Playdate? Party? Golf!

Every week, my son has a homework assignment where he has to write about one fun thing that he did over the weekend. Kai does not like to write, so he does not enjoy this assignment at all. It usually takes a lot of “encouragement” to get him to complete it.

But for us, it is always interesting to see what he eventually chooses to write about. Oftentimes the activity he picks differs from what we would have chosen for him.

This weekend, he could have written about playing with his young cousins who came over for dinner last night. We don’t see them all that often so it was a bit of a special occasion. Kai usually looks forward to seeing them, but this time he didn’t seem all that interested in playing with them when they first arrived. I had to facilitate, and Kai finally chose to play with marbles.

His two cousins took to the activity right away and were very creative with their marble runs. Kai mostly did his own thing – counting the marbles, looking at the numbers printed on the bottom of the marble-run pieces, throwing the marbles – but I was somewhat satisfied that he at least played in their vicinity and, at times, interacted with them.

After dinner, while the adults lingered at the table and chatted, the kids went downstairs and played some more. I wondered how Kai was doing without my presence. A little while later, his 10-year old cousin came up and asked me to come downstairs to supervise. Though she did not say so, I think Kai was disrupting them.

So, this wasn’t the most successful playdate. But it was still nice to have his cousins and aunt and uncle over. I considered it the highlight of the weekend.

But Kai did not write about that.

He also could have written about the Halloween party he went to yesterday afternoon. I may write more about that later in the week if I have time. He doesn’t go to parties every weekend so it was another somewhat special thing he could have written about.

But he did not.

He wrote about playing miniature golf.

He, my wife, and my father-in-law went to an indoor mini-golf place where you play in a dimly lit area with glow-in-the-dark balls and clubs. The black lights give my wife headaches, but Kai loves going there.

We’ve been to other, more creative mini-golf courses that don’t induce headaches, but Kai prefers this place. I think it is because he can play 36 holes instead of just 18.

As with most things that involve numbers, the activity itself is not his primary interest. Rather, he loves going from hole to hole and checking out all the numbers.

On his homework assignment, he took much longer than necessary, as he had to draw a layout of the course before writing about it.

As parents, I think most of us have ideas on what things stand out. But our kids have their own ideas.

In my son’s case, on this weekend, nothing was better than 36 holes of glow-in-the-dark golf.