Archive: The Fine and Right Education of the Young Doctor Benny

Last night during one of the many times we went up to try to get Benny to actually sleep, I was lying next to him in his bed and he had his arms up in the air. "WE ARE PLAYING ARMS MOMMY!!!" he said. I said, "How do you play arms?" and he said, "You go like this" as he was sort of vaguely waving his arms around. So we played "arms" for a while and then I said, "How do you win arms?" and he said, "You have to put up your knee." So I put up my knee and he shouted, "YOU WON MOMMY! YOU WON ARMS! GOOD JOB!" Hehehehe.

Good morning.

Today we went and looked at a house before going swimming at the YMCA. The house had a total of like... I don't know four bathrooms maybe. Lots of rooms. Lots of interesting things in the house. Plenty for a small child to see and remember including two very exciting dogs and a view of a canal. One of the bathrooms had an oddly shaped potty in it that was black. Benny tinkled in it. He has tinkled in one or more potties in just about every house we've been in. Anyway, so tonight he's in bed and I say, "What's your best thing today?" and he says in his very garbled but very excited way, and I'm paraphrasing, "When we went in the house and looked at the house and there was a black potty and it was a RECTANGULAR potty and I tinkled in it and the tinkle went down in the water and I flushed the black potty and the tinkle went down down down into someone else's house!" I mean, to even imagine that he's been saving up this excitement over a black potty that he tinkled in... saving it up without discussing it for like.... SIX HOURS until he's in bed and ruminating over the day's events... is just insane.

Today he is playing twinkle with his right hand while his left hand plays an A in the same rhythm. And he is playing an A major scale like that and also Allegro.

Benny went to the barber shop with Dad and got a fairly appalling haircut that involves a little ring of monk hair around the top and then the rest of it shaved. As Dan has pointed out, it will grow back. Here is a before picture, in the bathtub, where the butterfly and beetle are having a big drama. (Yesterday he had the beetle and butterfly downstairs and I asked if they were going to accompany him to the tub and he said that they weren't interested in taking any baths.)



Now here are some pictures of him with the haircut. He had been eating a bit of chocolate bunny -- thus the dirty face.





Here are some pictures of him taking pictures.

BTW Benny and I were playing a math game out of his new math workbook and he wanted to go play the keyboard (to play some song that he was humming in his usual shrill penetrating tone) so he rushed into the other room and I heard him say, "Big Brother Nemo, do you want to play this game with Mommy? Okay. I'm going to play keyboard. Okay bye." At which point he scampered over to the keyboard. Nice of him to take care of me like that! Hehehe. Goofball.

We brought the keyboard home from church so Benny could play with it. Two days ago we were sitting in the office and Benny was playing the keyboard in the front room and I heard him trying to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. We both sat and listened as Benny worked at picking it out by ear on the keyboard. HE CAN PLAY THE WHOLE THING! And in the right key (for violin) starting on A. He can also now play the A major scale and also "Allegro" which is another song in book 1 -- both of these things he picked out himself by ear without help. Right at this very moment he is playing variation A of Twinkle and he's playing two simultaneous notes -- A and the other note -- which is how the kids first learned the "Tuka Tuka Stop Stop" variation -- by playing "Only on the A String" while we played Twinkle. Amazing. SO CHARMING. SO DELIGHTFUL!!!!!! The only thing I have contributed to these efforts is a short explanation of sharps and how the black keys are the sharps and flats.

Benny: When I grow up I'm going to be Daddy and when you grow down you're going to be Sadie.

Yesterday we went to get more vinegar and baking soda etc. and collected some more purple flowers. We were tooling around in the grocery store with Benny saying, "IS THAT VINEGAR? IS THAT BAKING SODA? LET'S DO OUR ANTHROCYANIN PIGMENTS MOMMY!" Hehehehe. Came home and did it. The flowers we had were bad, we need better deeper richer purpler flowers. So again we will try today.

Well I just have to report a really good homeschooling moment here. As you know, Benny and I have been working on a unit study on plants. Which basically means I have potting soil and nascent bean plants all over my kitchen, and Benny is running around saying THE MOST CHARMING things like "Look Mommy, these chloroplasts are stacks of thylakoids where the plant makes light into food" (*BURSTWITHPRIDE*) and whatnot. Anyway, so we are learning about flowers and about how different pigment makes the flower a different color, and there's this pigment called anthrocyanin that is basically purplish but turns red or blue depending on the alkalinity of whatever blah blah. So yesterday we collected a bunch of purple flowers, boiled them down in the microwave, and then took the purple water and added vinegar to one half, baking powder to the other (vinegar being more acid, baking powder being more base), and they turned red and green respectively (why green?) and Benny just about DIED OF JOY. He was so in love with the whole process it was so charming and dear. He wanted to do it over and over until we ran out of vinegar!? He was leaping about yarping about anthrocyanin pigment and vinegar and baking "porder" and it was HILARIOUS. He looked quite the mad scientist, since adding baking powder made the whole thing fizz impressively.