Tag Archives: Griffin Says

Dreams

7:30am
Maggie: “It’s ORANGE SUN!! TIME TO WAKE UP!!!”
Griffin <groggily>: “Maggie, you woke me up from my favorite dream” <sad face>
Mama: “Sorry, honey. Can you tell me your favorite dream?”
Griffin: “I was playing a game with Mama. And no Maggie. And no Daddy.”

Arctic Bocce

We didn’t let a little snow and frigid temperatures interfere with our Thanksgiving Bocce game. Grandpa Jeff got out the snow blower and made us a court. The teams:

  1. Griffin, Nik, Alli, Pam
  2. Maggie, Andrew, Sarah, Jeff

We played to 11, and it was close to the very end. In the final round, 10-9, team 2 landed the clinching point. They simply had superior mastery of snow-braking techniques.

On the Roy side, the bocce tradition began at a rental house in Fort Bragg, California, on the Mendocino coast. We used to rent the place for Thanksgiving in the early 2000s, inviting friends and family for feast and fun. Here are two pictures from that era (with a slightly different climate!):

2002 - bocce court with the house and hot tub in the background
2002 – bocce court with the house and hot tub in the background
2004 - bocce court with the Pacific
2004 – bocce court with the glorious Pacific

Fishy Relatives

Griffin, at dinner last night:

“How do people actually get made?
Like how did the first people get made?”

This was not a question about reproduction—we’ve had a few conversations about that—but more of an ontological question about how humanity came into being in the first place.

Sarah gave a masterful overview of evolution and we looked at pictures on Wikipedia of various stages of human evolution. Before losing interest in the details, Griffin got far enough to state, “So, we’re related to fish.”

Evolution of Man
Irrelevant cartoon on the subject.

Kindergarten

Everything below is in Griffin’s words. It’s a bit stream-of-consciousness, but we just asked him to talk about Kindergarten. Occasionally we prompted him to give further details. – Andrew & Sarah


The bus stop.
The bus stop.
Maggie was there to see Griffin off on his big adventure.
Maggie was there to see Griffin off on his big adventure.

I like the puzzle maps. They are maps but they are puzzles: Africa, United States, and the other one that kind of looks like Africa (“South America?” “Uh-huh!”).

The trinomial and binomial cubes are boxes with blocks inside them and you try to match the pattern on top of the box.

Reading while waiting for the bus.
Reading while waiting for the bus.

I like the reading corner because it has a chair and there are two reading corners, one in the back of the room and one in the front of the room. I like the the one that’s up high with the stairs to go up, in the front of the room. I like to read the garden books and I like the pretend books and I like sitting in the reading corner too. There is only one garden book; it’s like a pretend garden and it goes all over the roof and he goes through it. It has lots of white flowers and yellow ones too. The pretend books are not real so like they are real books but they are not real people and stuff.

I like the computers too in the multi-purpose room. We try to match words sometimes.

We eat with silverware and sometimes our fingers. We have lots of tables which we have to set up. We sing this song before we eat:

For the golden corn and the apples on the tree,
for the golden butter and the honey for our tea,
for fruits and nuts and berries that grow along the way,
for birds and bees and flowers, we give thanks every day.

We also have another song that we sing at the rug:

Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Going up the tracks,
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Then we come right back.

First we go to Malaya’s house,
Then we go to James’s house,
Then we go to Crosby’s house,
Then we go to Tegan’s house.

Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Going up the tracks,
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Then we come right back.

First we go to Griffin’s house,
Then we go to Harrison’s house,
Then we go to Serenity’s house…

We keep singing like that until we go to everyone’s house.

The play structure! I love recess. Now we go on the play structure. The grass is medium new and medium not-new. The play structure is new; it was already built when I started school but the grass was new so we played out back instead of in the front. We like to play and tag and in the sand box. I like playing on the play structure too. We get to go outside every day, except when it is raining or super super cold.

I like my teacher Kristen and also Angela and Corinne, my side teachers. Angela passes out the food and she speaks Spanish.

I miss my sister when I go to school. It is a long day; I sometimes get tired.

When I get home, I like to snuggle with Maggie and also I say, “Hello Mommy and Daddy” if Daddy is home. I like to play with Maggie and when Mama and Daddy make dinner we like to play.

Griffin's first day: "Ten thumbs up!"
Griffin’s first day: “Ten thumbs up!”

Beautiful Day

Griffin woke up early this morning and intercepted me as I was finishing getting dressed. He wondered whether he had had a dream about a big “boom” that shook his bed or if it had really happened. In the darkness, in Sarah’s sewing room, we reviewed the facts. Had I had heard the boom? Was the dog next door barking? Did Maggie wake up? We determined that it was probably a dream, but it might have been a Boomba: a monster made of tires that can make really loud booming sounds. (This is the first I’ve heard of a Boomba, but Griffin knows many things that I don’t.)

Griff wanted to come downstairs and help me with breakfast. And he was a great helper—putting dishes away, starting the toaster, and asking many probing questions about my breakfast cooking technique. (Daddy, why don’t you put all the butter in the pan to watch it melt? What would happen if we turned the toaster to broil?)

Then, Daddy, can we listen to music? I put on my trusty Eels mix, and Griff sat with me while I ate, asking many questions about the songs and repeating the tracks that he liked. I explained that the lyrics had lots of inappropriate words, so he couldn’t sing them at school or at friend’s houses. He accepted this without question.

A few minutes later, someone peering in the window would have seen Griffin, in his PJs, and me, in my school clothes and backpack, pirouetting around the dining room, belting out the sublime refrain from Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues:

“Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day!”

And it is.

Master and Apprentice

After work yesterday:

Griffin: “Daddy, want to help me build my castle?”
Daddy: “Sure! Hmm, let’s put this block over here…”
Griffin: “No! That doesn’t go there. It should go here.”
Daddy: “Oh, ok. … Is this the wall of the castle?”
Griffin: “No!” <rolls eyes> “That’s a row of milk jugs stuck together.”
Daddy: “Ah, I see. Is this the castle living room?”
Griffin: “No! That’s the trap for catching bad guys.”

You know nothing, Jon Snow.

First Ice Cream Truck of 2014

A lovely, warm, Saturday evening, clouds looming with impending rain, the chimes of the ice cream truck arrived at the perfect moment.

(Griffin notes that this wasn’t really the first ice cream truck of 2014; it was the first one where we bought ice cream. )

Ice cream on the stoop
Ice cream on the stoop

Poor Turtles!

When Sarah told Griffin that she was eating a “Turtle Bar,” he frowned and asked,

“Is there really a turtle in there??”

(He’s convinced that we are bent on the destruction of turtles; see our recent post about Spicy Turtle Blood.)

Sarah with her turtle
Sarah with her turtle bar