September 20 letter

September 20, 2006

Has it only been a week since last I wrote? Amazing. It feels like it has been longer, or at any rate, that I have aged dramatically in the intervening period! Jason has now been in school for almost two weeks. The bus riding experiment appears to have been a failure. Jason informed me that there are too many people on the bus – and given the fact that when I went to meet him at school, he was amongst the last to get to his class, I take that to mean that when it comes time to get off the bus, the bigger kids crowd up and off first. He gets disoriented in the swirling masses and has to go find a bus monitor to get him redirected to class. I am proud of him that he figured out what to do and how to handle the situation but there is, at least at present, no need for him to continue to do so. Xander is much happier taking Jason to school. Jason is happier having us take him. Seems the solution is right there before me.

And that reminds me of something that happened yesterday that still has me smiling. Xander was a very tired little boy yesterday. Everything reduced him to tears – the clothes he had on, the food he ate, the toys he was playing with, but most especially saying ‘goodbye’ to his big brother. Jason was distressed by Xander’s tears and said ‘Xander, you have to let me go to school – I promise I will make you something special but I can only do that if I go to school.’ Xander was not mollified but Jason went off to class anyway. That afternoon, when we came to collect Jason, he came marching up to us, all smiles. ‘I have something special for Xander in my backpack’ he said, fishing inside it. ‘Let’s wait until we get home’ I suggested. Jason was not entirely satisfied with this but he waited. The moment we got home, he stopped inside the doorway and opened his backpack. Reaching in, he pulled out… a book! The school had had a bookfair and I had given him some money to buy a couple of books for himself. He had done so but he had also gone looking for a book for his brother. Xander was so delighted with the book that (1)I had to read it to him immediately and (2)he took it to bed with him when he went down for his nap – he fell asleep still holding on to it. Jason is amazing. It was such a sweet and thoughtful thing to do and it meant the world to his little brother.

I am sure that there are other tales to tell from the past week. The sad thing is that I am so tired at the moment, I have a hard time typing, let alone remembering what happened in the recent past. Last night was hard – the stereo in the boys’ room decided to quit so I had to go in, after they were asleep, and bang around setting up a new one. Then multiple times during the night, one or the other of the boys cried out with nightmares. That meant, of course, that I was up and down about every hour/hour and a half, soothing a child. Jason, who usually sleeps until 7, awoke at 4:40 this morning. Xander, who usually wakes about this time, is still asleep. Sigh. We will see how the day goes. The extra bedroom is pretty much ready. All we have to do is to move the crib. Then Xander will have his own room and there won’t be the concern that one boy will wake the other. Tom is not convinced that this is the best solution. He would rather keep the room as a playroom, a place to locate all the toys that have taken over the living room but then, he is not the one who has to get up repeatedly during the night to quite the boys so they don’t wake each other. I am hoping that, once they are apart, they will start sleeping better and maybe, just maybe, we will be able to move them back into the same room. Wish us luck.

We are here in Maple Valley for at least another year or two. I am rather dreading that, truth be told. There has been so much new construction in the area and the surface roads are not designed to handle the traffic flow. Already the road into MV from Renton is getting worse and worse. I dread to think what it will be like once the three new housing projects are finished and filled. Moreover, while the Tahoma School district currently has a good reputation, that is subject to change. Kent used to be good then there was huge influx of people who wanted to take advantage of it – but there was not enough money to handle the sudden overflow of students and so the district fell very far down the scale. Ah well, we will see what we will see.