April 23rd, 2010 §
I bought Caspar a puppet today, three dollars in the chuck-out bin at our little supermarket. It is just a little hand puppet – a monkey – with soft tan fur and two pink felt flowers sewn on. Caspar decided it was a girl and named her Silly. Silly Monkey.
I have wonderful conversations with Caspar, and we often have pretend conversations with each other when we play with his toys, but it is so interesting seeing how he interacts with her in a completely different way.
I love the complete suspension of disbelief, how his gaze never drifts from her while I speak. He laughs when “she” claps her hands or scratches her head as though she is thinking. He speaks to her like a best friend, so it is almost like a little voyeuristic insight into the workings of his mind.
He is still rather shy sometimes with the other children in our lives, and most we either don’t see often enough or they are not at similar enough stages of development for him to really have that comfortable camaraderie. With new children he often stands waiting for the other child to talk to him and you can see him just… wanting. But not knowing yet how to start.
And the problem is especially obvious with familiar children who have different personalities, whose interactions are more highly dependent on activity, who like to constantly be doing and for whom companionship is simply having someone else doing too. Caspar likes that as well of course, but he tires of it sooner and longs for more conversation. There is a rich imagination in there, and a strong social desire, which hasn’t yet found its peers.
He will love kinder next year, and will love school. (Hell, he’s been asking when he can start school since he turned two.) It still might take him some time to find his “friends” – it took me a long time – but for the moment, Silly Monkey and I will try to help fill in the gaps and I can enjoy seeing him express that side of himself which hasn’t yet found its space.
I feel a little bad sometimes that I can’t provide this for him now but even with lots of activities, a like-mind for him is not something I can pull out of thin air.
He’s such a joyous, happy, thought-filled boy. I’m looking forward to him having someone to share that with.
Related Posts
April 21st, 2010 §
Well, actually, before she goes, she’d just like to take this opportunity to complain about the 3 petrol stations close by who have all been telling her their air pumps are “broken” for three years. Because having to go out of her way to put air in her tyres gets on her goat.
There. Phew. She’s gone. Now…
As for me, I am procrastinating. It is my most finely honed skill. Instead of writing a post in which I really have nothing worthwhile to say I should be…
- Cleaning
- Cooking
- Doing taxes (Yes, they ARE rather late)
- Sorting out photo folders
- Practicing piano
- Practicing guitar
- Finishing my knitting
- Exercising
- Returning emails
- Organising garage sale stuff
- Building a compost bin
- Reading
- Writing (The other kind)
- Making some sort of list so I don’t forget all the things I’m forgetting here
- Finding out where the fuck “gets on my goat” came from…
Instead, I am doing this. Just sitting here, cluttering up your feedreaders to assist you in honing your own precious procrastination skills.
It is a vicious cycle.
In other news, tomorrow is Caspar’s second sports class. After asking me all week if he can go again “right now”, he decided today that he does not like sport at all. There were tears involved. But I’m placing bets that he’ll run in there tomorrow just as enthusiastically as he did last time.
Related Posts
April 15th, 2010 §
Earlier this year I was talking to a relative, who would probably prefer not to be identified, about a couple of things I’d like Caspar to be able to do as he isn’t at 3yo kindergarten due to single-mother budget constraints. One of those things was a music class, and I’d found one that actually had a pay-per-session Mini Rock Band at fairly reasonable prices. The other thing was a weekly sports class but the price, if I’d enrolled him for the entire year, was not much lower than kinder would have been. I was trying to save enough for at least a term of that, mostly because I wanted Caspar to get some experience with a structured environment to help prepare him for school.
So… Just your general parent-of-a-small-child talking to a parent-of-small-children conversation.
Except for the, “I’ll pay for that. Sport is my job,” with a shrug of the shoulder because it’s NO BIG DEAL. (Which made me cry a little bit because when you’re a single mother everything is your job and it gets a bit exhausting.)
Anyway, the point of this story is not really about how great it is to have very tall, baby-boy relatives with the highly under-rated sense of masculine, familial duty. The point is that Caspar had his first sports class today.
The question in my mind was… Which Caspar will he be when we get there? If it was the painfully shy one, then it might not be fun the first few times.
I took a wrong turn and we were 5 minutes late, everyone already lined up and ready to go. I held open the nets for us to squeeze through and join them… And he just ran into the thick of it.
He did try to follow the instructions as they ran, or stomped, or jumped from one side of the nets to the other to warm up, but he was just so excited (and giggling constantly) that co-ordination or anything that required slowing down was not on the cards. And when they formed a circle to do some bending and stretching, he, apparently, belonged in the centre of it showing off his crazy wiggles and fake-falldowns.
Attention-seeking Caspar had been another on my list of possibles. I think it is something that might be an issue in the first years of school. The problem is though, he is so delightful he’ll probably get away with it. (Which reminds me of my Grade 3 teacher, Sister Ursula, handing my empty workbook to my mother at the end of the year and saying, “I made sure she learned everything, but she is just so full of joy that I didn’t want to restrain her.”)
After that, he did some soccer exercises; slightly calmer, slightly better at following the instructions, only needing a gentle reminder to go to the back of the line after he kicking his goal instead of the front of it. And then it was time to cool down, which is when possible Caspar #3 showed up.
Playing musical hula hoops, jumping into hoops when the music stopped and having to share hoops as more were taken away, he always found his way into the teacher’s hoop. Sitting down in a circle to sing the goodbye song, he completely ignored the huge gap and squeezed himself right in next to her, almost landing on her lap and staring up at her with that flirty little sparkle in his eyes.
My charming little suck-up.
But the short story is… The first day was wonderful. Caspar wishes he didn’t have to wait a week for the next class. I think it will be very useful. And I love my unnamed relative.
(If you are wondering… The classes are run by Ready Steady Go, which operates throughout Australia, and I highly recommend them to anyone who has a pre-school age child!)
Related Posts
September 1st, 2008 §
I know that Monday’s Child is usually a photo, but to catch everyone up on Caspar, words are required, not a picture.
He is talking. A lot.
And very well considering.
Now is the time that I am supposed to be taking him to see a speech pathologist (which is another thing on my current to-do list) for an assessment and, because of his cleft palate, speech therapy was something that I expected to be part of our lives for quite some time. Now, I’m not so sure. The way he is going I can’t imagine that he will require anything more than a little monitoring.
To my untrained ears there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a lisp or a nasal quality – common difficulties with a cleft – or any indication that his language skills have been affected by those first nine months of hearing difficulties before he had his surgery. (Seeing the audiologist for a checkup is another job on my list but he knows there is an aeroplane nearby before I do, so I think his hearing is better than mine.)
The clarity and intelligibility of his speech is better than some older children I know. (Of course, that could be because he’s mine so the speech pathologist gets to give her educated opinion.) His vocabulary is good too, well and truly in the triple figures and increasing every day. That, however, is somewhat sobering because occasionally I talk like Magneto Bold Too writes (I blame working in hospitality – Gordon Ramsey is not an anomaly) and on Thursday, one of those new words was “Fuck”. My friend and I managed not to laugh and I, sarcastically innocently, said, “I have no idea where he picked that up”.
And last week he brought me his Schleich (I love Schleich!) velociraptor and when he handed it to me he said, “Raptosaurus”. I thought that was genius. For him to be unsure of the exact word, but to categorise the figurine correctly and to choose an appropriate word ending…
In all seriousness, the way humans acquire language is a beautiful and amazing thing.
Related Posts
June 21st, 2008 §
Soooo… Mum changed her flight schedule and arrived Thursday morning, which entailed a 5am drive to the airport which, living out on the peninsular, is at the opposite end of the earth. But all my work with Caspar, trying to get him excited about Oma coming on an aeroplane, paid off because he went running toward her as she emerged from customs.
After a couple of days catching up, last night I went to bed early and slept late and then we spent the day out visiting friends and family and now I am gloriously tired and not planning on writing very much more than this.
Did I say I had more important, meaning-of-life stuff to talk about?
Er… Not today.
But I do think this constitutes a Smiley Saturday post. Because I’m smiling. 
Related Posts
April 14th, 2008 §
I’ve been shite lately. Obviously. I don’t even want to look at the date of my last post. I haven’t been reading my friends blogs. I haven’t even been reading my emails much. I think there are a gazillion people online that I haven’t thanked for various things. And a few offline as well. At some stage, things just got “all too much” and I left my computer off, zealously, and buried my head in sand (aka Sci-Fi DVDs). And when you feel like everything things all too much and so ignore them, it actually makes you feel worse.
So here I am, back again and feeling somewhat miserable and stressed, but I’ll probably feel better by the time I finish this post. There are so many things I have to do right now. I can’t even begin to enumerate them. I know people say to break it down into small parts, and to write lists and tick them off so you feel like you’re getting somewhere, but when the task of writing such a list is overwhelming, I think you’re pretty much screwed.
So I’m starting my baby steps – again – here. And apologising to all those people who deserve much attention and haven’t been getting it from me. I can’t promise you’ll be getting it any time soon, but now at least you know that I am thinking about you.
Sometimes, I am the life of the party. And sometimes I am a very antisocial creature. My real life friends are mostly aware of that, and don’t worry when they don’t hear from me for months on end. That’s just me. I think internet relationships are more tenuous. They don’t, for me at least, have the strength of years. So I feel more guilty when I don’t “water” those friendships. Which, again, makes me want to bury my head in the sand.
I’ve been slack at taking photos too, so I have no picture of “Monday’s Child” (I don’t want to cheat and use an old one) but I can promise that he is still as gorgeous as ever. And we started toilet training a couple of weeks ago.
Caspar will be 18 months in 2 days, which is apparently on the early side for toilet training these days, especially for boys. (Yes, I scanned a couple of pieces of the child rearing literature before ignoring it and Skyping my mother.) He’d been showing signs of readiness for a while, and I had a potty on hand but decided that trying to get him to use the potty when he was interested in the toilet was a stupid idea. So I looked around for a toilet seat for him. I didn’t think that would be so hard.
I just wanted one of those seat and step combined folding things. I thought they were pretty standard. But no, I couldn’t find one anywhere. Just seats and separate steps which were too low. And ridiculously high tech things which convert into Lear jets or some such and had a similar price point. After a couple of weeks searching for simplicity, I gave up and just bought a padded seat because he didn’t want to wait any longer, and holding him over the bowl was not fun for my back.
(I also shopped around for some plain undies – without crazy patterns or “licensed” characters. I loathe “licensed” characters on everything. It was worth the extra pennies not to have to look at them 10 times a day.)
Of course, the standard seat didn’t fit on our toilet, so out came the hacksaw to remove some excess plastic and we were off.
One other issue is that Cas still doesn’t speak so has no way of telling me that he needs to go so I’ve had to be a little vigilant about keeping an eye on when he’s fidgeting. Kelley from Magneto Bold Too and Leechbabe from Stuff With Thing (I think – it was a while ago) both gave me a couple of handsigns I could use so I taught him one of those as a way to say “toilet”. He learned that pretty much instantaneously. Of course, learning it and using it are two different things.
Overall, it’s been a simple change. To be honest, throwing a couple of pairs of undies in the washing machine is easier than laundering nappies. And he gets it. There have been a few accidents, obviously, but also a few days accident free. We’ve even gone out a couple of times without a nappy. And he’s actually really great at weeing on the loo. He doesn’t even need rewards. He’s happy just to get a piece of toilet paper when he’s done and to wave bye-bye. The pooing, though? Not so much.
In the couple of weeks, we’ve only had half a poo in the loo. But he’ll get there. Toilet training is not as bad as I thought. Maybe because I decided not to stress about that, at least. It helps to have a Mum that says it takes longer than they say it does, and to not be a sucker for the Potty-Train-Your-Toddler-In-A-Day Brigade. If he’s fully toilet trained in six months, that’s good enough for me. Although, after seeing how well he’s doing, I doubt that it will take that long.
So there you go. I wrote a blog post. That’s one thing I can cross off my gargantuan non-existent list. And I feel a bit better.
Although still a crappy person for not, figuratively, returning my friends’ calls.
Related Posts
February 25th, 2008 §
