where wildly different is perfectly normal
He’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
He’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is

He’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is

After Christmas, birthdays, Halloween, and Pi Day, Geek Pride Day is a huge deal in the House of Chaos. One of the greatest parts of homeschooling is that we can spend the time not only enjoying A’s descent into Geekdom, but stand with him and run with it. This falls under “how homeschooling supports and protects a gifted kid’s emotional status” as well as “how homeschooling allows a gifted kid the time and space in which to explore current interests in depth, knowing that at some point interests will change and new things will be learned.” There’s no way he could pull off Geek Pride Day to the extent he wanted if he was still in school. He’d wantΒ to, but the other kids wouldn’t get it and he’d be embarrassed and his anxiety would have spiked yet again.

How geeky has A become in the last several months (coincidentally, since he left public school)? Well, he can recite Pi up to twentyish digits, can’t wait to celebrate Tau day (6.28) next month, went out of his mind with joy when he got THREE gift certificates to ThinkGeekΒ (couldn’t wait to get his geek on), watches documentaries on black holes/cosmology/theoretical physics for fun, and the greatest afternoon of the last six months was when we went to Fermilab’s family open house last month and he got to take a tour of the Linear Accelerator.

He has outgeeked his parents, and I’m drinking coffee from a Battlestar Galactica FRAK mug as I write this.

Earlier this week he sped through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a few hours. At dinner Tom quizzed him on it, convinced the child had just skimmed through it and didn’t absorb the actual story. Riiiiight. A not only followed the storyline, but was applying the humor to his own life, understands a lot of the jokes his father and I toss back and forth at each other, and now knows why “42” features prominently on my license plate. Awesome.

A has dressed the part of a geek today. He is wearing a Pi shirt, where the symbol is made up of a gazillion digits of pi (purchased from ThinkGeek with his gift certificates). He has on his Geek Pride Day button from ThinkGeek. On his wrist is a ginormous spy watch, also from ThinkGeek. He has an Apple drawstring bag filled with the following items: an old BlackBerry he bought at a yard sale, a portable doorbell that sounds like a phaser, a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his iPod Touch, and yes, a towel. I only wish it said Don’t Panic.

I am proud to say that my oldest son is a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.

7 Comments

  1. Allison G

    So this totally just made my day! I’m at work, click on a link to a ThinkGeek pic for Geek Pride Day, and who do I immediately see but A. I pull up the blog to tell you there’s a kid who looks suspiciously like your own on the ThinkGeek page, when, lo and behold, it IS your kid! How utterly awesome! As the resident geek here at work, I bow to A’s sincere love of all things science and geek-y.
    Oh, and has he been following the SpaceX Dragon capsule to the space station? There’s some pretty cool images of it out there this morning.
    Give him a hug for me – Al

  2. Thanks for sharing a photo of him. I love having a face to put to his stories.

    I have to admit that I have always resisted my inner geekdom. I married one, and I sprung from the combined loins of two, and I have one for a sister, but I always felt the pressure to keep a gentle distance from the label. But now I have to admit that my new 11 year old is a happy little geek and I need to let him– no, encourage him– to be who he is. I’m pretty sure that means I need to be who I am too.

    I wish your geeky A and my geeky A could meet!

    1. Jen

      Huh. I hadn’t put a picture up lately? I’ve gotten bad with photos the last several months; my computer strokes out if I try to work with pictures, so I just let it all slide.
      And some of my closest friends back in CO out-geeked even me. I miss them. At least I have my guys here. πŸ™‚

  3. Brilliant post! Absolutely – homeschooling allows us gifted people to be ourselves (our true authentic selves) without all that high school peer pressure junk.

    And yet again I am reminded of how much alike our sons appear to be! S (12) LOVES HHGTG! He read all of them (in hours) a few years ago – my brother questions “but does he get it?” – well, duh – he’s not laughing for the hell of it!

    Did you know that yesterday (in OZ) and probably still today where you are is Towel Day? Very appropriate because you should always know where your towel is πŸ™‚

    1. Jen

      That’s just it! Homeschooling lets him be HIM. I need to “encourage” him to pick up book two, but he just started reading The Mysterious Benedict Society, so I don’t want to interrupt that. πŸ™‚

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