Friday's Physical Texts with Cal

Home from work for only a few minutes this past Friday and learning the Leatherkids were upstairs, I climbed the stairs leading to our bedrooms and met up with this note:

Oh, boy.  This was going to be fun.  Initially, I wondered about this Pokemon thing.  It's an interest that's come and gone... come and gone... and come again.  I don't understand it, nor did I believe it could be the answer to this supposed boredom Cal was experiencing late on a Friday night.  But the grammar?  Goodness.  Missing commas aside, what not-yet-9-year-old knows the proper use of the word "whom?"

I love this kid.

I decided to respond with a note myself and placed it outside his door:

I don't know if this was mean, but it seemed fitting.  If he was going to properly use "may" and "pleased" and "whom," I was going to push his 8-year-old literary boundaries a bit and use a big word.  I wanted to see what he'd do with it.

A few minutes passed and I walked by his room to see him standing by his desk looking down at a book.  The note had been picked up, and I concluded he had to have been looking something up in his dictionary.

I love this kid.

Then he hand delivered a response to my note:

I guessed he didn't find "presumptuous" in his dictionary.  I'm not surprised.  It's a kids' dictionary.  The kicker was that he included an "I love you too!"  That pulled at my heartstrings.

I love this kid.

It seemed fitting to continue, so I did:

Explaining the meanings of words to the kids is a parenting responsibility that I find challenging.  I have a decent vocabulary and generally use words correctly; but providing definitions on demand is not something at which I'd claim to do well.  More often than not, my definitions are way too long winded for the kids to have a clue what I'm saying.  This note is a good representative of that.  And why I had to get the dig about his misspelling in, I don't know.  I guess I didn't look at it as a dig so much as a teaching moment.  I figured he could handle the bluntness, which he ultimately did in his follow-up:

He beat himself up a little too much in this note for my liking, but I did like that he explained his motivation.  And you know what?  I think he was genuinely glad that I read his note.  I think he enjoyed our exchanges.

I love this kid.

Not finished, I added some comments to draw our physical texting to a close:

I had so much fun exchanging these notes with Cal.  It really did bring me joy, and he gave me so many more reasons to be proud of him.  He's so smart and paying attention to everyday teaching moments that we have with him at home.  That grammar he's using isn't something that he's learning at school just yet, I'm sure.  That comes from our chatter at home.  His curiosity and interest in knowing things at any given time will only lend itself to expanding his knowledge base and reinforcing his learnings.  And his handwriting is so neat!  It always has been.

And he loves his mom.

I love that kid.  Now, I wonder where I can find one of these Pokemon "boost packs."