Borealis recently attended a sports camp — and it went about how you might expect.
When I picked him up after the first day, his coach remarked, “He started asking to go home at 10am.”
“But the camp only started at nine!” I whined.
“Exactly.”
Thankfully, in the following days, he stopped asking to go home early — and even began enjoying himself, instead.
Even so, he *didn’t* stop… well, being himself.
“I can store my sunglasses inside my hat!” he shrieked as I walked him in on Tuesday morning. “It’s very efficient!”
“Oh my goodness,” I muttered under my breath. Then, louder, I counseled, “Better just wear your sunglasses, bud. It’s pretty sunny already.”
“Oh. Good idea.”
“And make sure your shirt is untucked.”
“It is!”
“Ok, just checking. And, you know….”
“What?”
“Just, don’t be weird.”
Borealis swung around to face me with a comically confused expression. “Huh!?”
I screwed my eyes shut. “Uh, never mind. Just… listen to your coach, ok?”
Bo grinned. “Ok!”
And then he bounded off — to go be weird.
Minutes later, Aza, Rhys, and I shambled into the Golden Goodwill.
Without fail, I promptly regret bringing my kids into a store that is both unremittingly grungy and chockfull of breakable glass objects. Somehow, though, I have yet to learn from my mistakes. At least my kids have realistic expectations, though — because they know to select only one toy each per visit.
Indeed, this Tuesday morning was no different. After a [characteristically emotional] decision process, Aza chose a My Little Pony statuette. Meanwhile, on Bo’s behalf, I selected a quiver of suction-cup arrows. (Most of those have since been irreparably broken after being violently — and repeatedly — flung against our front window.)
And, to my surprise, Rhys picked out… Farkle.
“Really?” I asked him. “You know this is a game, right?”
“I want it,” he reaffirmed. He shook the cup and grinned at the rattling dice within.
“I mean, ok — it’s only two dollars,” I admitted. Then, checking the contents, I noted, “And it even still has the instructions!”
So, we purchased the game and brought it home — and then neglected to play with it for two whole days. Rhys occasionally rattled the container, but there was certainly no great undertaking to learn and play this new dice activity.
That is, until Thursday afternoon. A few hours after returning from sports camp, Borealis peeked onto the counter and observed, “Wait, do we have a new game?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answered distractedly. “Rhys picked that out at Goodwill.”
“Can we play it!?”
I grimaced. “Umm… sure. Read the instructions first and figure out how to play, and then we can play a round after I finish this up,” I said, gesturing at the pile of laundry before me.
Five minutes later, my son announced, “Ok, I finished reading the instructions!”
“Where are Rhysi and Aza?” I asked.
“They’re in Aza’s loft,” Bo answered.
He was referring to a pair of recently erected bunk beds — which has been our feeble attempt to expand the usable square footage of Aza’s tiny room.
Unfortunately, that effort has had mixed results. While her big-girl mattress is on the lower level, she hasn’t actually been using it. Instead, she’s been camping out on the upper level: sleeping not on her posh Nolah Evolution mattress, but on her ragged old crib pad — which barely fits among all the books and coloring sheets that are continuously scattered around “Aza’s loft”.
So, for the same footprint, we now have a dangerously high platform that is ludicrously difficult to declutter. And yet, declutter it I must — lest Aza be forced to sleep on a pile of colored pencils and Perler beads.
In short: It’s not the best solution… but it is better than having all the kids’ craft items scattered around our dining room table.
(Which, admittedly, still happens daily. So… maybe it isn’t a good solution, at all.)
Anyway, Bo’s answer gave me some confidence that the younger kids were — if not perfectly safe — then at least sufficiently occupied… which meant that *now* was the time to engage in a new game with Bo. I gave one final despairing glance at the half-folded pile of laundry before reluctantly following him into the living room.
My son immediately launched into a high-pitched, semi-incoherent explanation of the Farkle rules. “You have to roll all six dice, and then the good ones stay, and the bad ones get rolled again — so now you have to roll less than six dice — and then you add the good ones and the other good ones, unless you get no good ones….”
“Borealis, please,” I pleaded. “Just give me a second to read the instructions myself.”
I scanned the sheet to refresh my memory. Ones and fives count on their own; everything else has to come in triplets or larger combinations. The running score is additive, but the die combinations are not. You can stop rolling at any time — because any roll with no scoring die results in a forfeiture of all points for that round (i.e. a “Farkle”).
“Ok, Bo, I’m ready to play,” I finally announced.
“Ok!” he shrieked. “I got a paper ready — for writing down our scores!”
I glanced at the paper. He had scrawled “Mommy” and “Bo” at the top, with an almost-straight line down the middle.
“Uh, sure. That looks fine,” I answered. “What next?”
“We each need to roll one dice to see who goes first!”
“One die,” I corrected. “One die, two dice.”
“Oh, right. We each need to roll one die.”
I rolled a two. Bo rolled a six.
“I get to go first!” he crowed.
“Booooooooo! Don’t be a sore winner!” Aza yelled from her room.
I raised my eyebrows in agreement.
My son nodded. “I get to go first,” he repeated at a slightly lower decibel.
I waived him onward. “All right, go ahead. Roll with all six.”
Bo — who consistently wins Yahtzee — promptly rolled four fives.
I sighed. “Well, Bo — you’re starting out with a thousand.”
“YES!” he bellowed.
I scrawled his opening score at the top of his side — and then I had an idea.
I quietly bided my time until after his next turn, which earned a score of 350. Then, I *casually* introduced the concept of long addition.
“First, I’ll just line up the numbers here, and then… zero plus zero is zero… zero plus five is five… zero plus three is three… and one plus nothing is one.”
Sure enough, Borealis leaned over with interest. “What are you doing!?”
“Oh, I’m just adding these big numbers together,” I answered breezily.
On my next turn, I rolled three pairs. “Oh! I got fifteen hundred!”
“Ah, nuts!” Bo lamented. “Are you beating me now?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t we see?”
Aligning 1500 under my previous score of 650, I narrated, “Zero plus zero is zero… five plus zero is five… six plus five is eleven, so I’ll write a big one down here, and I’ll carry the little one right here… and one plus one is two.”
Bo squinted at the paper. “So now your score is… twenty-one fifty!?”
I shrugged. “It appears so.”
“Aw, but you’re beating me!”
“Don’t be a sorry loser, Bo!” came Aza’s distant admonition.
My son scowled in response.
“Come on, roll again,” I prompted.
Bo’s first roll turned up a one.
“Ok, that’s a hundred,” he said.
His second roll added another one and a five.
He screwed up his eyes in concentration. “Uh, that’s one hundred… and fifty. And then I already had one hundred — so now it’s two hundred fifty.”
His third roll turned up yet another one and five.
“Um, that’s one hundred fifty again… so now I have… three hundred? No, wait — four hundred.”
“Very good,” I enthused as I wrote down his score. Then, I had an idea. “Do you want to tell me what to write for this one?”
I saw the conflict play out on Bo’s face: distaste for doing something that wasn’t originally his idea, pitted against intense desire to acquire a new skillset.
The latter won out.
My son shuffled around to get a better look at the score sheet. “Ok! Zero plus zero is zero — obviously— and then five plus zero is five, three plus four is… seven, and one plus nothing is one. Obviously.”
I smothered a laugh as he dictated the long addition. “Obviously. Ok, now it’s my turn again.”
We went back and forth like that for a few rounds — with a handful of non-scoring Farkles scattered throughout, but more so for me. Bo definitely inherited my risk aversion, so I intentionally played a bit more dangerously than I normally would have.
(I mean, we couldn’t *both* be stopping with three dice still left to roll.)
Borealis continued to verbally assist me — until, after one of his turns, he asked, “Can I try?”
“Oh, did you want to?” I responded innocently. “Sure — I mean, I guess you can do it… if you want to.”
Sure enough, he correctly calculated the sum — even remembering to carry the one.
“I’m good at this!” he grinned.
“Don’t be a sore mathematician, Bo,” I counseled.
“What?”
“Don’t be a braggart.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
And that was that. He still had me write down the scores for a few more rounds — but soon, he took over both aspects of score-keeping.
There was one thing, though, that he still couldn’t manage — yet.
“How far are you ahead?” he kept asking. (Because, although my son is risk averse, he is also deeply competitive.)
After answering this query a dozen separate times, I clapped Bo on the back and said, “You know what? I’m just gonna teach you long subtraction the next time we play.”
[Note: And I did — but that’s outside the scope of this story.]
As the game dragged on, Aza and Rhys emerged from her room.
“What are you playing?” Aza asked as Rhys adroitly clambered into my lap.
“Farkle,” Bo answered unhelpfully.
“It’s a game of rolling dice,” I added. “It’s like Yahtzee.”
“Oh,” she acknowledged flatly.
“Do you want to play with us? You can roll my turn.”
Aza crinkled her nose. “No, I don’t want to. Can you get me some stickers to do a picture?”
“I want stickers, too!” Rhys added, now scrambling out of my lap.
I glanced at Bo. “I’m gonna go grab your siblings some stickers, ok?”
“Yeah, ok,” he sighed dramatically. Then, perking up, he asked, “Oh — will you save me some?”
I smiled. “For sure.”
I riffled through our hoard of clearance-priced Hobby Lobby stickers, eventually selecting a farm-themed set. I gathered up the other necessary items — like a pencil for Rhys and a Sharpie for Aza — then finally snipped the sticker sheet into roughly equal sections for each of my children.
“We’ll just go ahead and save this one for Bo,” I muttered, setting aside the fragment bearing the donkey sticker.
As I parsed out the relevant craft supplies to my other two kids, I prompted, “Remember to draw a picture before you start putting the stickers on!”
Aza nodded and began drawing a pastoral scene of rolling hills and big barns. Rhys, of course, just scribbled an impressive number of colorful, overlapping loops.
Finally, I returned to Borealis — at which point, I noticed that we were nearing the goal score of ten thousand.
“Bo! We’re almost done!” I exclaimed.
“And I’m winning!” he [correctly] countered.
“We’ll see,” I hedged. “You never know who’s going to win until the very end.”
But, thankfully, the end was not long in coming — because, on his next turn, Borealis rolled two triples.
“Bo! That’s twenty-five hundred points!” I shouted.
“Yes!” he cheered. I rolled my eyes as he began chanting, “I win! I win! I win!”
“Bo! Don’t be a sore winner!” Aza snarled again.
Bo immediately shrank. “Oh. Sorry.”
I stuck out my hand for a shake. “Good game!”
Bo’s grin returned as he shook my hand. “Yeah — especially since I won!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I admitted. “But you won’t win every game.”
[Note: In fact, he did not even win the next game.]
“Yeah, yeah,” Bo repeated.
Wow, that is *such* an annoying response, I silently realized. I should probably stop modeling that.
Aloud, I countered, “And actually, the best part is actually not even that you won — it’s that, now, you can add numbers as big as you want!”
Bo gazed pensively into middle distance. “Yeah… I can,” he answered mysteriously.
I pondered Bo’s strange reaction for a few seconds before shrugging it off.
After all, there was no way this could come back to bite me… right?
The next morning was unadulterated chaos. We needed to bring Bo to his final day of sports camp, but nothing was where it needed to be — including Aza and Rhys, who both lay nearly catatonic on the couch. The week had been long for even them — and they hadn’t attended sports camp.
Speaking of which, where was Bo? Oh, there — at the table. But, to my dismay, he wasn’t dutifully eating the breakfast before him. Instead, he was… practicing addition?
Drawing from his theatrical debut as the inchworm in Thumbelina, he sang, “Two and two are four… four and four are eight… eight and eight are sixteen… sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two….”
As he came to the end of the verse, he reverted to his normal voice. “So, thirty-two and thirty-two are….” He leaned over his paper and began to write.
I sighed so deeply, my chest hurt.
A few seconds later, Bo bellowed, “MOMMY! IS THIRTY-TWO PLUS THIRTY-TWO… SIXTY-FOUR?”
I nodded through my chagrin. “Yes, Borealis. Now can you please eat your breakfast?”
“Oh — yeah!”
And he did… sort of. In between each bite, he paused to calculate the next sequential power of two. He raced through 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, and 4096 — at which point, I had to bow out.
“Babe, I don’t know anything higher than two to the twelfth — than four thousand ninety-six. So I can’t tell you if your addition is right or wrong, because I don’t have those numbers in my head.”
“Oh, ok,” Bo mumbled dejectedly.
I laughed. “Well, I can check your work on a calculator — but not right now, because I need you to get ready for sports camp!”
As I hustled my younger kids through the morning, my oldest finally buckled down to eating and dressing. A quick slather of mineral sunscreen later, and my pale, nerdy child was finally ready for sports camp.
“You know, Coach Bri said that I was really good at baseball,” Bo commented as he fastened his running shoes.
“Yeah, she told me that, too,” I answered.
And indeed, she had — explaining it like this: “Baseball is his sport. He can throw; he can catch; he can run bases; he’s learning to hit; and he remembers the rules. But with the other sports… uh, yeah. Better just stick to baseball.”
… which means that we paid several hundred dollars for Bo to attend a multi-sport camp — only to confirm something that we’ve suspected for solidly six years.
[Note: Buried within my very first story is this prophetic (and bombastic) gem: “With the determination and dexterity of a major league baseball star, my feisty five-month-old batted my nearly-full tall Ultra Caramel Frappucino off our high top table and into the great beyond.”]
Bo grinned at me. “I knew I was good at baseball!”
“What gave it away?” I deadpanned. “Was it that time you sent Austin to the nurse’s office?”
Borealis looked at me seriously. “No, Mommy. I didn’t throw a baseball at him; I threw ice at him.”
“Right. That’s extremely different.”
Bo raised his eyebrows in a perfect mimic of my expression. Within our family, only he and I can expose quite so much sclera.
I chuckled, then pointed to the door. “Ok, let’s go. Aza, Rhys — you too. We’re gonna be late if we don’t leave now.”
I crammed the three kids into the car — with varying levels of shoe-shodness — and then hopped into my own seat. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I noticed my oldest leaning over a sheet of paper.
“Bo, are you still doing that doubling math?” I asked incredulously.
“YES!” he bellowed back. “Now I got to sixteen, thirty-eight, four!”
I tried to do the math in my head. What’s 4096 times four? It’s sixteen thousand… ugh, whatever. That sounds about right.
Aloud, I answered, “Yeah, Bo — that’s probably right. I can check once we get to sports camp.”
As we drove, I heard a steady hum of numbers from the back. “Thirty-two… seven-six… eight. Sixty-five… fifty-three… six.”
I rolled my eyes. “Rhys, Aza — do you want to listen to Dog Man: The Musical?”
“Yeah!” came the twin responses.
Soon enough, we arrived at sports camp — with only a minute to spare. I left the car running, grabbed the keys, and hopped out. (Perks of driving an old police car.)
“Bo, come on — we gotta go!” I barked into the back seat.
“Hang on — I’ll almost ready!” he muttered back.
“Borealis!”
“I’m just….” he trailed off.
“BOREALIS!”
“Finally! Ten, forty-eight, fifty-seven, six!” He looked up. “Is that right?”
“How would I know!?” I scoffed. “And no, we don’t have time to check! Come on, it’s the last day — let’s go!”
Bo sighed deeply, then excised himself from his carseat. “Ohhhhhhh-kaaaaaay.”
“I’ll be back!” I called to Rhys and Aza.
“Get me out!” Rhys yelled.
“Nope,” I answered as I locked the door. “Come on, Bo!”
Alas, Bo remains wholly un-rushable — so my exhortations to jog fell on comically deaf ears. As he [literally] dragged his feet, he deflatedly complained, “I just wanted to keep adding numbers!”
I nearly screamed in hilarity and frustration. “Bo! You have to finish out sports camp! We’re paying too much for you to just stay home and do math!”
“Alllll-riiiiight,” he sighed again.
Finally, we arrived at the check-in desk, and I got my son signed in for his final day.
“Be good!” I ordered.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bo countered.
I rolled my eyes. At least his attitude was now Coach Bri’s responsibility.
A minute later, I was exhaustedly sliding back into my seat.
“Get me out!” Rhys whined.
“No way,” I shot back. “We’re going home.”
“Get me out!”
I snorted. “You’re not even wearing shoes.”
My youngest looked down in shock. “My shoes!”
“Rhysi doesn’t have shoes!?” Aza wailed.
“It’s fine!” I yelled back. “Because… we’re going home!”
“Oh yeah,” Aza acknowledged.
(Rhys, meanwhile, continued to whimper.)
I started to put the car in drive… but then I reconsidered.
I got back out — phone in hand — and circled around to Bo’s seat. I tapped a few numbers on my phone, then shook my head in reluctant admiration.
“You did it, kid,” I muttered.
The last number written on his sheet — 1,048,576 — was correct. Two to the twentieth power is one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred seventy-six.
… Or, as Bo would say: “Ten, forty-eight, fifty-seven, six.”