The cure for cable TV

Yesterday I turned on the television and found myself looking at S. Epatha Merkerson and Dennis Farina, which meant TNT was showing yet another episode of Law and Order. I assumed that Sonny knew nothing about the show, even though he is occasionally in the room when I watch it, because he rarely pays attention to the TV unless it is broadcasting the bright candy colors of the Disney channel. But he looked up as the television came on, saw the two actors, who were drinking coffee in the police station, and immediately said, “Uh-oh. Someone got killed. Someone got killed. Someone’s dead.”

I turned off the TV.

Paradox in Sneakers

Lately, Sonny has been very much into trains. His picture book of locomotives is at the top of his personal hit list, and most evenings we walk to the train station so that he can watch the trains go by and run himself ragged up and down the handicapped ramps. He’s been talking about riding the trains as well, not just looking at them, so this past weekend I decided to give him a treat. I intended to take him on the commuter line: One stop up, then turn around and come right back again.

He was jubilant. He was boisterous. He kept saying “Yes!” and “I cannot wait!” He would not walk next to me on the way to the train station — he kept running on ahead and had to be called back. He sat with his mother and sister on the train platform while I went to the opposite platform to buy tickets from the machine. When I looked over, he waved and hooted.

And when the train pulled into the station, he burst into tears. He pulled away when I tried to get him on. “I don’t want to ride the train!” he said. I got him on nevertheless and we sat together in a pair of seats. He kept crying — not a genuine, from the gut cry but the whine of a bad child actor. Poorly acted or not, I didn’t doubt its sincerity. Nor did anybody else in the train car.

We arrived at the next stop, found the right train back, and boarded. He was stoic now, though by no means happy. He sat looking out the window, silent. All right, fine. I’d prefer he actually enjoy this experience, but if this is the best I could get, I’d take it.

This experience has made me very, very nervous, and I shall tell you why: In two months’ time, I am taking my family to Florida. Sonny is going to go on his first airplane flight. He is very excited about it… for now.

The Odd Couple

So here’s the current State of the Kids.

Sonny remains his normal, cheerful, ebullient self… as long as he’s doing something he wants to do. Working with him on schoolwork-related tasks has become increasingly difficult. He gets frustrated very easily — sometimes immediately — and no amount of praise seems to encourage him. In just the last couple of weeks, he seems to be slipping back on reading. He is still at the bottom of the mathematical mountain, struggling with the most basic addition problems. And writing is such a nightmare that I hesitate to put him through it, even though clearly I must. It’s just so sad to see him berate himself: “Sloppy! Sloppy! I scribbled!” The sloppiness makes him upset, and when he gets upset he scribbles, and that’s sloppy, and that makes him upset.

All in all, I’m glad he’s back in summer school, where trained professionals are putting him through the paces, instead of his clueless parents. Alas, Sonny himself is not glad to be back in school. At some point in the last couple of weeks, he decided he doesn’t like school anymore. All weekend long he kept saying, like someone making a wish, “No school Monday.”

“Yes, Sonny. School on Monday.”

Commence the tears. The same tears we get before a dentist appointment: I may be helpless to change my fate but you can’t stop me from showing how I feel. Is this the same kid who, a month ago, always wanted to wait for his school van in the driveway? What the hell happened?

Meanwhile, Peanut has graduated first grade, and it’s becoming more and more clear that she is going to fall on the Mathematical side of the great Math/Verbal divide. She’s reading at an advanced level, which is strange, because she hates to read. Numbers, though — ah, numbers. She’s just started a third-grade workbook in math and is finding it insultingly easy. There are concepts coming up that she hasn’t yet been introduced to, so we’ll stick with it, but I expect she’ll be in the fourth-grade workbook before the end of the summer.

And recently I’ve started to teach her chess. When I brought up the subject, I didn’t think she’d be interested. She is. She likes the way the knights move — although she can never remember the name “knights”; she calls them “beasts.” At a friend’s suggestion, we’re playing now using only the pawns, the rooks, and the kings, so I can teach her very rudimentary strategy. It’s slow going, and I keep thinking she’s going to ditch it for more immediate pleasures, like the Playstation, but for the moment she’s sticking with it. (As long as there is time for the Playstation afterward, of course.)

These two kids, in short, could not be less alike. But thank heaven, they are still at an age where they love each other unconditionally. It’s clear that Peanut is more and more aware of her brother’s shortcomings — I’ll write more about that soon — but she accepts it with a shrug: If it takes him a little longer to take his turn in Chutes and Ladders, well, so be it. And she still prefers to share a bedroom with him. This congenial attitude won’t last forever, of course. I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for the day when Peanut views her brother with disdain instead of acceptance. But for now the two of them are not just brother and sister, but friends. If I was the praying sort, my prayer each night would be: Let that last just one more day.

One… more… time!

It is ridiculous to think I can revive this blog. I tried that months ago, didn’t I?, and the great revival puttered along for maybe three posts before once again dropping dead.

It’s not that I’m lazy — honest! In fact, it’s because I’m too damn busy. I’ve got my day job, I’ve got a couple of side jobs, I’ve got kids who can’t find their pajamas. Something had to fall off the table, and I decided that X-Dad was the least important of the many items I was trying to juggle.

But, dammit. I recently finished Michael Lewis’s new book, Home Game, about the births of his three children. And in there he talks about how quickly memories fade — particularly memories of one’s children. Holy smokes is that ever true. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that my second child, Peanut, was born walking and talking. I barely remember her as an infant. I’ve got stronger memories of Sonny, since he was the first, but even these have faded and will continue to fade.

I was re-reading some of my writing about my kids, here and elsewhere, and I thought, I have to keep this going. I never should have stopped: It’s as much a responsibility as my day job or my side jobs or trying to figure out what happened to my kids’ pajamas. So much has happened to Sonny even in the last few months. If I don’t write about it, all these events and memories will soon condense down to a vague, illegible smear.

Unfortunately, I’ve chosen a really bad time to start this up again. One of my side jobs is taking up a lot of my free time, plus I’m about to leave for a brief vacation. Frankly, I’m not crazy about the odds of this blog making it in the long term. But, well, what can we do but try, right? So welcome back to the revived X-Dad. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Just You Wait

4:30. Asking Sonny to do his homework when he is this grumpy is like asking… um, a very cranky and tired little boy to do something he doesn’t want to do. I promise I will sit with him, but it makes no difference. He scribbles a answer, and then says, “I scribbled! I’m sloppy!,” and then, in self-punishment, scribbles some more. Oh yeah, I can see we’re going to get lots of math done.

I give up on addition and move over to the second worksheet. He has to write ONE or TWO by each item, depending on its quantity. Sonny counts that there are two kittens in the first picture, puts the pencil on the paper, and writes JFAJKLFSKLDGJIEIJFHAHF, or at least that’s what it looks like.

I decide that maybe we won’t do homework right now.

5:45. After dinner we try one more time, and it’s like maybe my wife performed an exorcism on Sonny while I was checking e-mail. Totally different kid. He writes ONE and TWO as appropriate, and they are legible if not neat. He accepts praise from me with grandiose high-fives. We move over to addition, where he gets stuff wrong but doesn’t mind when I correct him. We work it out. He ends the session proud of himself and ready to play Star Wars, his promised reward. He is happy for the rest of the evening.

Note to future self: Remember the power of giving up and trying again later.

Stuck in the Mudflats With You

This weekend’s swimming lesson went much better from Sonny’s perspective: The woman with the keys never showed up, so we never got anywhere near the pool.

The wife had taken Peanut on a bike-riding playdate — we’re trying to ease her into allowing us to take off the training wheels. So it was Sonny and me and a gorgeous day. When Sonny said he wanted to go to the beach, I did not hesitate. He grabbed his industrial-size digger, I grabbed my book, and off we went. No towels, no sunblock, no blanket. Just two men on an impulse. All we needed was a keg of beer, but neither of us drink, so that would have been odd.

The tide was out, which is a great time to be at the beach. The water has receded practically to Asia — you can walk forever out into where the water used to be, looking at very confused hermit crabs and about one quazillion snails. Sonny asked for permission to run out there even though he was wearing sneakers. I said sure! So you get muddy! You’re a little boy! Go get filthy for a change!

Miles away, my wife looked up sharply, somehow sensing that her husband was doing something boneheaded.

It was fine, really. Sonny ran all the way out to the tideline and threw rocks. I could hear him laughing and howling even though he was a football field’s distance away from me. I read my book and enjoyed the breezes and the sunshine. All was right with the world.

When I next looked up, Sonny was face down in the mud, trying to pull himself back to a standing position. He was trying to get back to me, but had walked through a particularly muddy piece of beachfront property. The mud had eaten his sneakers and was starting on his ankles. He was rooted to the spot. Every time he tried to lift his leg, he fell again.

This was one of those moments when a father learns just how fast he can run.

“I’m stuck,” Sonny told me when I got there. He wasn’t crying, but he was a long way from happy.

I reached for him with two hands and yanked him out of the goo. “My shoe came off!” he said. Yes, it certainly did. Sonny stood there covered in mud, sopping wet, with one shoe remaining and his other foot clad in a sock so wet it had turned transparent. I stretched out and grabbed back his other shoe — it came loose from the ground with a sound like SHPLORK. (No, it didn’t. But it should have.)

Now I had to get Sonny back to the car. He was not a happy beachcomber. “I fell! I’m dirty!” he kept saying. Somehow I succeeded in keeping the situation light enough that he didn’t get too despondent. I wanted him to see that this was all very silly. Which it was. Nobody likes being wet and muddy, though, so for now he was pretty unhappy. By the time we got home, though, he was more or less back to his old self. He started walking up the driveway, and he looked at his wet feet and the tracks he was leaving behind. “Footprints!” he yelled, and laughed.

He undressed on the enclosed porch, and I took his sneakers and washed them out with a hose. They should be dry again by the year 2015. We both took showers, I got Sonny into his pajamas, and we spent the rest of the day indoors. Some days are too nice to spoil by actually going outside.

The Water is Wide

We signed Sonny up for special ed swimming lessons. Apparently the first three or four lessons will cover “getting your child into the swimming pool.”

I am reasonably certain I did not dream the summer of 2006. Back then, Sonny attended a summer program that included time in the high school swimming pool. I remember thinking: Good luck, but the couple of times I went to observe him, he laughed in the arms of the lifeguard or counselor, and splashed himself silly, and threw a basketball .00001 inches into the hoop, and in general had himself a fine old time.

Did we build on that positive experience? Noooooo.

Fast forward a couple of years, and now we’re taking Sonny and Peanut to that same pool for public swim. As soon as Sonny saw the pool, he started crying. What the? Did he not remember having the time of his life in that pool, back when he was, um, six years old? It took much of that summer to get him back in, and even then he clung to me like a barnacle on a shipwreck.

Now we want to teach him how to swim, and we’re back to my original thought back in 2006: Good luck. After about twenty minutes, I convinced him to sit with his feet in the water, so that he could splash me. (I was in the pool. Freezing my eyeballs out, to be perfectly honest.) I would occasionally splash him, which he found amusing enough, but not so much that he now intended to move on to full-body immersion. So we played catch with a plastic dolphin, and he continued to splash me, and that was the end of his first swimming lesson.

Hopefully before this whole thing ends six weeks from now, I’ll have succeeded in getting him moist. And hopefully the water will get a little warmer, because right now I’m not looking forward to getting back into that pool myself.

Just Couldn’t Stay Away

All right, darn it, I’m going to get this started again. I’m not going to blog every day, because I don’t want this to feel like a chore. But I also don’t want my kids’ childhoods to slip away from me. Some parents take a million photographs, or keep the videocamera glued to their hands at all times. I write. Or did. And now I will again.

So! Where to begin? Sonny and Peanut are both doing well. We just tweaked Sonny’s medication — the first two hours of his school day he was cranky and annoyed and throwing things. (”Not making good choices,” in the diplomatic parlance of the special ed industry.) Now he’s up to 5mg of methylin in the mornings and another 5mg at 11:00 or so. He’s taking risperdal as well (5mg divided up over the course of the day), as well as depakote syrup in the morning.

Speaking of risperdal, did you all see this? It’s another reason I’m sorry I walked away from this blog for so long. I missed my opportunity to curse out Dr. Joseph Biederman in a timely manner. What a putz. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this soon.

Anyway… what else has happened in the last couple of months? My kids are now playing video games. Specifically, Lego Star Wars. They are total addicts. Despite having never seen the movies (we’ve tried; they find them boring), my kids can name all the characters and whether they are good or bad. This past weekend, they bought plastic light sabers. I asked Sonny: Who uses a light saber? “Skywalker!” he cried. “And Darvader! Skywalker’s father!” Thus is the new generation converted to the Cult of Lucas.

Sonny has gotten surprisingly adept at knowing which buttons to press, although he sees the videogame as a playground where he can jump around and shoot things. This frustrates Peanut to no end. She wants to play the levels, solve the puzzles, defeat the bad guys. But, like a bad buddy movie, she’s stuck with a partner who prefers to blow things up indiscriminately and then jump off cliffs because he likes the sound R2D2 makes when he’s falling to his death.

Her patience with Sonny is really quite amazing. She doesn’t demand that Sonny not play the videogame, and she doesn’t yell at him that he’s not playing right. She simply finds a way to have fun playing with her brother even though she’d rather be playing the game her own way. Her uncomplaining nature and her acceptance of her brother make me so proud of her I could pop.

We still haven’t had The Conversation where we spell out in detail what’s wrong with Sonny, but it’s clear she’s picking up much of it anyway. This past weekend at the playground down the block, a little girl Peanut knows from the school bus asked if Sonny was her brother or her friend. “He’s my brother,” Peanut said. “Sometimes he doesn’t talk right and sometimes he doesn’t make a lot of sense. But he’s trying his best.” With the matter thus settled, they all got busy on the slide.

Sorry, folks

My little experiment in blogging has probably come to an end.

Updated to add: Everybody is fine, folks! I’m not leaving for health reasons — not mine, not Sonny’s. I simply don’t have time to do this amid all the other stuff I need to do. Maybe I’ll start it up again at some point, but that point won’t be soon. Again, sorry.

You Never Know From One Moment To The Next

Two hours after Sonny brings home a behavior sheet with the not-a-good-boy box checked off (”refused to do his work today”), he sits calmly at the kitchen table and does his math homework like math has never been a problem for him. 5+4? No sweat. 6+3? 8+2? He was like, geez, people, give me some credit here, I can do this in my sleep. Then he traced letters (sloppily) and colored with crayons (insanely sloppily), and then he shouted, “I earn Lumpy Pillow!” I’m used to bad behavior at school overflowing into the evening hours, but last night was really one of his better nights. He actually went to bed a little late, because he was reading so nicely with his mom. The kid’s like a roulette wheel — I never know where to place my bet.

I’m on the road today through the weekend. Have a good one — back Tuesday.