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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (60433)	8/30/2001 6:12:48 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Are all five year-olds as eccentric as mine? I can't speak for all, but IME, all the healthy and normal ones are. What it says to me is that you're not forcing him be what you want him to be, but letting him be what he wants to be. Within, of course, safe limits. I remember once when a friend and I were in a William Tell phase her mother looked out her window one day -- I was maybe six then -- to find her daughter standing in front of a tree with an apple on her head and me holding my bow and arrow and very carefully, very responsibly taking aim. Her ferocious screech startled me, and this tiger of a mother came screaming out into the yard, dragged poor Debbie into the house by the arm, and slammed the door behind them. And made me think I had done something wrong. Which I couldn't understand. If WT could do it and be a hero for it, why couldn't I? My bow was taken away from me. So unfair, I thought. I mean, it was history, wasn't it? And we were being very careful about it. So make sure the fantasies are safe ones. But otherwise, sounds mighty healthy to me.

To: carranza2 who wrote (60433)	8/30/2001 7:14:58 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Are all five year-olds as eccentric as mine? Yes- although the fixation on Paul Bunyon gave me pause. CW just loved computers, so his obsessions weren't as noticeable since they took place in his room and revolved around his desktop, but Ammo was all over the place-- starting with dinosaurs, He-man figures, drawing detailed pictures of decapitated men, and basketball, and continuing into the teen years with the Blue Man Group and movies and the keyboard. He knows every John Cusack movie by heart and can do all Cusack's monologues. He went through a Freddy Kreuger phase and took apart all the scissors in the house, cut the fingers off his batting gloves, and made himself some very serious claws. He spent hundreds of dollars and an entire summer in the garage building a huge musical instrument out of PVC pipes. It's still there. I thought maybe we could sell the PVC pipe to the city for the new townhall- I swear there's enough of it- and pay for the first year of tuition, but he begged us not to take it apart. Then all our trashcans disappeared when he decided to do a drum solo with his band that involved a friend pouring flourescent paint on the tops while another held black lights over them. The trashcans are still gone and my laundry room sink glows in the dark. I do think that it is this ability to focus that leads to success. I have no idea what Freddy Kreuger claws or Paul Bunyon will lead to in the future, but I am absolutely confident that it's all good, as they say.

To: carranza2 who wrote (60433)	8/30/2001 7:29:19 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Carranza, their obsessions grow. Some go right off the deep end as they age and they become cyberspace SI fiends, obsessed with arcane CDMA factoids. Some spend years ranting obsessively in SI. That is a good thing. It's called focus. <He is singularly focused on one fantasy at a time, the current one being pirates and piracy. The passion and energy for the subject is absolutely amazing. > When he finds something genuinely rewarding as he gets older, he won't drop it. He'll make like Irwin Jacobs, a real CDMA wacko. The pirate stuff is learning how to focus and figuring out how to do it all. The reward at present is self-reinforcing as he learns that by crikey, he can really get stuff organized, figure it out and ... well, now, what else is there... hey, look at Paul Bunyan!! Lemmee get a piece of that. Well, that's my story and justification. Mqurice