Will’s favorite daily activity is “around.” This game began in Honduras during the summer of 2003 with Paul and Jonas, the then 22 month old son of my friend and colleague, Joanne Bailey. Paul spent a lot of time watching Joanne’s kids, especially Jonas, who had taken a special liking to Paul. While we worked on Joanne’s in-laws’ porch, Paul would play in the yard with Jonas, and they developed the game “around.” This involved walking (over and over again) around the outside of the house and yard, repeating the same activities each trip “around.” With Jonas and Paul, “around” involved things like picking up Jonas so that he could touch the clothesline, jumping off the concrete sill of the house at a certain corner, and counting the chickens in the trees (really, the chicken slept there.)<\/p>\n
With Will, “around” involves a similar pattern (but unfortunately without the chickens.) The Joseph Street version of around leaves our house to the right, and going around our street block in a circle. Will points out certain things, performs specific acts in specific places, and basically explores his world each tiny detail at a time. This includes pointing to the ceramic frog in the garden of a house around the corner (“La Rana! Ribbit!”), saying “Woof, Woof” to the decorative dogs on an iron fence gate, sitting on the front steps of a particular house where he sometimes sees the owners sitting (“Hi!”), spinning in a circle on a stamped concrete driveway, pointing and getting very excited about the friendly cat and two dogs who live at the corner of Octavia and Laurel, peeking through a Will-sized hole in a fence, trying to open one gate that has a knob he can reach, “smelling” the black-eyed susans (still an exhale rather than an inhale), poking his finger in a certain hole in a patch of concrete sidewalk, straining to turn a spigot on the front of someone’s porch, and then once he’s turned the corner back onto Joseph Street, picking up two rocks, only to drop them a few steps later to pick up a stick. We do this walk three or more times a day. The neighbors are getting used to the routine to the point where they look forward to his little visits. <\/p>\n
We can’t so much as open the front door without the risk of Will running out, full speed, to begin “around.” (Luckily, we’ve trained him to wait for us to hold his hand before going down the front steps.) He LOVES it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Will’s favorite daily activity is “around.” This game began in Honduras during the summer of 2003 with Paul and Jonas, the then 22 month old son of my friend and colleague, Joanne Bailey. Paul spent a lot of time watching Joanne’s kids, especially Jonas, who had taken a special liking to Paul. While we worked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}