Jonah and Pokemon

If any of you read my wife's blog you're no doubt up to date on all the latest antics of our boys. Jonah is loving going to school two days a week, and Nathan is having all sorts of adventures in learning the English language, and getting into everything, and tormenting his brother, and, well... being Nathan.

Jonah has taken up another interest as of late: Pokemon. His grasp of numbers and basic strategy is finally strong enough that I decided to have a go at teaching him the basics of this card game. And he picked it up fast! Much faster than I expected, to be sure. It was rough going at first. During the first two hands he was quite sure I was insane, and that this wouldn't be any fun at all. But then he started getting it. And then he started getting competitive. And then even devious...

I was pleasantly surprised to see his grasp of numbers was beyond even what I had thought it was. He easily and quickly identified all of the numbers between 10 and 90. However, when he drew Arcanine and put him into his hand (we play open handed right now) his eyes grew wide for a moment, then he asked me, "What's that number?" "That number?" I asked. "Oh, that's 100." This blew his mind, for two reasons. First, he immediately recognized that having a third number made it very big, and to him (as Sunny and I recently discovered) 100 embodies everything huge and vast ("There must be a hundred of them! Or maybe a hundred and thirty!"). Second, that meant Arcanine was huge, and "really hard" (as Jonah puts it), so he was now well situated to waste me.

Then the unthinkable happened. He had already played out his Growlithes. Now, as he was well aware, but some of my readers may not be, you cannot use Arcanine without Growlithe. All three of his had already been discarded. This is when I learned something else about my son. He really doesn't like to lose. I saw some faces during the next ten or fifteen minutes that I had never seen before (and I've seen quite a large range of his vast set of facial expressions).

Anyway, this didn't turn him off to the game. He still likes to play every couple days or so. This evening when I got home from work he had somehow found a large assortment of those erasers you can fit to the end of a pencil in various colors, about six colors, and must have been around forty erasers, and he had them all arranged on the coffee table. He explained to me that they were his deck, and started going through the list of what color was what type of thing, so on and so forth. I think we'll have to see about getting him some actual pokemon toys for his birthday this year...