Golden boy

Zack awoke exceedingly early this morning. In the darkness, he commented that even though everything was dark, his hand was "gray." Believe it or not, I think what he meant was that he could tell, despite the twilight, that his hand was its normal color (yes, as I recently mentioned, he considers his skin tone to be gray). I gently questioned his characterization of his skin tone. "It's gray," he affirmed. "Or maybe it's gold."

We took the kids to Eatonville, a restaurant in DC, for lunch with Sewell, who's in town for the weekend, and Sarah Hurwitz, Jackie Gran, and Alex Nguyen and his fiancé Thanh. The kids were incredibly well behaved, even though their food was slow to come and the conversation revolved around adult topics. It may have helped that the restaurant is airy and decked out with colorful murals. At one point, Zack said, "The hilltop." I looked up and realized the words were written in large lettering on a mural on the far opposite wall. He recently learned to recognize 'the' by sight, but he must have sounded out the letters of 'hilltop' silently to himself before uttering the word in a single breath. Later, he read "Flor-i-daa" off another mural. "-duh," I corrected, at which he initiated a discussion of the variable phonetic qualities of the letter 'a'; this boy is not thrown off by nuance. The city of Eatonville, I explained, is in Florida, just like the Everglades. He then pointed at a street sign out the window, and I noted that it read 'Langston Hughes Way.' Hours later, at bedtime, I pulled a book off the shelf and read from its cover: "The collected poems of...". "Langston Hughes," he finished for me.

That little trick--especially ignoring the silent 'gh'--was probably enabled by his good visual memory. Nevertheless, his ability to read words even when their spelling is not exactly phonetic sometimes astounds me. On top of that, he seems to have good retention of special rules that supersede more familiar ones--for example, his rapid near-mastery of the 'silent e', and his strengthening grasp of how to pronounce 'th', 'sh' and even 'ph'. He also makes lightning-quick connections between anything he reads and other encounters with the same words. When he read "master" from a newspaper headline recently, he added, "Like 'master of my fate'," alluding to the poem "Invictus."

After eating their fill, both kids walked around and around the Eatonville dining room, sometimes holding hands. They were very, very sweet with each other, and Sam was extremely outgoing and comfortable with our friends, even smiling and making eyes at Sarah.

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Zack was singing "Turkey in the Straw" on an endless loop the other day. (Believe me, this is an improvement over the Christmas songs that were previously stuck in his head!) After singing one stanza--"So he fished all night, 'til the sea got sore, / And he said, By golly, I will fish no more"--god knows how many times, he suddenly paused and asked "What does sore mean?" It's rather tough, I realized, to explain a word in a manner consistent with its metaphorical usage without doing an incidental disservice to its literal definition. I tried to explain that the sea grew tired of giving up fish, the way muscles can grow tired and sore. But he was quick to point out that the sea wasn't really giving up the fish; rather, the fisherman was catching them.

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Sam again practiced sitting on the toddler potty this afternoon. Nothing doing, in the end, but it was a good effort, and caught on video. I'll see if I can upload it. (Her wawa made of go of it, too.) She's been talking avidly of "pi gu", as the video shows, and not just her own. She even pointed out one of our fellow diner's at lunch today!