More than a love affair

To say Jasper likes balls would not only be a wild understatement but it would also do a disservice to his unwavering dedication to a love of all things spherical. It’s actually not even just spheres; festoon lighting, decorative vases, cut crystal bottle stoppers, gatepost toppers, security cameras and of course, all the globe sculptures in our apartment complex (of which there are now 5, since a new slingshot one was added to the collection.) Anything that can be broadly described as ‘round’ merits a loud, animated, repeated-until-someone-acknowledges-it, exclamation of “BAW!!”

He’s only just stopped including placemats under the ‘blella term baw because he has learned to say ma’ (the ‘t’ is silent for now). It seems 2D or 3D, he still knows a ball when he sees one. It has got to the point where he can’t leave the house without someone shouting “baw” at him to get his attention. The security guards greet him with a “baw” and an outstretched arm for a fistbump, the lifeguards will say “Jasper, where’s the baw?”, the cleaning staff make ‘where is it’ arm signals saying “Jasper…baw?”, and even the little gang of similar aged babies will immediately say “baw!” if someone says the word “Jasper”. It’s impressive word association, I’ll give them that. Even if one day he woke up and decided balls were no longer for him, or with a rare form of amnesia that led him to forget the existence of balls, he’d be an addict once more by the time he left the compound purely because of the number of mentions he would hear of this wonderful-sounding mystery called a ‘baw’.

A typical day looks like this:

Jasper wakes up in his room around 6.30am and shouts for mama and baba. Once he has been extracted from his cot and brought into our room, he immediately escapes and runs with his little splatting footsteps (marble floors) to the living room, aka Jasper’s Ball Emporium. He returns shortly with any combination of cricket bat/ tennis racket/ hockey stick/ golf club/ random piece of surprisingly strong cardboard and cricket/ tennis/ golf/ woboba/ foot/ rugby/ volley/ bouncy/ moon/ squash/ racquetball/ wooden/ beach ball. In recent days, he has taken to tugging at baba’s leg and saying ‘down’, to indicate Dylan needs to get out of bed and get ready for the morning match. Before he had ‘down’ in his vocabulary, a smack in the face with a cricket bat (it’s foam, luckily for Dylan) would wield the same result. While I make breakfast, Jasper and Dylan practice any or all of the above sports (it takes me around 10 minutes from fridge to plate) and then we eat. With breakfast done, Jasper returns to his Emporium, pausing his ball play only for tooth cleaning (this morning I had to clean the teeth of the golf ball - no word of a lie), face washing (which actually results in a high octane chase around the living room during which Jasper slalems through the scattered ball collection), and dressing (during which he adeptly transfers whichever ball he is holding from hand to hand so I can do his sleeves). A ball usually comes to school with us, and when he arrives at school, the teachers will say “Morning Jasper! Ball, ball!” in the same way you might say “come in, come in” to a normal person entering your place of work or residence. In the hours when he’s not sleeping, he plays downstairs in our apartment building, with an array of different children, and an array of different balls. Even if he takes 10 balls down with him, he will pinpoint the one ball that’s not his and make a beeline for that one. If it’s not raining, he doesn’t think twice about running onto a pitch full of 16 year olds to take a closer look at their football, or wandering into the basketball court to see if he can give their ball a quick once-over. Some days we book the squash court and invite all the other little people to join us playing with as many balls as we can carry. Between dinner and bath time is when things get a little dangerous as he fights tiredness with erratic swing techniques, cannoning tennis balls of paintings, table tops and one day soon, the TV. Before we put him to sleep we have to do a quick sweep of his room to ensure there are no balls in there to avoid him stirring and deciding it’s time for a midnight cricket session. Once Jasper is asleep, Dylan and I pack up all the balls in their various boxes and buckets and wonder where we went wrong.

For the love of balls!

Or right. To his credit, Jasper is remarkable. At 19 months old he can drop a tennis ball with one hand and hit it with the racket in the other. He can lob a cricket ball over 2 metres, and can hit a bouncy ball either full toss or off the bounce, according to how it’s fed to him. He knows how to dig a volleyball and has a delightful little ‘twist and release’ technique for the rugby ball. He can dribble a football, or drop kick it, and he knows to take a big run up every time he wants to kick it hard. He watches the different sports on TV and genuinely seems to take in the different styles and techniques available. He refers to them mostly by their sounds, with an accompanying action - cricket is a sort of back-of-the-throat ‘quack’, a bit like a duck, but trying to be his best impression of the sound the ball makes when it hits a real, willow bat. Tennis is ‘pssshh’, which we think is the sound of the bounce on clay (we watched a lot of the french open around the time he was assigning a sound to tennis) with a forehand swing. Basketball is ‘ba ba’ with his hand bouncing an invisible ball. Hockey and golf seem to be ‘ckuhkuhluhkuh’, which might be the sound the hockey stick makes on the marble, or could be from the word ‘hockey’. The only concern we have is that he is almost certainly a lefty, or at least, he throws left-handed. That said, he might only throw with his left because his right is normally holding an implement. Not that we have anything against lefties, per se, but it will make it harder for us to nurture this talent and hone his techniques. If we are going to retire off this skillset, we might need to bring in an expert. Or a team of experts. Depending on if he ever settles on a single sport for longer than 5 minutes. His love of balls of course extends to balloons, and his pronunciation for them is a sort of glottal ‘bagunnn’, where the double ‘ll’ is replaced by a sort of nasal grunt.

One difficulty I have had with Jasper is separating his ‘Ooh, a ball’ excitement from his ‘does it bounce?’ curiosity. Pomegranates, it turns out, not only do not bounce, but make an incredible mess in a supermarket aisle. Echo Dot speakers, do not bounce. Watermelons, thankfully, are too heavy to try to bounce. Wooden balls, do not bounce and really hurt when they land on peoples’ feet. Large, concrete balls surrounding the lawns of the Willingdon Club where the ANZAC Day service is solemnly underway, do not bounce. Peas, unfortunately, do bounce and I hate to think how many are under our sofa now. Another challenge is when we are unexpectedly ambushed by balloons. Just last weekend we popped out to a bar-restaurant for an early dinner, only to arrive and discover there was a baby shower being held in the same venue. There were pastel balloons for days…all perfectly arranged in arches, and towers, and centrepieces and ceiling drapes, and wall hangings. Needless to say, Jasper did not want to sit nicely and eat his asian-fusion small plates while Dylan and I sipped our miso sours. No. He wanted to run the balloon gauntlet and tear down the hours of work that must have gone into decorating. I will have to remember to ask in future “do you have anything that could be mistaken for a baw or bagunnn in your restaurant?”

Other people say “Oh my little boy is obsessed with balls too”, and then I observe them as they happily play with other things. When I say Jasper is obsessed, I mean he is obsessed to the point of laser focus and sniper vision. He can sniff a ball, or a balloon, out a mile away. When we go to watch Dylan playing touch rugby on a Sunday, Jasper can spot rotting, mouldy footballs half-hidden in the undergrowth a full football pitch’s length away. Or rotting mouldy basketballs tangled in foliage one full football pitch and two basketball court width’s away. He has been known to take a tennis ball right out of a dog’s mouth. He knows where every picture of a ball is on every page in every book. He points out balls in the background of sets on TV shows, and is glued to any sports coverage making sure we see every ball they show us, including the hard-to-spot golf balls on fleeting masters coverage.

I believe we can trace Jasper’s obsession back to the introduction of the lesser known member of the ball-and-whacker sport family, Spoonball. Spoonball (or at least our branch of it) owes its origins to what we affectionately now call COVID-under-coup in July 2021, when Dylan and I were trapped in our house for 2 weeks with a 7 month old baby, no nanny, and nothing but our existing possessions to entertain us. Photo records suggest that the first variation actually involved a spoon and an egg (a toy one, we weren’t stupid enough to play with real eggs while our cleaning lady wasn’t allowed to visit). The spoon was actually more of a textured spatula, but it traveled with us from Myanmar, to Ireland, to Jersey, to London, back to Jersey, to Australia and now to India. Over time, the sport of Spoonball has grown to encompass SpoonBalloon too, and an increasingly wide range of spoons, scoops and salad servers have been accepted. Just last week we played a bit of spaghetti spoon and sponge ball Spoonball. Spoonball can be played by all ages from 7 months upwards, starting with the beginner level tummy slither style, progressing on to the slightly faster-paced crawler style, and advancing finally to the full height running style Spoonball.

In case Jasper does go on to become a famous professional sportsman, I will absolutely be trademarking Spoonball™ as a pre-junior training program for future athletes. For now, we will just lean into his reputation around IndiaBulls in case any IPL scouts come knocking.