Geek Squad

I wonder sometimes how my kids play off our family’s inherent nerdiness at school. After a full evening of fondue and folding origami, do they tell their friends what we did and how hard we laughed? Or do they stay quiet as their peers regale everyone with tales of playing the latest Wii game or watching a new release on the flat screen in hi-def?

I feel certain that my youngest, Jeffrey, complains the way only a seven-year old can about the fact we don’t have a game system in the house. He’s good at video games; I’ve seen him play at our friends’ houses. He’s quick, intuitive and very, very focused. But I’ve also seen the way his entire demeanor changes after about 30 minutes in front of a screen, and it’s not pretty. He grows surly and openly defiant with everyone around him.

So instead of plugging in with a video game, he and I solve Sudoku puzzles together. He is just as good at those, using his focus differently and figuring out the answers quickly. We laugh while we do it, and really enjoy ourselves. I am not at all ashamed to say that he is better than I am at Sudoku.

My middle child, Emma, may well invent stories about our life for her friends. She invents stories about everything and I have had to redefine the term “lying” in our house so that she can be openly creative without getting in trouble about it. When the kids were very young, I would call them out for little white lies by euphemistically saying to them, “Is that true, or are you telling me a story?” Now we know that Emma is often “telling a story” on purpose, working to make it as big and colorful as possible.

I’m sure that if Emma decides to tell her classmates that we once spent an entire road trip making up a story about Martian squirrels with purple hands, she’s will invent a story around the story. She might talk about how her mom “made her” participate, and about how her part of the story was the best, “everyone said so.” Or maybe she’ll change the details. Maybe we weren’t simply driving to a friend’s house up in Oshkosh. Perhaps instead we were stuck in the car during a blizzard for two whole days with no food except half a box of Cheez-its and it was the only way to keep warm and stay awake until rescue workers could save us!

The truth, of course, is that Emma loves to create all kinds of things, not just stories. She draws cubist seahorses, paints fairies in flight, colors her fingernails with markers and costumes herself daily in splashes of hot pink and day-glow red – at the same time.

My oldest, Lena, loves to spend free time on our home computer. She researches Harry Potter characters and builds huge files of information about them. She chats with friends, sends emails out from her very own email account and plays the internet version of Guitar Hero. Additionally, she loves music and loudly laments that her mp3 player is only a 512! How can she possibly store enough songs on there?

But she willingly leaves the computer room in a rush if I yell, “Who wants to play MadLibs?” or someone opens the box for the deluxe Scrabble board (you know, the kind on the lazy Susan) and wants to get a game going. We turn the TV off and spend the evening trying to decide if we’re going to allow proper nouns. Sometimes, one kid will play Othello with me, while the other two play chess. Or we’ll cut up a mess of cheese to have with crackers and fill our time beading little doo-dads and key chains.

It all seems sooo nerdy when any of us try to talk about it. Even my grown-up friends will occasionally roll their eyes when I start a sentence with, “Last night Lena was reading out loud to the little kids from a new book…” because it seems so wildly unrealistic that we truly enjoy those things so much. But I don’t care; I am grateful that my ultimate geekiness was passed genetically on to my kids. Otherwise, I would have no one to play with! VS