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 […]