Monday – They all look so normal
Oct. 25th, 2010 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
Saturday was the Fall Festival at my son’s elementary school. His teachers had been talking up the event a lot, and little Sweet Pea wanted to go so bad he could barely contain himself. My own elementary used to have a Halloween Carnival each October, and I always enjoyed them. At some point it was decided to make it more inclusive by linking it to a season that everyone experiences rather than a holiday that some people may not celebrate, so all the Halloween Carnivals became Fall Festivals at some point. It is a big fundraiser for the school, and a blurb in the school’s newsletter made the event even more worthy of my support: The Fall Festival is our school’s main fundraiser. We are deeply committed to never asking your children to sell cookie dough or wrapping paper, but in order to meet that commitment, our Fall Festival must be a success!
The idea of keeping my front porch free of sad-eyed tykes selling cookie dough that I don’t need and that they would rather not be selling impressed me plenty. I purchased advanced tickets so we could get the early bird special, and made it a date with my 6 year old son.
I met a couple of other children with so-called issues that day. I know that such childrenhave always been around, but since Sweet Pea has been labeled “special” I have taken a vested interest in other children who also labled as such, both for the sake of research and the feeling of solidarity I have with their parents. A lot of children greeted Sweet Pea by name, and he greeted them back when I prompted him to. He couldn’t tell me who they were, but I’m used to that.
The booth sponsored by his kindergarten class was one of those paint spinning things that makes a splatter picture. Sweet Pea made his picture and ignored the boy about his size making one next to him. I didn’t realize that this wasn’t his normal absorption in his task, where he focuses on what he is doing and ignores all else. Turns out, he was deliberately shunning this boy. Later, he told me the child was Jack from his class - the boy that Sweet Pea bit one day on the playground. It turns out that Jack is special, too. Like Sweet Pea, he has an assistant who sits next to him in class to help him focus. Sweet Pea has Miss Lucas, and Jack has Miss Hughes.
“He’s weird,” Sweet Pea told me. “I don’t like him.”
I asked why he didn’t like Jack.
“He does things he’s not supposed to do. Weird things. And he makes weird noises.”
Considering that Sweet Pea is a kid who kicks his teacher, throws his shoes at people, hides under tables, and screams at the top of his lungs, I found myself smiling at the idea that Jack’s idiosyncrasies drive my son up the wall. Sweet Pea is irony-proof, though, so he saw nothing strange about the way he feels toward Jack. Perhaps he doesn’t like the competition. I suspect that the most unforgivable aspect of Jack in the weird noises that he makes; Sweet Pea has a thing about noises. If the sounds that Jack makes are high pitched, it’s probably why he got bit that day. Weird, high pitched noises like ringing bells and beeping machines and strange hums are unforgivable to Sweet Pea.
Toward the end of the festival, we paid a few of our remaining tickets so that Sweet Pea could work on the Art Car. This was a rusted-out old Volkswagen that children had been painting all day. For two tickets, each child was handed a Styrofoam cup with about an inch of paint in the bottom and a paint applicator (a flat sponge on a plastic stick) and told to go to town. Sweet Pea’s paint was green. He worked his way around the car, painting bits that he thought needed improving as he found them. He painted his name of the passenger’s side. On the driver’s side there was an air vent that someone, probably a little girl, had painted pink. Sweet Pea decided it needed to be green, and he covered up every bit of pink paint before moving on. After he used up the last bit of paint in his cup, we came back to the driver’s side only to find a little girl finishing up painting the vent purple. None of Sweet Pea’s green paint showed anymore.
“She painted it purple!” Sweet Pea exclaimed, his face darkening in anger. Speaking of paint, he looked like someone had painted him bright red.
“It’s okay,” I said. “People have been painting it all day. You painted over someone else’s paint, remember? Don’t worry about it. Calm down.”
“But I painted green! And then she painted it purple! What did she think?! That I didn’t paint it? That I didn’t want it that color?! I wanted it green!” The cords in his little neck were sticking out, and his fists were clenched at his side.
I talked him down from a full blown meltdown. The mother of the girl who had painted the vent purple was standing close to us, and she chastised her daughter a bit, which I didn’t think was necessary considering the car was covered in layer after layer of paint, each child painting over what countless other children had painted earlier in the day. The little girl moved on to paint something else, but hearing her get chastised calmed Sweet Pea down better than my sweet talking did.
“She’s like that, too,’ the girl’s mother told me, to my surprise, ‘Do you have a diagnosis for him yet?”
“No,” I said, ‘We’re pre-diagnosis. We’ve had the team meeting, and we’ve signed a stack of consent forms for them to assess him. We have an appointment with the Meyer Center, to, but it’s a few months away.
“The Meyer Center; that’s good.” I am surprised at how many people in Houston have heard of the Meyer Center for Developmental Pediatrics. Before my son started acting out in daycare and his pediatrician wrote him a referral, I hadn’t. “Do they think some sort of emotional issue, or mild autism? That’s what they say about her, too. I call it ‘Baby Bi-Polar.’ I’ll be out with her and my 3 year old; one minute she’s fine, and the next thing I know she’s having a full blown meltdown in the middle of a store and people are looking at me like there’s something I can do about it. She looks so normal, I guess they can’t understand that maybe she’s not.”
I smiled wanly. “I miss being self righteous about others people’s kids,” I said. “When I see a child having a meltdown, I just thank God that mine is calm at that moment, because I know it could be me standing there trying to get him to calm down.”
She nodded. “Her father has anxiety issues, and I think she does, too. That’s what brings on a lot of it.” She nodded toward Sweet Pea. “He’ll be fine. You’ll get him figured out,” she said, and walked around to the other side of the car to keep an eye on her children. I didn’t get her name.
Sweet Pea was still put out over the whole purple air vent thing, but he forgot it when I asked if he wanted to spend some of our remaining tickets on the giant inflatable slide a few feet away. I took a picture of him sliding down, his face full of delight. He looked normal and happy, and the child who almost exploded in rage over paint a few minutes before was nowhere to be found.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
Saturday was the Fall Festival at my son’s elementary school. His teachers had been talking up the event a lot, and little Sweet Pea wanted to go so bad he could barely contain himself. My own elementary used to have a Halloween Carnival each October, and I always enjoyed them. At some point it was decided to make it more inclusive by linking it to a season that everyone experiences rather than a holiday that some people may not celebrate, so all the Halloween Carnivals became Fall Festivals at some point. It is a big fundraiser for the school, and a blurb in the school’s newsletter made the event even more worthy of my support: The Fall Festival is our school’s main fundraiser. We are deeply committed to never asking your children to sell cookie dough or wrapping paper, but in order to meet that commitment, our Fall Festival must be a success!
The idea of keeping my front porch free of sad-eyed tykes selling cookie dough that I don’t need and that they would rather not be selling impressed me plenty. I purchased advanced tickets so we could get the early bird special, and made it a date with my 6 year old son.
I met a couple of other children with so-called issues that day. I know that such childrenhave always been around, but since Sweet Pea has been labeled “special” I have taken a vested interest in other children who also labled as such, both for the sake of research and the feeling of solidarity I have with their parents. A lot of children greeted Sweet Pea by name, and he greeted them back when I prompted him to. He couldn’t tell me who they were, but I’m used to that.
The booth sponsored by his kindergarten class was one of those paint spinning things that makes a splatter picture. Sweet Pea made his picture and ignored the boy about his size making one next to him. I didn’t realize that this wasn’t his normal absorption in his task, where he focuses on what he is doing and ignores all else. Turns out, he was deliberately shunning this boy. Later, he told me the child was Jack from his class - the boy that Sweet Pea bit one day on the playground. It turns out that Jack is special, too. Like Sweet Pea, he has an assistant who sits next to him in class to help him focus. Sweet Pea has Miss Lucas, and Jack has Miss Hughes.
“He’s weird,” Sweet Pea told me. “I don’t like him.”
I asked why he didn’t like Jack.
“He does things he’s not supposed to do. Weird things. And he makes weird noises.”
Considering that Sweet Pea is a kid who kicks his teacher, throws his shoes at people, hides under tables, and screams at the top of his lungs, I found myself smiling at the idea that Jack’s idiosyncrasies drive my son up the wall. Sweet Pea is irony-proof, though, so he saw nothing strange about the way he feels toward Jack. Perhaps he doesn’t like the competition. I suspect that the most unforgivable aspect of Jack in the weird noises that he makes; Sweet Pea has a thing about noises. If the sounds that Jack makes are high pitched, it’s probably why he got bit that day. Weird, high pitched noises like ringing bells and beeping machines and strange hums are unforgivable to Sweet Pea.
Toward the end of the festival, we paid a few of our remaining tickets so that Sweet Pea could work on the Art Car. This was a rusted-out old Volkswagen that children had been painting all day. For two tickets, each child was handed a Styrofoam cup with about an inch of paint in the bottom and a paint applicator (a flat sponge on a plastic stick) and told to go to town. Sweet Pea’s paint was green. He worked his way around the car, painting bits that he thought needed improving as he found them. He painted his name of the passenger’s side. On the driver’s side there was an air vent that someone, probably a little girl, had painted pink. Sweet Pea decided it needed to be green, and he covered up every bit of pink paint before moving on. After he used up the last bit of paint in his cup, we came back to the driver’s side only to find a little girl finishing up painting the vent purple. None of Sweet Pea’s green paint showed anymore.
“She painted it purple!” Sweet Pea exclaimed, his face darkening in anger. Speaking of paint, he looked like someone had painted him bright red.
“It’s okay,” I said. “People have been painting it all day. You painted over someone else’s paint, remember? Don’t worry about it. Calm down.”
“But I painted green! And then she painted it purple! What did she think?! That I didn’t paint it? That I didn’t want it that color?! I wanted it green!” The cords in his little neck were sticking out, and his fists were clenched at his side.
I talked him down from a full blown meltdown. The mother of the girl who had painted the vent purple was standing close to us, and she chastised her daughter a bit, which I didn’t think was necessary considering the car was covered in layer after layer of paint, each child painting over what countless other children had painted earlier in the day. The little girl moved on to paint something else, but hearing her get chastised calmed Sweet Pea down better than my sweet talking did.
“She’s like that, too,’ the girl’s mother told me, to my surprise, ‘Do you have a diagnosis for him yet?”
“No,” I said, ‘We’re pre-diagnosis. We’ve had the team meeting, and we’ve signed a stack of consent forms for them to assess him. We have an appointment with the Meyer Center, to, but it’s a few months away.
“The Meyer Center; that’s good.” I am surprised at how many people in Houston have heard of the Meyer Center for Developmental Pediatrics. Before my son started acting out in daycare and his pediatrician wrote him a referral, I hadn’t. “Do they think some sort of emotional issue, or mild autism? That’s what they say about her, too. I call it ‘Baby Bi-Polar.’ I’ll be out with her and my 3 year old; one minute she’s fine, and the next thing I know she’s having a full blown meltdown in the middle of a store and people are looking at me like there’s something I can do about it. She looks so normal, I guess they can’t understand that maybe she’s not.”
I smiled wanly. “I miss being self righteous about others people’s kids,” I said. “When I see a child having a meltdown, I just thank God that mine is calm at that moment, because I know it could be me standing there trying to get him to calm down.”
She nodded. “Her father has anxiety issues, and I think she does, too. That’s what brings on a lot of it.” She nodded toward Sweet Pea. “He’ll be fine. You’ll get him figured out,” she said, and walked around to the other side of the car to keep an eye on her children. I didn’t get her name.
Sweet Pea was still put out over the whole purple air vent thing, but he forgot it when I asked if he wanted to spend some of our remaining tickets on the giant inflatable slide a few feet away. I took a picture of him sliding down, his face full of delight. He looked normal and happy, and the child who almost exploded in rage over paint a few minutes before was nowhere to be found.
