About a month ago, my grandson, Isaiah, turned ten. For a couple of months before his birthday I had been teasing him a little about what it meant to become a double-digit person. “You know, Isaiah, when you turn ten you’re going to magically stop teasing your sister.” Or “Isaiah, did you know that double-digit kids automatically help around the house and keep their rooms clean?” I was hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy, while really banking on some of the things I know about ten-year-olds that I mentioned in my last blog post.

Darned if it didn’t work. Well, some of it. Turning ten seems to have made him more self-confident and self-reflective at the same time. He doesn’t seem to need to tease his almost-five-year-old sister as much. The teasing, when it happens, is more to get a reaction from her rather than to let his mom or his grandparents know he isn’t getting enough of the attention.

And the positive pleasure at being the big brother and getting her attention in this way is increasing. “Isaiah, watch me swim,” yells Lily across the Rec Center pool, and Isaiah stops his play with his peers while she takes her brave, tentative, dog-paddle strokes to him over her head in deeper water.

And, just the other day, I found Isaiah beside me at the kitchen sink, helping me dry all the pots and pans without complaint, rather than avoiding the chore and hoping for a game of “horse” at the driveway backboard. The game of horse was guaranteed as he put away the last pan. His room—well, that’s another story.

Isaiah has his baseball cards in scrapbooks and his YuGiOh and Pokemon cards all over the place. His birthday party had both girls and boys as guests and one of his key martial art buddies is a girl, a few belt degrees ahead of him, who is in his class at school. He has been increasingly dedicated to his martial arts classes, even as summer vacation began. His independent reading also is extending into the summer. He gobbles up facts from science books and the Discovery Channel and believes he knows more than his Papa (which he does about a lot of the science). He’s beginning to care about his hair and ask questions about puberty.

Although school hasn’t been his favorite thing, I suspect he’s secretly looking forward to fifth grade. He has told us he’s happy about his new teacher and he’s now able to actually talk about his frustrations with school work and his “disability,” as he defines his struggles with getting his ideas out of his head and into writing, organizing his “stuff,” and staying on task in class. Yup, a bright boy on a 504.

As for poet Billy Collins (see the last blog entry), turning ten has also brought some sadness to the surface for Isaiah and some anxiety about what the future holds for him and the world he is growing into. But I also suspect that fifth grade is going to be cool.