All About Justin
My son was recently reading my blog and came to the conclusion that I have not blogged about him nearly enough. I pointed out that I hadn’t blogged very much about anyone, but he still felt neglected.
His sisters might suggest he “be careful what he wishes for.” Or maybe he has a point.
Lately when I look at my son, I think of a cat and dog that we used to own. We owned the dog first — a tiny dog that was thrilled to beat up the tiny kitten that we brought home. The dog would constantly beat up the kitten. But a few weeks later, the kitten was about the dog’s size, and the dog was starting to lose interest in the game. The kitten, however, was just getting started. For the rest of their lives, the cat (easily 3 times the size of the dog) would perch up high and wait for that little dog to go by, so the cat could attack him. In this story, my son is the kitten turning into a cat and my other three children (his older sisters) are figuring out they are the tiny dog.
My point is (and I do have one) is that in the last year, my son has had a HUGE growth spurt that has put him at pretty much the same height as his oldest sister and his youngest sister and within an inch or two of his middle sister. The boy will soon be the tallest Sherwood child. His limbs seem impossibly long to me. I look at him and expect to see my little boy, and I see this teenager instead, and I am not quite sure what is going on. To a big extent, I pretend he is still a little boy, which works until he stands any where near me. (In other words, it is NOT working.)
His face has angles. I knew his face was changing, but I couldn’t put words to the changes (until Kira mentioned it when describing one of her boys). There are angles where there weren’t before in his chin and cheeks and…. He doesn’t look like a baby anymore.
When I think of him, I am more likely to remember him playing a video game with tears streaming down his cheeks because he could not get the jump across a chasm, so his character kept dying. He would beg his dad to make the jump for him, but his dad made him keep practicing instead. Within weeks (maybe days), he mastered the jump. He was about 6, and he eventually mastered that game. He still plays video games, but there are no longer any tears. He is a master of the games, and it is usually his dad begging for mercy or complaining that Justin moves too fast. I haven’t seen his dad cry, but I have heard his dad say, “Let’s play that racing game; I can beat you at that.” Of course, Justin is playing that game more too, so his dad might not be able to make that claim too much longer.
Justin has his bad habits. He picks. His Grandma Sherwood says he probably got that behavior from her. If there is a string or a bump or anything, Justin will pick and pull at it until a loose string becomes a huge hole or an uneven bump becomes very ugly looking. He destroys his shoes since he frequently picks at the rubber at the bottom or at the toes. He will one day become very good at drywall because he has to repair the walls in his room where he has peeled at the walls and poked holes and then taken those tiny holes and made them larger. This is probably the thing he does that perplexes me the most. Last September, his school issued him a brand new math book. This May, his school gave me a bill for that math book because it had been….Justinized.
One of the things that makes me proudest is how hard he works when he sets a goal. Whenever he has a school fundraiser, he goes above and beyond to sell as much as he can. He gets on his bike and rides miles and miles to sell his wares. We live in the country, so it takes miles and miles to get to just a few houses.
He is creative. He builds things in our back yard and his room that always fascinate me.
He reads. Oh my does he read. He read the entire Harry Potter series for the very first time when he was just 7 years old. Since then, he has read the entire series at least 5 more times. He knows the stories forwards and backwards.
He reads so differently than I do. When I read a book, I devour it. It is like I am a starving person being presented with my first real meal in months. It is not pretty. It is not slow. Once I’m done reading, I burp and move on forgetting that I was once starving. I rarely reread a book because there is another one waiting for me to devour.
When Justin reads, he savors the story. He takes little bites. He questions and ponders and remembers. When he knows I’ve already read the book, he tries to engage me in conversation.
Justin: Mom, what did you think of Ralph?
Me: Ralph? Ralph who?
Justin: You know, in the book, the guy that did the thing at the time when this thing happened….
Me: [blinking cluelessly and thinking to myself, "There was a Ralph in that story?"] Um…wow, interesting….
My point being is that when he reads a book, he KNOWS the book. He remembers and shares and discusses and sometimes I am about 5 steps behind him. I’ve devoured all of the Harry Potter books, and I know the main characters, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between the various books or the characters therein. Justin can. He can tell you which book it was that Syrius Black died. I’m not even sure I got the name Syrius right, and if I did, it is because of Justin not because of my own reading memory.
In one way, Justin is very much my child. He is quiet and watching and observing and absorbing most things. He won’t say much right away, but after he has studied and researched and thought about a topic, he will run off at the mouth with all he knows and thinks about the topic. He doesn’t just think about what was and what is, but he loves to ponder what if.
The what if can be perplexing and fascinating. It apparently causes me to have what Justin calls my “annoyed” face. Although he calls it my annoyed face, I am rarely annoyed when I make this face.
It usually happens like this….
Justin has been doing his researching and thinking and has been holed up and quiet for hours or days depending on the topic. At some point, he emerges and decides to share his thinking. He will start telling me all about it. The actual topic can vary. It can be a very complicated review of a certain challenge in a video game that challenged him but he has now mastered. It can be amazing insight about mankind or the dog. It might be an intricate recitation of how he built something or what he discovered.
I’m not sure I could recreate one of these conversations, but it goes something like this:
Justin: Mom, did you know (insert lots of words)
Me: (I start out appropriate, but pretty soon I realize I am out of my league, and I am reduced to just listening, but I can’t just listen. I start thinking things like, “How did he figure that out?” and “Where did he learn that?” and “Wow.” — I suspect this leads to my “annoyed” look.)
Justin: You’re getting that annoyed look….
Me: I’m not annoyed.
Justin: (more words)
Me: (jaw open)
It is just fascinating to hear his thoughts about things, and the stuff he remembers.
When he was younger, he went somewhere with his sister Maxine and their grandparents. The kids were reading road signs, so they were little. Maxine complained because Justin would read the sign out loud before Maxine could. It wasn’t that she couldn’t read the sign; it was just that Justin read it so much faster, so Maxine couldn’t even get a chance to answer.
It was a feeling that I experienced just a couple of days ago. I was playing a game at knoword.org, and I was doing pretty well. Justin was walking by and saw what I was playing. He stood just over my left shoulder. As the clues came up, he would say the answer before I could even get a chance to figure it out. I knew the answer, but I didn’t know it as FAST as he did. OK, there may have been a couple of times I didn’t know the answer, but he did. It was humbling. I still haven’t had a score as high as I did during that game he stood over my shoulder….
And he has a girlfriend….
