Yesterday, Danya went to Dominic’s birthday party. To help assuage the younger-brother-grief, Eric took Tima out for a special Daddy-time. First, though, Tima asked him to play a game with him. He used to always request to play war, but now he requested chess. Although we observe the two boys playing chess against each other constantly, Eric was still surprised by Tima’s skills. Well, relative skills for a four-year-old! Eric saw that Tima understands the basic strategy of ‘I move here, you kill me, and then I’ll kill you with this other piece.’ And, by the way, his language is truly that war-like. He often plays where one piece ‘shoots’ the other to kill it. He knows how each piece moves, but often makes small mistakes with the knights and queen. (Somehow, the queen often curves a bit in her trajectory.)
A few days ago, Tima was playing by himself, setting up a ‘check-mate’ scenario, which was the first I understood that he knew the goal of the game. One of the amazing things is that we haven’t taught Tima any of this. It has all come from Danya.
For the rest of their time together, Eric took Tima out for ice cream, and also gave him a small stuffed puppy that he had debated over at the toy store (when he decided to instead spending his allowance on a shiny sword with sheath.) That brings our black-and-white-puppy count to 9. Do you think it will finally be enough?
Tima’s plan for the Titanic:
The boys like to pretend that our apartment is the Titanic. When I asked if there were enough life boats this time, Tima claimed we didn’t need them. “We can stick our swords in the ice. And then we can climb on, and then use our light sabers to move the ice away from the Titanic.” Danya adds, “Because light sabers are very powerful.”
