my eye contact says I’m listening, mm hmm

When I think about how to describe this, the first thing that I want to say is that I love my son so, so much, I adore this person, he is so uniquely himself and himself is so awesome. So with all this love in my heart, when he talks I listen. I listen and I try to hear. I look him in his green-brown eyes and my eye contact says I’m listening.

He is so sweet and he means well when he tells me the details of a virtual event that has occurred in one of his games. (Sometimes video games, sometimes just regular games that he plays with his toys.) I just have no clue what he is talking about and though I’m trying to hear, my mind is trying to wander. And the words keep tumbling out of his mouth and to my brain it sounds like, “blah blah blah something blah digging blah something blah blah destroy blah blah blah respawn…”

Today I really worked at listening to every word my 8yo son was saying, with the intention of remembering just so I could report here to give context to what I’m trying to describe. Here is, to the best of my memory, what he said,

I dug all the way down to the end of the world, I was in Survival, I mean Creative. I was in Creative, and I dug down, down, when you’re in Creative it just takes one hit to destroy a block, so I dug and dug and dug, way, way down, and then I looked up and it was so high, I was so far down, and then I kept digging and digging, and I went all the way down to the end and it was just black. And I died, and then I respawned. When you are in Creative, the only way to die is to dig all the way down to the end. When I respawned I was in my house. When you respawn you start over in the nearest safe place and the nearest safe place was my house.

He starts to leave my room, but comes back and says,

It should be that you dig all the way down and then you reach lava. You don’t die in lava on Creative, you just catch on fire and the only way to put out the fire is to go in water.

He does this all the time. He’ll come find me, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing and, with zero preamble, he’ll launch right into one of these long, long descriptions.

I don’t mean to space out when he goes on these long tangents. But I won’t be tested later and instead of paying attention to each word I’m thinking, “He is so articulate, he is getting so tall, my little guy is growing up, golly, he is so darn cute.” He’d have my head if he knew I was thinking those things while he is telling me details of conquest and adventure and success.

100 non-redeemable points go to each and every one of you who knows what my son was talking about and mentions it in the comments.