November 22 letter

November 22, 2006

Back again and the rivers are nigh to overflowing. Each day starts out, it seems, with the promise of sunshine. But it is cold sunshine. Then, when it seems as if, maybe, just maybe, it will have warmed up enough to be sane to go outside, the rains come. As you can imagine, with two very active little boys, this becomes something of a challenge, especially since their mother is intensely cold sensitive and their father has been having to work late most everyday. I did take them to a playspace yesterday but Jason is really getting too big for those places, I fear. On the other hand, Xander was thrilled to bits to have his brother paying attention to him, and charged around behind his beloved ‘bahbah’, following every direction with delight. I shall have to come up with a better solution. We have taken the boys outside, of course, despite the rain and cold conditions but again, Jason has rather out grown the backyard – and the parks are not really safe as the play equipment is very slippery when wet. Sigh. Such are the challenges of parenthood, I suppose.

Now on to stories. I have two Xander stories and then I shall tell you the Jason ones. First, Xander is tricky. He has been trying to come up with solutions to his mother’s (and father’s) habit of denying his requests. The other day, he told me that he wanted to watch a movie. I said ‘Not today.’ He thought about that, hard, for a few moments and then announced ‘Mommy, you are Xander and I am Mommy.’ I shrugged, ‘okay’ I said, not thinking through the implications. ‘Xander, you go to bed. I am going to watch a mobee!’ I looked at him, he looked hopeful. I said, in the guise of Xander ‘But I don’t WANT to go to bed!’ ‘You go to bed!’ he said firmly ‘You too little!’ Hmmm… He has tried that switch tactic a couple of times without much success.

My other Xander story is related to poetry that we read to the boys. Have you ever read the A.A. Milne poem ‘The King’? The first line is ‘The King told the Queen and the Queen told the Dairymaid, ‘Could we have some butter for the Royal slice of bread?’ I think we may have read that poem a bit too often for the other night at dinner, little mister announced: “Mommy, I am King.” I blinked. “Okay” “You are Dairymaid. I want butter for my bread!” He has the most impressive memory, that child. He already has his ‘favorite’ books memorized, as well as quite a few of his brother’s favorites. I shouldn’t be surprised if he were to be an early reader…

He did quite well, actually, when Tom and I dropped him off at my friend, Andrea’s house. She had offered to watch the boys so that Tom and I could go out to celebrate our anniversary. We only went for two hours – we took the boys after Xander’s nap and had to collect them by 4:30 as it was Jon’s birthday (Andrea’s husband). According to Andrea, Xander asked once ‘Where’d my Mommy go?’ She responded ‘She went to get coffee. She will be back soon.’ He said ‘Okay’ and went back to the much more interesting business of following his big brother, his brother’s friend, Rowan, and Rowan’s little brother, Colin, around. So that was a relief.

There are other Xander stories, I am sure, but those are the two that stand out – oh, except for the fact that he is now in his ‘big boy’ bed – something that delights him no end, and so far, he has done quite well in that bed. If I remember the others while writing I shall, of course, include them!

As for Jason, we are taking him out of school effective immediately. The meeting with his teacher was a fiasco. We were met not just by his teacher but by his teacher, the Principal and the Dean of Students. (The latter was clearly uncomfortable and actually disagreed with the Principal regarding Jason at one point.) The upshot of the whole thing was that the Principal, a cold stone bitch, has decided that Jason is ‘trouble’ and a ‘problem.’ There was nothing, in her commentary, that demonstrated that she had any awareness or concern for him as a person, a child, an individual. There was also no attempt at any sort of ‘plan’ to remedy the situation, just a lot of ‘we don’t want trouble’ and ‘we don’t want this to become a serious problem’ and ‘you need to talk to him about this at home.’ And what was ‘this’? Hmmm… well, there was concern that he doesn’t draw representational pictures consistently. My response to that was ‘Tell him that you want him to draw a picture that you will recognize.’ He is quite capable of that, but unless so directed, he draws his ‘impressions’ of things. Then there was concern about his paying attention in class. After listening to the teacher’s review of Jason’s class work in which she told us that Jason had already met/exceeded more than 75% of the minimum expectations for the entire year, Tom asked what sorts of options Jason had to prevent boredom. She said ‘Oh, Jason doesn’t get bored. He always finds something to do.’ But that, as my husband pointed out, is the root of the problem. He has completed whatever she set him to do and now… what? I can see that it is a ‘problem’ for her but it is a problem that she, as his teacher, needs to be able to resolve.