Sonny’s cheerful, upbeat streak continues unabated. Did I really start this blog to document the searing drama of raising a Fragile X child? There hasn’t been any! Come on, Sonny, work with me here! I need a kid who’s gonna give me some decent material! Don’t make me call the casting department.
His teacher, at our request, has started sending home homework, and yesterday was the first day in a couple of weeks that I sat down with Sonny to get some serious work done. He was superb, giving me a solid effort for fifteen minutes or so, with just one small break along the way. You might think fifteen minutes is nothing to get excited about, but it’s triple his attention span from a few weeks ago. I’m tempted to start taking his methylin myself.
The work itself was merely okay. He needed a good deal of prompting to accurately count dimes and pennies. And he had a mighty hard time identifying a picture with its proper sentence. Is that “a cat with a fan?” Or is it “a cap with a fin?” It didn’t help that the drawing seemed to have been made by a child. It could have been a cat with a fan, or it might have been a dog with a microwave oven, or it might have been a walrus with a crystal ball. Your guess is as good as mine.
Anyway, the real lesson was not counting money, nor identifying animals and their consumer products, but simply controlling the pencil on the page. Everything he writes, it looks like Sonny was holding the pencil in his mouth. I’m gratified to see that they’re really drilling him in this at school — he comes home every day with a sheet of handwritten numbers and letters and words, and we’re already seeing some minor improvement. I’d love to see him write a whole sentence — one he makes up himself! — before the year is out.
In other child news, Peanut spoke with her grandfather yesterday, something she has previously refused to do. She loves her Papa just fine, but all kids are assigned quirks from some cosmic Quirk Generator, and Peanut’s was this: She claimed to only like Papa’s voice when she was at his house. Not on the telephone! Is that Papa on the phone? I cannot talk to him! NOOOO! If I extended the phone to her, she would cover her ears and run away. (She is perfectly willing to talk to her Nana, however. In fact, just try getting her to shut up once she’s started.)
A few weeks ago, the kids’ computer broke. Or, put another way, a few weeks ago, Sonny broke his computer. Papa offered to buy a new one, and I accepted. Yesterday I informed Peanut of this, and told her she would have to be polite and say thank you. On the phone. Right now.
I got my father on the line and Peanut nervously accepted the phone and put it to her face. She all but whispered thank you. Papa asked a question. Peanut answered it, her voice getting a little stronger. Papa said something else and Peanut said, “No! That’s silly!”, and then she proceeded to tell her grandfather about her day in school, and then she moved on to some other subject, and I think it was my father who finally had to cut off the conversation. Peanut’s conclusion: “I like his voice after all!”
Then she asked when the computer would arrive. All hail the motivating power of pure, undiluted greed.
