Capitalist

Dad: "Grafton, come on! I don't want you to get pizza sauce on the wall of my house."

Grafton: "It's not your wall. It's the bank's!"

First Basketball Game

Grafton played his first competitive basketball game today at Mosier. It took a while for both teams to get the hang of playing a real basketball game, but I was impressed by everyone's skills by the end of the game. Similar to soccer, Grafton was very fast moving up and down the court and had high intensity when on defense. He got a few shots off, but no baskets yet. I think he'll do great as he continues to figure out the flow of the game. I definitely noticed that when he was playing poing guard that he could dribble the ball up the court with looking at the ball, and was able to keep an eye on his teammates.

By Ear

Grafton realized he could play some his piano songs by ear and he performed a couple for me this morning. I think this is great milestone in his musical career!

Chinese Instruction

Grafton has been occasionally teaching his parents the Chinese symbols that he's learning at school. Today he introduced some news one to me that are particularly hard to pronounce. In response to my attempts, he gave up on me said, "Dad, we'll work on it."

Hardball

Grafton and Dad played catch with a real baseball today. Dad was a little nervous at first, worrying it would end up with a bruised face (not saying on who...). But no such thing happened. And Grafton's arm packs some heat! And he's catching a good bit too in his undersized glove.

Old Books Must Be the Best

Mom: "Why do always choose the old, beat up books from the library at school?"
Grafton: "Mom! That means a lot of people got them and [so] they are the best books!"

Another coder?

I introduced Grafton to the "Lightbot One Hour Coding" app, which is an educational app that teaches the basics of programming in a visual way. He picked up the programming environment quickly and with little help proceeded through Level 1. He was usually able to figure out where a bug in a given program existed and to remove and redo the undesired commands. Level 2 required use of procedures--a set of repeated commands that can be packaged into a single, reusable higher-level command. Grafton immediately recognized how to make use of this programming abstraction, and how it helped simplify and shorten the main program, which gave me great pleasure to witness. He knew exactly when it was appropriate to call the procedure from his main program. I think what made me happiest of all is that he kept at it for almost an hour and repeatedly declared "I love programming!" If this is the start of his programming education, he'll have had a two year jump on his Dad--so I look forward to seeing where this takes him.