Dadblog

teaching moment

The family visited the old college campus yesterday to meet an old friend. While walking the grounds, Alex asked me if you had to take math as a student. I told her that it's probably different now, but when I was a student I took linguistics to get out of a math requirement, and it was a total farce that I regretted now.

"What's linguistics?" she asked. I explained that it's the study of language, but most of the tests were really just simple grammar exercises, and anyone who could recognize whether "I bringed my lunch" or "I brought my lunch" had a good chance of doing well in this class. This called to mind one day when the professor was discussing the "sph" phoneme, and how "sphere" was the only example in English.

I told Alex that I immediately thought of the word "sphincter" but didn't want to draw attention to myself.

"What's a sphincter?" she asked.

I paused, aimed and poked. Alex yelled "YIIIIIIIIiiiiiiIIII!!"

Andrew perked up. "What? What did you say?"

"Alex wanted to know what a sphincter was."

"What IS it?"

"TELL HIM, DAD!"

During the intermission

Andrew spent ten days with his grandparents in Illinois. While there he picked up an addiction to Wheel of Fortune. I watched it with him once, and I wasn't sure whether he was spelling out the words himself, or just delighting in the good fortune of those who win a thousand dollars of travel from Bedandbreakfast.com. WOF requires some cultural fluency. "White, Wheat or Rye Toast" for example, is not a phrase we ever use in our house. We only ever get egg and everything bagels.

Andrew being Andrew, he starts getting tense around five pm, lest he miss the 7:30 start time.He might benefit from a watch that beeps every night at 7:25 pm.

overdue

The happy news is that a tiny dose of Topamax, which is often given as an anti-seizure medication, has greatly reduced Andrew's noises. When he's excited, he still coughs, snorts and sniffs, but the baseline is much lower than it used to be, and it has greatly reduced our household stress.

The doctor perked up when I mentioned that the recent explosion of tics happened after Andrew came down with strep throat; he said there is a correlation between strep and tics, and that we should have Andrew treated aggressively the next time he comes down with a sore throat. We had the opportunity to do that a few weeks later, when the school nurse called to say "get him out of here, he has a white patch at the back of his gullet." Rachel got him into the pediatrician's office, where she learned that not everyone in the medical community subscribes to this strep-tic link. Apparently, it's something that crazy parents like to obsess about on Internet forums. She declined, in the presence of her wide-eyed med student, to prescribe antibiotics for a little white patch probably caused by good bacteria.

Okay, that's a fight for someone else. We are just fine with how things are going.

noisy

Andrew got really ticcy over the Presidents' Day weekend. His new noise sounds like he's trying to expel every last bit of air from his lungs, or like he was just punched in the belly. Sometimes he makes these noises when he's in a distracted state, like listening to a story or watching TV, but lately he's been wheezing while he's talking.

Alex was able to get him to arrest it in the car ride home by having him breathe in, hold, and breathe out. I called it ten-year-old yoga. But the rest of the time it was very disruptive.

Since Andrew also seemed more anxious and volatile than usual, I e-mailed his teacher to ask how he was doing in the classroom. The teacher called me that afternoon to say "I'm glad you wrote. I was going to give you a call..." He said that Andrew was making lots of noise during the day, which was new, and that he didn't seem to be mixing with the other kids in the class, which surprised us. Nobody is giving him a hard time, but he seems to only want to talk and play games with the teacher.

Andrew does not like discussing the matter with us, as it makes him so embarrassed, but he did say he'd like to talk about it with a doctor. We've lined up a child psychiatrist someone recommended to us, and Andrew will spend a very expensive hour with him later this month.

Who believes in Santa?

Andrew says his pal Raza told him that Santa must be a fraud because Raza's mom was seen putting out presents that were supposed to be from the guy in the red suit. Andrew told this to Rachel as a way of getting used to the unsettling idea that Raza might be right. 

Alex knows the score, but then Alex spent almost two years of her life obsessed with ancient Egyptian culture, which is a great way to introduce kids to the idea that sometimes people believe in things that aren't real. Elizabeth probably believes in Santa, but only because it's so convenient. She would rather not believe in Dr. Blum, the dentist. 

Rachel told me last night that some friends in the neighborhood pay $60 a year to have Santa telephone their house on Christmas Eve and talk to their kids. Santa knows the names of thier friends, pets and teachers, and creepily, what the kids might need to improve about their own behavior. The call leaves the children with a mix of wonder and shame, but very compliant with Santa's instructions to go straight to bed that night after church. 

nighttime drama

Andrew and Elizabeth have a sleepover just about every night, which means Elizabeth ends up in Andrew's bed. She doesn't mind the wall-side, which he hates. Even on nights when she's fallen asleep in her bed before the official lights-out for Andrew, we still find her across the room the next morning.

Andrew has come to depend on his sister for security. It's normal to be scared at night. Both Rachel and I used to climb in bed with a brother when we were kids. But sometimes Elizabeth, who was going to go over anyway, says she doesn't want to sleep in Andrew's bed. This makes him frantic, which is why I think she does it. I've seen the look on his face when Elizabeth declines Andrew's invitation, and it looks like a smoker who desperately needs nicotine. The last time it happened, he jumped up and got a lovey from his drawer and pressed it to his nose. He'd been off loveys for weeks before that incident.

When Elizabeth says no, Andrew keeps begging and insisting. I have told him that "no means no" and you can't keep pressuring a girl to get in your bed if she's declined. "I know, but it's hard, I get scared," he says.

Here's the kicker - when Elizabeth is in there, as she is most nights, she just wants to run her fingers through Andrew's curls as she falls asleep. And he hates this. It leads to nightly screaming matches. "Don't! Touch! My! Hair!" he bellows, loud enough for his parents to hear in the back room downstairs.

"Dude," we say. "you have a choice here. Let her touch your hair, or don't invite her in." So simple, and yet we can't quite find the solution.

Piano Dude

Andrew's tics have quieted down significantly. This is always a subject-to-change phenomenon, but we're grateful for it. He's replaced the need to hum or click with a desire to play one of the pieces he's learned on the piano. In the house, he can't walk by the piano without turning to bang out some bars of his lessons.

Outside the house, when we are in a public space that contains a piano, it can be excruciating for him not to play.

My brother-in-law took him to a young person's Philadelphia Orchestra concert in Philadelphia late last month. He thoughtfully took a picture of Andrew's Kimmel Center debut, reproduced below.

where on the spectrum?

Andrew throws a lot of dramatic rage our way. Whenever he has a setback, he snarls, bares his fangs, snorts, stomps his feet and/or pantomimes throwing a missile. He does not actually hit or stab anyone, except in the rare cases that he is returning one of Elizabeth's volleys, and then she usually has it coming.

He isn't dangerous, and for all the angry snits he throws, he's also very free with the "I love yous" and hugs. He is just a very emotional guy, and it's exhausting. Rachel reported that she'd endured four separate avalanches from Andrew by 3:45 pm.

He's not like his mom or dad, but does he fit under the bell curve in general? Is this what most little boys are like?

bang

We moved Andrew's drum kit upstairs from the basement back when he came home from Chicago, to give him something to do that could channel his energies. The kit has languished down in the playroom since his sixth birthday, underused because Andrew really won't go down there by himself. He would have loved to go down and bang the skins with a parent observing him, but wow, it's loud.

At Andrew's suggestion, we set him up on the front porch. Several neighbors immediately dropped by and from their comments, Rachel felt that perhaps our family was becoming too obvious. She moved Andrew to the back room, where the computer and TV reside. This has worked out well for everyone. Andrew has some natural musical talent, and his uncle Dan taught him some basic riffs that he's mastered and made his own by adding instruments not commonly found on drum kits.

One of our neighbors on the back of our lot is a sound engineer, and he called Rachel to say that Smokey Robinson's keyboard player had been impressed by Andrew's playing when he dropped by for a visit, without even knowing Andrew's age.

I am really happy for Andrew to have this outlet (although it is difficult to think straight while he's going at it.) He is also taking piano lessons this year, which is good because when I was a kid the drummers were all cut-ups.  

condensed milk of human kindness

Alex is spending the week with my parents in Connecticut. So far, they've taken her fishing at the state park in Redding, to a VIP tour of the Bronx Zoo, to a Beatles reenactment concert in Bridgeport, and today they are going to the Seaport in Mystic. At night they do puzzles, build crafts (yesterday: rain stick out of cardboard tubes, nails and beans), and watch baseball and the Olympics on TV. Then she gets to read late into the night. We get her home this Sunday.

She calls home every night around 8:45. At first she sounded faint and wistful, but now she's got her high spirits back. I rheard her tell a friend that the first two nights are the hardest - the seeing parents drive away part especially - but then you adapt. She's a wise girl for her age. I knew some college freshmen who had a much harder time with separation than she does.

As part of a general makeup to Andrew, Rachel and I are taking him to a Phillies game tonight. As long as we bring home some cotton candy for Elizabeth, she is fine not going. Last night she told me that she likes when the Phillies win, but she doesn't care when they lose. We hired her favorite babysitter - the one who likes to host tea parties with stuffed animals - to keep her company while we're out of the house. Typically, Andrew is now concerned that he might be missing out.

Yesterday, Rachel took Elizabeth to the eye doctor for her annual checkup. She is at risk for glaucoma, so she gets her pressure checked every year. It's never easy to convince Elizabeth to submit to even noninvasive procedures, so getting her to allow the big nosed medical student to stick his pin in her eye was a very difficult sell. Rachel said "we could hold her down, but that would shoot her pressure way up." I got a call on my cell to try and deliver a remote pep talk, but poor Liz was still sad. She proclaimed it unfair. "How come I have to get my eyes checked and Andrew doesn't? I wish ANDREW was here!!"

Later, Andrew saw the conciliatory chocolate wrappers in the back seat and yelled "HEY!!!" Poor kid, he's always getting screwed out of something.

Next year, Andrew will be old enough for Camp Grandma.