I’m totally blanking on the monthly update. I kept horrible notes this past month. So much of it would have involved the trip to Nova Scotia, so I point you back there.
His caregiver came back from Toronto Trek Polaris with a miniature sonic screwdriver for him, and he adores it. He ‘fixes’ things with it, including people’s teeth and ears. ( “Because I am fixer guy who fixes things,” he explains.) We put the kibosh on ‘fixing’ people’s eyes the first time he tried it, because the thing has a blue tip that glows when you press a button. He also loves to help in the garden with HRH, which is great. He helps water the plants, and tidy things up. He was thrilled to be able to help HRH paint the hallway, too.
We are running into an irritating problem with food. When he asks what’s for dinner and we tell him, he immediately says, “Oh, I don’t like that.” Now, this is patently untrue a lot of the time. We tend to prepare meals that we can all eat together, so the automatic response really, really gets on our nerves. Both HRH and I have blown up at it once each this past month. Part of it comes from his conflation of the terms ‘want’ and ‘like’ – we have to point this out to him sometimes – and part of it comes from the fact that if he could live on chicken nuggets, he would. Except his memory hasn’t caught up to his tastes yet, because when we give him chicken nuggets these days he sort of half-heartedly nibbles them, then decides he’s done. We just need to keep reminding him that the kneejerk reaction isn’t helpful to anyone.
The biggest drama of the past month happened the day or the day after we came home from Nova Scotia. I’d unpacked everything and placed a travel-sized tube of hand cream on the toilet tank next to my hair stuff, to remind me that I wanted to take it out to the car. He used the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then spun around… and knocked the hand cream into the bowl as it was draining. There was a shriek and screaming and he ran into my office crying so hard that we couldn’t understand him. HRH came running from wherever he was, and I had the boy by the shoulders trying to calm him down. We honestly thought he’d hurt himself badly somehow, although we couldn’t see any blood. We finally got him calmed down enough to understand that he’d knocked “the sunscreen, your sunscreen, Mama” into the toilet and it had vanished. He was deeply distraught, and we had to kind of hide the snickers while I hugged him and told him that it was okay, that it hadn’t been irreplaceable or expensive, and that we knew that it had been an accident. We talked about how important it was to close the lid before one flushed, and gradually the sobs stopped. HRH told him that when he was little he’d done the same thing, only he’d knocked his mother’s hairbrush into the toilet, and he’d been afraid his parents were going to be mad, too. “Did you get it back?” the boy asked, interested. “Oh, no,” HRH said. “Long gone.” And then we had a talk about where the drains go, and the boy decided that if we got a big net we could go to the water filtration plant and scoop out both the hand cream and Grandma’s brush.
The language. Ye gods. I live with him and I keep being surprised at how he expresses himself. One morning he came to my side of the bed with a small stuffed rabbit and said with pathos, “Mama, Snowball is sad. He is very sad. Tears are dripping from his eyes, do you see?” And his storytelling is evolving, too. The stories he makes up to tell us are becoming increasingly developed and complex. It’s really interesting to listen to him. His expression and inflections are making a large leap forward now, too; he knows how to modulate his volume, pacing, and delivery to enhance what he’s saying really well.
Let’s see, other firsts this month… riding in the canoe, riding in the motorboat, swinging in a hammock, roasting marshmallows, learning how to skip stones. Uncharacteristically, Nixie is allowing him to pet, kiss, and hug her. I still can’t get over how good he was on the two-day trip down to NS and back. I’m so proud of him.
