The passing reflex

According to Scientific American, our brains don't develop their reasoning abilities till we're in our 20s. A whitish material (myelin) grows over our neurons or synapses or something, allowing better communications to take place from one part of the brain to the other. This process starts in the back of the brain, the automatic area, I think, and travels to the front, hitting the reasoning areas of the frontal cortex last.

I bring this up because it's interesting watching kids five and six play basketball, or any sport, probably. They "get" part of the game, like dribbling. Seems like dribbling is for some the only reason to play basketball. Next comes shooting. Love to sink two. Passing is a distant third in the things they like to do with the basketball, but not always because they don't want to.

When the ball-handler stops, he's usually immediately surrounded by every player on the floor, those on his team as well as the other team. Too much information ensues. I watched Jordan get into this predicament several times, and once he just looked at the big guy guarding him, bemused and wanting to revert to some younger version of the game, probably the first game he devised: chase.

I've given him several alternatives for what to do when he's being guarded like this, and he painstakingly goes through a few of them, once even faking out the guard, ducking under his outstretched arm, and reaching up for a basket. But the decision-making process necessary to make a quick pass hasn't happened for them yet, unless they're thinking about it beforehand. Many times, Jordan has been in "pass" mode and even if he's got a clear shot at the basket, he'll look for somebody to pass to.

This sometimes frustrates the coaches, but hey, their myelin is supposedly fully formed.

Traveling, b-ball, pool, and school

Jordan (in the green) fast-breaks for two.

Everybody made it home from Colorado okay. They had a good time skiing, tubing, and ice skating.

Next day, Jordan went straight to swimming and basketball. Swimming was playing in kiddie pool, so not a real lesson, but we signed him up for another seven lessons. He's as good at swimming as anyone, and like his other sports, when he doesn't have to do something, he doesn't; but if he has to show he can swim, he's fishlike.

Basketball, his team played the best team again, for the last time this season, and it was much better than the previous times. Not a blow-out, at least, and Jordan has shown remarkable progress, dribbling and passing, shooting from the free-throw line. He said he gets nervous sometimes because people are watching and he is not sure what he's supposed to do because one coach says shoot and the other says pass. Understandable. On both counts. The coaches don't really coordinate at this level, so you get what you pay for, and we paid for some nice green uniforms.

Now, we're looking at new curricula for the new school year. Thinking about what we could or should do, and it's quite difficult, almost as hard as choosing the homeschool in the first place. I think we're in agreement that homeschooling is the way to continue, as long as we're able to do so.

Through the door, again

My little boy and his mom are flying to Colorado this weekend. It's not the first time I've watched him (and her) lug a suitcase through the doors into the airport. It never ceases to amaze me how brave and confident he is about his life. At least about most things.

Here's a boy who can work his loose teeth "a hundred wiggles breaks off one root" but who won't let a doctor take a throat swab or won't let us put eye drops in his eyes. It's something to do with being aged from six to nine, say the docs and the books.

But when I watched him walk through the doors today, I remembered the first time he flew, almost four years ago. He was barely able to push the door open. He never looked back then, and he didn't look back this time. He was headed into the future. And somehow I saw a vision of him walking through those doors in the coming years, getting taller and taller, till one day, he was grown and his visit was just a visit and he was going home.

Then, I'll remind him of when he was a child and couldn't see a future that didn't involve his mom and me being with him. Or maybe I'll just remind myself.

Living in the light of greatness

As children get older, parents may find themselves reliving their lives through the eyes of those little ones. I know from the beginning, I've tried to figure out what my son is seeing, and how the world seems to him. It's usually not possible to remember the innocence of being a newborn (unless you're the obsessive-compulsive character Adrian Monk in the Monk mystery series), but some things came back to me as Jordan got older.

I tried to remember first times seeing things, and I'd often crawl around on the floor and observe from his point of view. Things are a lot different from below. Bigger, taller. I remember even as a first-grader how big my grade school gym looked, but going back as an adult, it was not so grand.

Ever since Jordan started doing sports, I've been blessed to be able to live the dream through him, as he makes the last-minute soccer goal, laughing and dribbling around his teammates and competitors to kick the ball into the corner of the net. I'm able to stand in awe of his easy confidence after he's learned the techniques in basketball that allow him to dribble (with his hands, this time) off-handedly while eyeing the competition and his team to see where he's going to pass the ball. I can thrill to his ability to force the ball into the paint, stop at the bottom of the free throw circle, and hoist up a perfect two-pointer.

But in both sports (and don't worry, baseball fans; we plan to introduce him to that, too, and maybe even American football, though I'm not too keen on that one), the biggest thrill for me has been watching him learn to give up his own glory, so to speak, in order to pass off and let somebody else enjoy the moment. Thanks to his selflessness, one boy in basketball was able to score his very first points. The coaches were screaming "shoot it, Jordan," but Jordan had other ideas, found the player who, in his words, didn't get to play that much, and passed it to him.

We still have some questions as to the idioms of basketball. When the coach yells things like "spread out" and "get on her," something is sometimes lost in the translation.

A rude ride

The boy lost another tooth. This one came out onto his pillow while he slept. Needless to say, it was hanging on by a thread. We almost knocked it out during some basketball play yesterday, but not quite.

Now he's got three teeth missing: two on the bottom front, and one on the top front. Talk about a gap-toothed smile. And he's beginning to get embarrassed by it because people have a tendency to go "eww" when he showed them his loose tooth. What a rough time for a kid. Kind of like when Adam and Eve realized they should be embarrassed to be naked.

Life. What a rude ride at times.