Tag: the boy

A recent behavior that the boy has begun to manifest is a strange sort of denial when we yell at him. It’s a strange amalgam of rage, frustration and rationalization that he’s the aggrieved party and we are always singling him out. It’s a straight up attempt at emotional blackmail to flip the script and make us feel guilty for telling him he acted foolishly, stupidly, carelessly or some combination of the preceding plus other things I failed to mention. Some of this is to be expected since the totality of his behaviors reveal a fairly myopic view of the world. Welcome to the world of 8 year olds, I suppose.

What his near-tearful fits fail to account for is that the yell is typically preceded by a notice that he’s pushing the line, followed by a warning that he’s going to get in trouble, followed by an ultimatum that disaster is imminent. I know while reading that you might be thinking “Hey, what about all the decisiveness stuff you’ve talked about in the past? Clearly, he’s just going along because he knows he’ll get several chances before he finally gets it.”

To which I say, it’s subtle. The fact is, the Wife and I can’t always be around to act as his brake for poor behavior. He needs to learn to slow down and stop himself. I like to think that’s what we’re exercising- his ability to identify that he’s getting out of control, to recognize his actions might have negative consequences, to stop himself before he really does get in trouble. It’s possible that those abilities are beyond him at this point, but we won’t know unless we try. Besides, am I supposed to believe that there’s a judgment switch inside him that at some point in the future gets flipped on and suddenly, he can do it?

Maybe so, but we’re just parents. So we’ll put him through his paces anyway, thank you very much.

Take yesterday as an example. Out on the deck, the boy had brought out his large beach ball. The Wife knew what was going to happen the moment it appeared on the deck, and she warned him “Don’t throw is near the plants or you’ll break them.” Not 30 seconds later, the boy carelessly kicks the ball and almost knocks down one of my desert roses. The Wife doesn’t yell, but gives him the firm “I told you so!” voice. A minute after that, he hits one of the Wife’s tomato plants.

BOOM. Ball confiscated. Plus the confiscatory speech about listening.

So the boy starts to get tears in his eyes and stomp around the deck. He starts making some annoying, agonized, whining noise in his throat. Then he yells “YOU ALWAYS YELL AT ME! YOU HATE ME!” Big flourish, flop in the chair. Arms crossed of course, for emphasis. Furrowed brow, stare daggers into the middle distance.

And the Oscar for best 5 Seconds of Fury goes too…

I head off to the garage for something. Several minutes pass and then there’s more yelling, and now the boy comes storming into the garage. The Wife had asked him to clean something up on the deck. When he hadn’t complied after several, escalating in intensity, requests, she yelled. See, we’re alway yelling at him.

So I took him aside and tried to explain the obvious to us, but apparently not to him. That we don’t always yell at him, that he needs to learn to listen. That he’s got his causation backwards- we yell because he doesn’t act until we yell. If he listened the first time, there’d be no yelling.

“But you never yell at my sister!….”

Hogwash. We yell at her for the same reasons. Learn to listen, learn to act on the first request and there won’t be any yelling.

“But we don’t hate you, we love you very much.”

Last week, the boy picked up a couple of Star Wars comics. He read them both and wanted to try something else, so we took him back and he decided he wanted to try the new Superman storyline. That works well since they are only up to issue 8 or so, therefore we don’t have to hunt down hundreds of back issues.

He provided an amusing moment after deciding Superman would be his thing. He wanted “the first Superman.” Presumably, because you start at the beginning. Of course, he had no way of knowing what he was asking for, so I decided to let the clerk at the store bring him up to speed.

She said she’s never even seen the first Superman comic and that it would cost him about $2.3 million. She was very good natured about it all, and then informed him about the newly rebooted story.

Thankfully, it didn’t take any arm twisting to get him to go along with her suggestion.

Took the boy to the local comic store which, somewhat surprisingly for a small town, is well stocked with comics. In the process, we ran into his martial arts instructor whom, it turns out, is a comic collector wit over 10,000 comics. He prefers the 60’s and 70’s strain but doesn’t have any preference for DC or Marvel. He just enjoys his comics, even to this day.

So we wandered the store for awhile, the boy looking somewhat overwhelmed and not sure what to make of it all. I pulled down most of the familiar titles to see if he was interested, but he demurred. There are 2 challenges for picking out comics, as I see it. The first is it’s almost certain you’ll be starting in the middle of some kind of plot line meaning it’s likely you’ll need to find back issues to get up to speed. The second, which I think is more of a modern problem phenomena, is that story lines nowadays are more mature than is appropriate for the typical 8-year old, particularly with the Batman or Wolverine titles.

He finally decided something Star Wars related would do. We were able to find several titles for him to pick from. We left with a couple of them, so we’ll see if they are a medium that captures his attention.

Looking through the comics put me in mind of picking my own as well. While I’m no collector, I’ve always enjoyed comics. With my Nook, I figured it was worth a look at the B&N selection. It appears that rather than individual issues, you have to purchase graphic novel collections. That’s fine by me, since I’ll presumably get all of a particular story arc.

Why should the boy get all the fun?

Yesterday was a good day. We got to the Scout camp site around 3:30 and the rest of the day flew by. The boy and his friends ran around all afternoon, the parents all mingled and relaxed. Based on my experiences with it so far, group camping is about as good as it gets for parents. Infinite diversions and distractions for kids, none of them the electronic variety, along with low opportunities for getting in trouble.

About the only form of trouble that does come up is the inevitable friction that comes with being in close quarters with other personalities. But that’s a strength as well, since they have to figure out how to cope and make nice. Plus, other parents can usually step in a smooth the flare-ups over without too much fuss.

After dinner, the Order of the Arrow showed up and performed a graduation ceremony for the various dens. It’s a hokey ceremony, as these things go. The Boy Scouts show up dressed in Indian garb, excuse me, Native American garb and they recite some poetry. Then, I hand the earned rank badges to the head Akela and he in turn hands it to the Cub Scout.

But it works. The boys are quiet and attentive the whole time and the ceremony is done in 15 minutes tops. The parents all enjoy it was well. A fun thing on a good day.

After that, it’s more running around followed by s’mores followed by more running around and the night for the boys ends with some songs by the campfire, as well as a skit where I’m the butt of the joke. I and another parent are human props holding a stick to act as a counter at a store. “Customers” come up one at a time and ask the clerk for candy, who tells them that he doesn’t have that kind of candy. Finally, the last customer comes up asks “Well, what do you have?” The clerk answers “Two suckers on a stick” and points at me and the other parent. Rimshot.

I stay up a bit later to help clean up while the boy goes down for the night around 10. By the time I’m done and the fire has finally died down, he’s fast asleep in the tent. So I settle down to join him.

Then, he’s awake and it’s early morning. He’s on top of me and shaking me saying “Dad!” in an urgent but hushed voice to get my attention. I shake off cob webs enough to acknowledge I’m not asleep anymore. I check my watch, it’s 4:30.

He says “Happy Father’s Day!” Then scampers off to the bathroom.

With only 4 days of school left, the boy received a homework assignment tonight involving his spelling words. He won’t be tested on them, as he took the test for them last week.

But this particular homework assignment has a writing element to it. He’s supposed to write something about a visiting a relative who lives far away. He’s got plenty of material to choose from, but the catch is he has to use 4 of the 10 spelling words.

He finally stopped crying after a marathon tear-fest of what seemed like hours. In reality, it was more like 15 or 20 minutes, which is still 15 or 20 minutes too long. The Wife and I both told him to step away and calm down. But he was inconsolable. We’re talking full-on balling, snuffling, sucking, tears and snot. All over a small writing assignment.

“I can’t do it….” he snuffled.

“Can somebody heeeelp ME?!?” he whined.

“This is hhhaard…” he cried.

In between there was the bleating and other sounds of sobbing. Unbelievable.

Maybe I should make him write a blog post. But first I’d better put some water protection over the keyboard.

Somewhere along the way, in the boy’s developing sense of how the Universe is supposed to spin, he got it in his head that “older” equals “better.” Now, the Grandparents out there might largely agree with that assessment, but the boy has been ruthlessly applying this reasoning when comparing himself and his sister.

He hates losing to her because “he’s older and should win because older people are supposed to win.” And he hates her knowing things that he doesn’t because “when you’re older, you’re supposed to know more stuff than younger people.” He also hates the idea that she’s learning to read because she’s been getting better at it faster than he did. Never mind the fact that he’s still a better reader right now because of practice.

I’m aware that part of his reasoning surely comes from his comparing himself to the Wife and I. The most obvious difference, besides the physical ones anyway, is we are much older than him. But his generalization of the concept to the extreme he’s taking it is just… odd. It’s not something the Wife and I have ever tried to emphasize.

I suppose that’s not entirely true. When it has come up, it’s usually been in the form of trying to explain to him why he needs to be careful when rough-and-tumbling with his sister, or when he expects her to be capable of something simply because he is. But that’s a long way from telling him that his poop doesn’t stink because he was born 18 months earlier than his sister. And trust me, it stinks (and still clogs toilets).

I suppose it could be as simple as he hasn’t learned that there aren’t many “rules” in life that aren’t broken at one point or another. Big people are clumsy and dumb, except when they’re not. Little people are annoying, except when they’re not. Older people are better at everything that younger people, except when they’re not. The point being, of course, that they aren’t really rules to begin with. Rather, they’re erroneous conclusions based on small sampling size (except for small people being annoying, that one’s true). Try explaining that to an 8 year-old.

Maybe when he gets a little older, he’ll understand that.

The boy may be well on his way to having his father’s feet. The Wife discovered that she can basically fit her feet in his new flip flops. He’s now in a size 6.

Still a ways to go before he catches me though.

The boy came downstairs this morning and after saying “Good Morning”, the Wife told him he’d have to change his shirt. He had selected a nice white-blue plaid pair of shorts and a green striped shirt to “match.”

Even I knew that wasn’t a good idea.

The boy immediately balked. “Why?!?” he blurted at her, dripping with annoyance.

Upon being informed of his fashion faux-pas, he opted for the defiance approach. With gusto. The Wife measured him a moment and then put her foot down “You are NOT going to school dressed like that. Go put on the white shirt that’s on your bed.” How she knew he had a white shirt on his bed I don’t know. But her tone had clearly communicated he wouldn’t win this battle and he stomped off to his room. Literally.

I think we heard every step he took from the kitchen, up the stairs, to his room and back. I’m pretty sure I heard the sighs as well while he was changing shirts.

All this and he hadn’t even been up 10 minutes yet.

Things didn’t improve much when he got back down. The battleground simply shifted to the his sister and breakfast, where he continuously made a nuisance of himself to his sister. He’d deliberately stand in her way and stay in her way. He was taking out the frustrations of the loss of his shirt battle on his sister now. The Wife told the lass to just keep away from her brother. She also told the boy to knock it off or he’d end up in the corner for awhile.

After breakfast, the battle shifted to who sat where to watch morning cartoons. Things didn’t finally settle down until the third or forth Woody Woodpecker skit.

Where was I the whole time, you might be wondering? I was on the periphery catching up on news and drinking a cup of coffee. The Wife was handling things fine and my getting involved would have only resulted in telling the boy to go to school with no clothes on, both kids being grounded for the rest of their lives, TV privileges revoked and the cancellation of Christmas. Permanently. Oh, and I’d have threatened to shoot the Tooth Fairy as well.

That’s the difference between an adult and a child: one of us knows how to wake up in the morning.

The boy managed to rebound in his martial arts classes tonight, earning his stripe and thus his next belt level.

But it wasn’t easy.

He tested last month, but failed to perform some self-defense techniques properly, so he had to come back and work another month at it. He tested on Monday, but they still didn’t give him his stripe. The problem this time was with his technique in his forms.

Being young and immature, he stomped out of the school, leaving the Wife to figure out what had gone wrong. She learned the problems from the instructor, who also informed her that he could test again today and still earn his stripe.

Now, one might assume that given the circumstances, any normal individual would willingly, perhaps even eagerly, put in a little time to polish his forms to insure that he earned his stripe. However, someone who makes that assumption doesn’t understand the way 8 year-olds think.

I use the term “8 year-olds” somewhat hesitantly, because I’m aware that not all 8 year-olds are identical. That said, I’ve spoken with enough parents about enough similar-but-different circumstances to believe for the moment that the boy’s behavior is, basically, age appropriate. Certainly, it isn’t unusual.

Not that it isn’t frustrating. It makes me wonder if there’s anything we could have done different along the way to improve his ability to handle adversity. The pouting, feeling-sorry-for-myself, whoa-is-me, I’ll-never-get-it-right attitude is really tiresome. Did I mention that he does the same thing in math? I swear, unless he’s a superstar at whatever from the get go, this is the routine he pulls.

So anyway, he begrudgingly came and asked me to help last night at the Wife’s suggestion. Things started off very rocky. After the first couple of attempts, I simply looked at him and said “I can’t do it for you and do you really think you’ll earn your stripe if you do it like that tomorrow?” He muttered something unintelligible, at which point I simply looked away and said “Fine, do it your way.”

Reverse psychology is a startlingly effective technique. I had to employ it several more times, but eventually his enthusiasm was improved, as was his technique in his form. In the end, he probably could have practiced more, but he’d done enough and it seemed like a good chance to end on a high note.

I can say that the instructors expect a lot more from the red-belt level. I suspect that the little drama his practice was last night won’t be the last.

The boy received a camping radio as a birthday gift from his grandparents. It’s actually a slick little device that’s not a toy. It’s really a grownup kind of toy. That hasn’t stopped the boy from taking a shine to it.

This is the device here. It’s not a normal radio by any stretch. The grandparents got it for camping, but it’s actually more like an emergency device. It works as a normal radio, but it also picks up the 7 NOAA weather bands. It has a solar charger and a hand crank charger as well as a 3 LED based flashlight. Lastly, the hand crank can be used, via a USB plug, to charge a cell phone. Pretty cool stuff.

While on the way to his martial arts class, he brought the radio and was listening to one of the weather bands. He then proceeded to inform the Wife that there was going to be “30% participation.”

I don’t think he was talking about his martial arts class.

So a couple of weeks ago, I noted that I was disappointed with the math the boy had learned this year. Mainly, I felt he hadn’t learned some fundamentals like borrowing and carrying for his addition and subtraction. I got a couple of suggestions that I should just show him myself, which is so obvious that I’d ruled it out.

More seriously, I’d refrained from doing it because the boy is typically pretty touchy about that stuff. I didn’t want him to get frustrated, shutdown and turn the thing into a nightmare.

But yesterday, an opportunity presented itself and I decided to roll the dice. Right after dinner, the boy was sitting around so I grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote a problem down for him that involved carrying. But I presented it that I’d reward him for his efforts. He wanted to know if as long as he tried that meant he’d get rewarded. I opted to put the screws to him and told him it was all or nothing.

Of course, he didn’t get it quite right. But he was close and I showed him what he did wrong. Then I gave him another one. Mind you, I was having him add 3 and 4-digit numbers to try and maximize the practice while minimizing the number of problems. Once he seemed to get it, I told him “Double-or-nothing on this one.” Even though, technically, he still had nothing. But his curiosity had been piqued and I kept going with it.

After a bit more, he asked about borrowing. So I showed him how that worked and gave him a few practice problems there as well. When we were done, I informed him that he could now add and subtract any numbers together. Which isn’t quite true, strictly speaking. But it was close enough for my purposes.

I even rewarded him with a little ice cream when it was all done.

So then when he came home today, he asked for a few more problems to practice with and told me he’d informed his teacher that he’d learned how to carry in addition. He even got her to give him a couple of problems.

So I guess it worked out OK.

Lost in the shuffle a bit last week was that the boy had belt testing at his Martial Arts school. In particular, this one was significant for the boy because it was to advancie to the red belt level- the final one prior to becoming an apprentice black belt.

The school takes the testing seriously at this stage of the kid’s development. A point that was made apparent by the fact that when he went on Monday expecting to test, he was told he could only be tested by one of the 2 head instructors for the school and neither was scheduled to be there that night. So he had to wait until Wednesday to do his testing.

He ultimately ended up failing his testing that day. He was unable to perform a couple of the self-defense techniques requested of him and the instructor also felt his forms needed a little more work. The boy was a bit confused initially because he thought he could test again the next night to earn his advancement. In reality, he has to train and test again next month to earn his next belt.

When reality finally sunk in to him, he was upset. Partly because he gets things in his mind that “this is how it will be” and he doesn’t always deal well when things don’t go as he intended. He was also upset because he wants to earn his black belt before I do and now he thinks I’m going to get there “first.”

So I sat him down and did my best to explain a little more of the reality he was in. Namely, that there is no competition between him and myself. Also, that it was OK to fail- because all it meant was that he had to work another month to earn his red belt. In the scheme of things, another month means nothing; after all, he’s already been at this for 3 years. I also tried to reassure him that as long as he kept at it, we would eventually earn his black belt.

Usually, when he’s upset about his sort of thing, the boy is nearly inconsolable and refuses to hear, listen or comprehend anything. This time was different. While he was clearly upset, he seemed to be willing to listen and understand that his space-time continuum was not going to collapse.

The proof of the pudding came last night when one of the instructors came up to the Wife and asked what had happened with stripe testing. The instructor had already spoken to the boy and told her the basics, and impressed her with the fact that he was handling the “setback” well. After a quick discussion, the instructor said she’d look into what happened so she could help him our for the next testing cycle.

So for those of you out there with similar “ability to handle failure” issues in their kids, wondering when things will start to improve- I have a completely non-scientific answer. About 8 years. That’s all. And mind you, this was only a single instance of coping well.

Hooray for progress.

The sound was a very familiar one to me. I’ve heard it many a time over the past few years. Borrowing from Dr. Seuss, it could appropriately be described by It started in low. Then it started to grow…

Only this sound wasn’t merry. In fact it was very un-merry.

It was the beginning of sobbing from the boy.

What could possibly have reduced him to such a state? If you’re suspecting me, well, that would be a fair guess I suppose, but in this case I can’t claim credit. It was his homework that had done him in.

That and having low blood-sugar levels.

His homework involved using his spelling words for the week. He’s been very good all year with spelling, even knowing all of the bonus words the teacher has tossed out. The exercise that did him in was the final one on the worksheet, which wanted him to write a paragraph describing how to do some gardening using 5 of the spelling words.

The problem he had was it wasn’t obvious how to use any of the words to describe ow to garden. The phrase he kept using was “It’s IMPOSSIBLE!” Hmm, actually it was more like “It’s IMPOSSIBLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!”

At this point in my parenting career, I don’t have much patience for crying. Especially because something is hard- cry me a river. It’s just a phrase but the boy was taking it literally. So I sat silently, waiting for him to stop. I didn’t even bother with the usual “Does crying solve anything?” type of attack. It’s not worth it as it only would have given voice to my frustration.

Since he wasn’t in a hurry to calm down, I took his worksheet to see what all the fuss was about. As it turns out, not only was his assignment possible- there existed a shining example of it in the previous problem. It was a paragraph about gardening using all of the spelling words, only some of them were misspelled. For that one, he was supposed to identify the misspelled words. He managed that just fine.

Back to the problem at hand, I informed him about the example on the worksheet. But this only agitated him further because he couldn’t use it. Oddly, I felt a little better after his statement since he’d voluntarily rejected plagiarism as a solution.

Since he still wasn’t calming down, I decided that the best course was to make him eat something. He continued to whimper all the way through his meal. To the point that I decided to eat somewhere else. Finally, after he’d finished his meal he calmed down. I’m guessing those two things are not unrelated.

Then wouldn’t you know, he went and wrote a paragraph about gardening using his spelling words. I even checked it over, correcting his spelling mistakes and helping him with his writing in general. He was a habit of creating runon sentences and using the same phrases over and over and over again without breaking things up into different sentences so that he has a whole bunch of words that are tied together and by the time you are done reading his sentence you are out of breath because you weren’t sure it would ever end and did I mention about the runons?

So it turned out to not be so impossible.

What kind of parenting blog would be complete without a little puke?

Got home from the boy’s MA class tonight, and he went right to the couch with a stressed kind of breathing. Next thing I know, I get those 6 words every parent loves to hear: “I think I’m going to THROWUP!”

He made a bee-line for the bathroom, and pretty much just made it. Several minutes later, it was all over. I checked him and he didn’t have fever or anything, so I had him take a shower and, since it was close to bed time, basically just herded him to bed.

I made pasta with meatballs for dinner tonight. So far, the lass and I are fine. Of course, the lass loves pasta so much her body may be overriding the stomachs desire to evacuate. Here’s to hoping. As for the boy, I was thinking perhaps I hadn’t served him dinner far enough in advance of his MA class, so he’d gotten an upset stomach as a result of that.

Anyway, I’d just finished the greatest comeback in my history with WwF, when I heard the distinct coughing sounds of a child retching. When I made it upstairs, I discovered the boy hanging off the side of his bed, hovering over a puddle of noodles. Apparently, the puking process interferes with other neural pathways, because the boy continued to hover there, spitting onto the floor. When I asked him if he still had more, he grunted at me in reply. So I went over to him and got him moving towards the bathroom in case there was an encore.

Thankfully, there wasn’t. But I still had the mess to clean up. Upon closer inspection, he’d nailed the side of his bed as well. So I did the bed strip-tease and got that laundry going. In the meantime, what can I use to clean puke out of the carpet? Murhpy’s Oil Soap? No. Orange Cleaner? No. Resolve Stain Remover? No. Finally, I found some Woolite which seemed likely to be my best option. By then, I noticed my socks were wet. Which is great, because I’m sure when foot sweat and residual puke get together, it’s good times!

So the boy’s bed has been remade and I’ve spot cleaned the floor. I’ve also left him with a bucket. I thought I was doing pretty well, but then the boy appeared (while I’m on my hands and knees cleaning the carpet) and says “Aren’t you going to put a cold towel on my neck?”

After considering him for a moment, I replied “Do you feel hot? Like you’ve got a fever?”

“No” he said, “but that’s what Mom always does.”

Mom is, unfortunately, away at the moment, so it’s just me. And the pukes. I finally told him “Well, go ahead if that’ll make you feel better.” So he did.

He also wanted to know if he was going to school tomorrow- he’s always thinking ahead. I suppose I should commend him for trying to find a silver lining, but his silver lining will cause me some issues tomorrow. All I could tell him is that first we had to get him through tonight, and we’d see what tomorrow will bring.

At least in this case, I know what I hope it won’t bring.