Boy, A Different Creation | Great Peace Living

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I’m Linking up this week with the MOB blog hop. What is MOB you might ask. It stands for Mother Of Boys.

For many years I had babysat children, both boys and girls. I was a sister to 2 other sisters as well as 1 boy. I married a boy. So somewhere along the way you would have thought that I would have realized that boys are entirely different creations than girls. I mean, that’s obvious. Right? Well of course. Except that, I didn’t really understand it until I became a mom to a boy.

I have only one boy. I have only one child. He is truly my greatest joy and delight. He also is confusing and sometimes troublesome to my soul, because I don’t always understand him.

I love writing. I had these marvelous visions of how our homechooling life would go. Me, methodically teaching him the greater points of creative writing. Him imaging the next great novel at age 6, and I lovingly writing it down for him. But, that didn’t happen. He couldn’t stand writing. It takes too much time to write. He however, loves math. Me? Not so much. He can spend hours writing his multiplication table. He could spend entire days bent over his desk calculating the diameter of a circle.

He uses his math mind in oh so many ways.

Piano… Music is based upon numbers. He quickly picks up the “rhythm” of those numbers and adapts very quickly to learning a new song. He basically learned fractions by playing the piano.

Video Games… Now, I know. As a homeschool mom I’m not supposed to encourage my son playing videos. But, I do. He sees and plays videos quite differently than any other child I know. For him it isn’t about the adventure of the game. It is rather, about the mathematical dynamic of the game. He plays the levels to perfection. Meaning, he plays them not to finish the level, but to master the level. He then, takes what he has learned in playing the level and converts it to a 3-dimensional drawing of the level. He goes through a LOT of paper doing this. Then he transposes those drawing back to a 1-dimensional map of the level. He commits all of this to his memory and wants to share it with anyone who will listen.

That leads me to the next way he uses math.

Art… He loves art. He loves the graphic of the art. I imagine in his mind he is drawing as if he is viewing it in a graph. He doesn’t care about perfection here. It is the one place that where he let’s go and draws to his hearts content. He draws everything. I mean, everything. We go on a field trip, he comes home and draws whatever it was that excited him the most. We go to a baseball game, he comes home and draws a replica of the stadium. We go to visit my parents and he comes home and draws a map of their home. We go to the conservatory and he comes home and draws a biome. I just don’t understand his need to draw everything he sees. But, I know it’s part of him, part of his learning, and part of what make him, him.

I think he would number the world. He at a very early age counted everything. We would go on a trip and he would count light poles that we passed on the highway. Hi gave numbers to our televisions. They are not numbered in any discernible pattern that I can figure out either. He remembers street addresses. I will tell him we are going to someones house and he will respond with…”You mean, 221?” That would be the house number of the place or business we are going. He isn’t obsessive about this, it’s just that he can’t NOT remember those numbers.

My husband and I refuse to teach him that the earth is divided by longitude and latitude. Why? Because instead of telling me the names of the states, he would give me their geographic coordinates. I figure let’s wait a few years before we teach him that.

He loves to stretch the boundaries. He always wants to know “why.” never fully accepting any reason I give. He is always asking me what something means. He wants more and more information. I know that somewhere in that fascinating mind he is storing these bits of information for a future use. But for today, I wonder… ‘What will he ever do with that tidbit?’

He is also so loving, gentle and kind. He loves when we get to the building where the church assembles, because he loves to jump out and run to get the door and hold it open for the ladies coming in. He loves to greet everyone he knows and calls them by name. He still loves to cuddle with me in the mornings and all throughout the day he says, “I love you mom.” He smiles with laughing eyes that makes my heart melt.