this super-serious look on his face, narrowing his eyes and staring off into the distance; you can almost see the neurons firing behind his eyes as he parses the question. A second later, he announces definitively: "On the moon." What made it so great was not only the answer itself, but the absolute certainty with which he said it; flying moon bears were a fact.

And it hasn't stopped with that; their has been an explosion of imaginative play in our house of late, as though someone through a switch in my sons' brains. Tristan recently pushed the couch cushions down, and he and his brother were sitting between them and the back of the couch. "What are you up to back there?" I asked him. "In bathtub!" he replied gleefully. "Oh? Is there water in the tub? Can you splash around?" And then, to my amazement, he follows my lead and turns on the imaginary faucet, runs imaginary water, and splashes in it, complete with make-believe bowls and rubber ducks. Then he and his brother turned on the shower. Then they pulled the plug. Then they ran more water, and did it all over again. On a recent walk in the woods, the twins told me at various points that the sticks they picked up along the way were water pipes, fishing poles, walking staffs, and axes. They have spent mornings gleefully running into the living room, picking up imaginary food, and bringing it back to the kitchen table for to me to eat -- everything from chocolate cake to bok choy. They dump imaginary dirt out of their toy trucks, then scoop it up again and haul it off to an imaginary construction site. And thanks to their creativity, I've recently been deemed a frog, and a bear, a tree, and a dog.

It is amazing to me to see imagination suddenly develop in my boys. Many of my pastimes and hobbies are imaginative -- D&D is just playing cops and robbers, after all; the dice, rulebooks and character sheets are just there to keep people from arguing over who shot who first. Reading is simply a means of transporting one person's imagination into someone else's head. Writing is that process in reverse.

A whole new realm of possibility has just opened up for my sons, and it will be great to watch where that takes them. There are games to play, stories to invent, and many, many, many books to read. And I can't help but look forward to when they get a little older and I can introduce them some books by Monte Cook and my collection of polyhedral dice, not to mention some other writers who also think about furry, space-faring mammals.