Monday – I think the 12-Steppers Call this a “Slip”

[ninanevermore]

.
.
.
There was a minor setback with my little Sweet Pea this Saturday, when he was not so sweet to a little girl and nipped her. After 13 months of not biting another child, I was dismayed that it happened again. On the other hand, when I take him in for his developmental assessment in June (they moved our appointment back), I am now confident there is something for them to access and that we aren’t wasting their time. See? I'm perfectly capable of finding a silver lining to my clouds, thank you very much.

On Saturday I took him to a large community Easter egg hunt sponsored by a local church at the baseball park where the local little league teams bat it out. There were hundreds of children there and bouncy castles and other amusements set up to entertain them all. One amusement was a large inflatable slide that Sweet Pea found irresistible. On one side of the slide there as a set of stairs for the kids to climb to the top so they could slide down the other side. As the attraction grew more crowded, I noticed Sweet Pea didn’t come down right away. When I peered up to find him, I saw he’d curled up next to a cubby hole next to a mesh window at the top of the stairs. I watched to see what he would do, and after the crowd thinned a bit (the kids tended to come in clusters), he would climb out of the cubby and slide down when it wasn’t so crowded and there wasn’t so much squealing and pushing and shoving to contend with. I understood what he was doing (waiting for gaps in the crowd) and why he was doing it (less stress and stimulation), so I waited patiently at the bottom while he bided his time at the tip. There wasn’t a problem until one of “those” little girls noticed him hiding out in his cubby and decided something should be done about it.

Little girls (and I say this with some authority as a former little girl myself) can be mother hens, some worse than others. They learn it from watching their own mothers and apply the hovering and mothering techniques to children around them younger than themselves. Sweet Pea finds the little girls who take this behavior to the extreme to be particularly bothersome and he doesn’t care for them one bit.

“There’s a little kid up there in the window and he’s not sliding down,” she told the volunteer manning the attraction, pointing to the top of the staircase.

“Hey! Hey, you! Get out of there! Go down the slide!” the volunteer shouted at Sweet Pea, who poked his head around the window and then ducked back into his hiding place. “Don’t worry about it,” the man told the little girl.

I walked over to the end of the slide where the kids got off, anticipating my son would heed the instructions and come down. He didn’t. The little girl, now empowered by the volunteer’s order for Sweet Pea to get out of the window nook, took it upon herself to go up to the top and order Sweet Pea to move. I didn’t see what happened up there, but she slid down, ran around to the volunteer, and exclaimed, “That little kid up there bit me!”

Oh, dear.

The volunteer looked at her arm, and said, “You’ll be fine.” The bite must not have been that bad; apparently it was just a warning nip. I walked around to the side of the window and ordered Sweet Pea to come down, NOW, and gathered up his shoes and plastic bucket full of Easter eggs while he did.

“Did you bite a little girl?” I asked when he got to the bottom.

He told me he hadn't.

“Yes, you did. She said you did. Why did you bite her?” He was kind of shutting down, closing his eyes and stiffening his body, so I picked him up so he wouldn't collapse into the dirt. While I carried him over to a tree with a wide sloped trunk where he could sit and put his shoes on, he started making a loud whooping noise I haven’t heard him make since he left Miss Coco’s care after he was thrown out of daycare. He makes the sound to drown out criticism so he doesn’t have to hear it, but when I ordered him to stop he did. After that, he curled up against me and tried to disappear as best he could.

“She was bothering me,” he said miserably.

“I don’t care. You can’t bite people just for bothering you. Get your shoes on, we’re leaving.”

This devastated him. We discussed a little further what he’d done wrong and why it was inappropriate, or at least I did, while we walked to the car. He was mostly silent, mumbling that he was upset with me and upset that we were leaving. I realized he had been out in the hot sun for some 4 hours surrounded by noise and crowds, which are two things that tend to push him over the edge. I think making him leave was both a punishment and a respite for him, and I didn't punish him further after that.

The rest of the weekend was pretty quiet with no other big incidents. He had two more Easter egg hunts, one at home on Sunday morning and one at his grandparents’ house that afternoon. As long as he’s with familiar people in familiar surroundings, he’s good as gold: Sweet Pea is perfectly sweet. His babysitter has no problems with him and tells me how good he is for her on a daily basis, especially these last 6 or 7 months now that the memory whatever happened to him back in his daycare center has started to fade. This could just be an isolated incident, or it could be a warning of things to come. He starts Kindergarten later this year, with all the stimulation and changes involved in that. I don’t know whether to be optimistic or afraid about how he will react to that environment.

Maybe after the appointment with the developmental assessment clinic in June, I’ll have a better idea as to which emotion is more appropriate.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Comments

[basketcaselady.livejournal.com]

I think in this situation I might cut him some slack. Of course we really don't know what went on up there. But I suspect that not only did the girl tell him to move but she probably pulled at his arm in an effort to move him. Though unacceptable, it doesn't seem unreasonable that he verbally told her no, and physically refused to move, but when she physically attempted to move him, he stood his ground and did what he had to do to make her stop. Perhaps tugging on his arm or leg or shoving on him while he refused to move, hurt him too. It's one thing to argue over a toy and bite to win. That's wrong. But if someone is manhandling him, even if it's a little girl, this sounds like it could be more of a self defense than anything else. I mean you still need to address it, but I think I would still cut him some slack in this situation.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

I was not too hard on him after we left. In fact, I took him for ice cream because he needed something to calm him down and that seemed to do the trick. I think he was overwhelmed and that his threshold for stress is a little lower than other children his age. He's not a very aggressive child and doesn't seem to know how to react to children who are more aggressive.

I'm not angry at him, just worried that things could escalate again once he starts school.