Game Time

I am always conscious of how much time I spend with Gabriel and how good that time is.  Still, I have a gag response to the term "q--l-ty time" that inhibits me from forcing the matter or parenthesizing a moment as one of intense purposeful bonding that I could close and discard. Instead I've contented myself with being there with him for walks to and from daycare; and books, whether read on the sofa, in bed or from the side of tub. Whenever I give into his request for TV I try to sit with him to avoid using it as the electronic babysitter. Invariably, though, I will gravitate toward the kitchen to prepare supper or tidy something up rather than zone out or silently critique as Gabriel makes the mental shopping list required for him to achieve his (apparent) goal of becoming a Paw Patrol completist.

Because of his attachment to TV time and my tendency to disengage when he's in front of the TV, I have grown conscious of that void in the day where we are out of touch with each other.  There will be programming at some point that we can connect over and talk about, but the programming for a five-year-old only prompts conversation if there is a nostalgic, "This is what I watched..." introduction to the likes of Friendly Giant or Mr. Dressup.

In the face of the void that TV imposes on the day, I've tried a few times over the last year to get him interested in board games.  The gathering around the table for a board game, cards or a jigsaw puzzle each is loaded with memories of family and place that is immensely evocative. I've tried quite a few times to interest Gabriel in a game and there have been a few lapsed-attention efforts at Snakes and Ladders and a few occasions where I've gotten Trouble out of the box but could not engage him in much more that the percussive sequence of crush-pop-rattle that was the "roll" of the dice.  His mastery of jigsaw puzzles, like that of Lego is set and it is easy for him to lock in on the challenge when it is in front of him, but that can leave me on the sidelines.

Last night, with a stint in front of the TV finished and him asking for more TV after supper, I attempted to get him to try Trouble and we finished two games.  Best of all, this morning he asked if we could play again.  He counted his turns properly and mastered the simple task of starting his count on the next space on the board rather than the one he was in.  Rules were grasped and followed.  They were tested at times to but it comes with the territory.  There will be many games to follow.  I'm recall my capability to play double solitaire when my grandmother at the lake when I was seven and ponder introducing Gabriel to war (the card game).  More games will appear after Trouble, in their rightful sequence: Sorry, Clue, and maybe we will, in time, aspire to Life, Monopoly and the board flipping etiquette of Risk (ok, maybe not that one.)  All things to look forward to for the laughter and small lessons that will come from them and the closer connection that will come from sitting face-to-face on the floor or at the table.

At a time when he is holding his own more and more in conversation and surprises with the turns of phrase or topics that he introduces it is good to discovery that a refuge in the week where we will slow down to connect face to face.  He is in the middle (or early stages) of a growth spurt that has turned him ravenous, cranky and drowsy at times over the last 5-6 weeks and it is one of the unnecessary-necessary reminders that this will blur by fast and that the bond will be challenged by friends with the lure of video games, suppers over at friends, after school activities where he'll be home later and the kitchen is nothing more than a transit point or a node of quick fuelling as lives diverge step by incremental step. There will be stolen conversations on the road but the first successful foray introducing the game habit will promise a stillness and trove of memories that we have not been able to form yet.  It is a comfort to see his growth be complemented by the capacity to sit through a game and finish it, not to mention dust himself off for the needed rematch.

By the way, if anyone has a green peg they can spare, let me know.

First Lullabye

We are at a moment where my son seems formed and less likely to present a revelation to us.  He will grow, but there is the feeling that for the next little while, there is little likelihood for surprise. According to what I have read about growth in children and the formation of their personalities, he is pretty much wired, as it were. At the age of 5, he is obsessed with Star Wars, Lego and Paw Patrol. His knack for completing complex Lego sets is prodigious.  Consequently, I have consigned my quiver of ironic jokes about pressuring him to go into Art school, because it now seems unlikely on the part of the budding engineer.  As he assembles Lego or completes puzzles, he shows a spatial ability that makes the completion of a 1300-piece set uneventful for him and an affinity or affection for those challenges that surpasses any tolerance for wrestling with a creative block.

He is big for his age. He loves to run with me and no walk is complete without him challenging me to a race over some distance.  As was the case as a newborn, he fights sleep even seconds after acknowledging he is tired or burrowed into us for the assurance that he will not be alone for his transit into the night. Books are both obsession and refuge and might still be ahead in the neck and neck race with the iPad for his attention. He is a poor sleeper and the nights are still punctuated by his dark AM requests to sleep with us. He continues to demonstrate a knack for music and has filed away a few favorite hooks and choruses that he will sing or dance to when the mood strikes.

He is still the same extroverted, affectionate kid he was when he was a budding candy striper visiting his grandfather in the hospital in early 2012. He left Tim Horton's yesterday only after giving a hug to an older gentleman who complimented him on his new interest in practicing his letters. Once again, mom and dad struggle with the dilemmas that come with having a child who is so open and trusting with strangers (most of the time.) In that is an example of the questions that lie ahead: will his affection and openness make him vulnerable to the overrated threats all parents dread or will they evolve into something that is supportive and nurturing to those around him.  Time and the forks in his road ahead will determine that but it is clear that he is on a path that will shape his affections rather than the more emotionally cautious route that I have followed.

But, last night, as my weary extrovert was giving into fatigue and the early stages of a stomach bug that ails him today, which I believe was his first "sick day" (albeit from daycare) I surprised myself. After a long reading session on the sofa, the floppy, fatigued, yet still sleep-resistant lad sprawled on the sofa rather than dragging himself to his room, which prompted me to utter, with the faintest hint of melody, "Little boy, little boy won't you lay your body down," the first of many lines from Paul Simon's "St. Judy's Comet" that summed up the moment.

I've found it a challenge to sing my son to sleep, never quite finding the precise melodic whisper something I could get the right volume and pitch on, words trapped and muffled in the throat rather than given their appropriate whisper.  I've usually delivered a burr or a hum of some sort that was only a half-hearted approximation.  Last night though I did the song justice and sang it out - except for the "make your famous daddy look so dumb" which is Mr. Simon's own private confession about his struggle with lullabyes.

The likelihood is that he will surprise my wife and I in some way and that there will be some discovery of character or timing that will catch me off guard as we go through the journey together. There will be times as well though when, I excavate some part of myself and surprise him and perhaps myself too as I retrace parts of myself that are dormant or buried under the detritus of (dubiously) adult preoccupations.  He'll have a revelation that I was a kid once or that there are sections of my path that can be retraced and shared with him as I tentatively unveil some forgotten or hidden aspects of myself.

On the Playground

My family lives in a condominium so we do not have a backyard to lay claim to as our own. Fortunately we are within 500 metres walking distance of three playgrounds and we regularly take advantage of those when Gabriel is restless and needs to get some burn for a while. It is quite easy for him to lose all track of time as he chases other kids around, make friends for the brief time that they share together and expand his abilities on the apparatus.  It is an interesting way to mark the passage of time as he progresses.

He still has a fondness for the toddler bucket swing, but he has limited his turns to about 10 minutes instead of an arm-aching sequence of an hour top off by a half-dozen additions of "two more minutes." He has graduated to the bigger swing and after getting a scrape or two - but thankfully not a faceplant - when he first ventured onto it this summer he is managing to pump his legs in time with the movement and I have more opportunity to sit back and observe.

Observing alone can be fraught with dilemmas. There was one occasion where I found myself observing him observing to older boys who were playing some game and inflicting some punishment on one another.  The smaller one of the two was consistently at a disadvantage and I winced when they started using the term "pole-dancing," but commenting on their behaviour or Gabriel's immobile curiosity was probably going to bring attention to the odd dynamic between the three of them. My interest and focus on them heightened when they invited Gabriel to play with them, some odd for of tag that required the one who was "it" to walk with his eyes closed on the playground equipment. Gabriel said he understood the game, but after a moment of unresponsiveness when the game started the older boys adjusted and integrated him into the game without much harm.

There is always the opportunity for Gabriel to get exposed to something "mature" when he is there and most recently it was a new acquaintance who was quite quick to issue the "double bird."  Gabriel did not seem to pick up on it or attribute any meaning despite the fervour with which it was issued. (Gabriel has stuck it out incidentally from time to time and despite an occasion a year ago when he earned a loud response to it when he did it at the Thanksgiving table, he still hasn't adopted regular intentional use of it... I think.)

I'm not always at a distance.  More often than not, I get roped into a game of tag with Gabriel and whoever else he has gotten to know during our visit and somehow these sessions of tag take more out of me than a 10K run.  It must be the stops and starts. Aside from that, there is always the requirement to spin the carousel for a while as kids climb up and down.

The toughest thing about the playground visits is when the convergence to make new friends results in an untimely parting and his own upset at being left alone.  It is one of the few times when I get the sense of the vulnerability that he feels at being alone and without kids his age nearby and always at the ready to play. Often the occasion makes it difficult to settle him down and it is hard to console him. The flipside of that, two weeks ago, was when Gabriel found himself spontaneously invited to a birthday party that was taking part at the playground.  I had a sense that the invite was not parentally endorsed and anticipated the painful awkwardness as Gabriel's status as an included friend would have quickly diminished in a furrow of confusion. The range of logistics covering grab bags and unreceived presents was going to test the goodwill of people I had never met before.  We had been at the playground for well over two hours and it was time to get some food into him.

The playground visits will continue, even through the winter months and there will be times when I will have to figure out how to maneuver myself and my son through the interactions that present themselves as he grows into more independence and new relationships. He will continue to give challenges to his acrophobic father and I'll even dare to climb what he climbs far easier than I.  I can also tell that he has my lack of upper body strength when he's on climbing apparatus.  It is hard to tell what comes each time we go there as the cast of playmates evolves, but each time I ask him to behave or come back to me to check on something or to head for home he comes back - the tether between us still solid for all of the influence and opportunity that emerge each time we go there.

Masculinity and the Post-Gift-Shop Meltdown

A few weeks ago a close friend, after relating a story about her father's stoicism, advised (or pleaded), "Please tell me you are not going to close off all your emotions, when you get older, okay?" I held my tongue. It was not that I was intent on avoiding emotional expression of any sort. It is more a matter of not knowing what is the right level, amount or timing of emotions to express. At the same time, there was concern that the request may have come too late. To an extent, Marshall McLuhan's adage about fish being the last to discover water may apply to my ability to discern what emotions to express honestly or what the cultural expectations are for men or perhaps distinguish it from what it used to be.  Last night I came across a New York Times article from earlier this year on the challenge of men becoming or remaining emotionally honest.

I could cite my tendency (ability?) to shed a tear when sitting in the dark screen-rapt solitude of a movie theatre or how certain music in my possession can essentially take me out of commission for a couple of hours, but that is not evidence of emotional openness or honesty. My response to those inputs and in other instances my ability to articulate a response to something does not necessarily ensure ongoing emotional honesty as a man. There have been times when I have muted or walled-up my emotions out of a sense of propriety or a sense of preserving a decorum, but it is hard to determine what pressures or pain points I was giving into when closing myself off. Those cautions have made me wonder if a mode of communication has gone unpracticed, however, and left me wondering if I would be prepared to speaking openly and conscious enough of my intuitions when someone dear or important to me needs to hear what I have to say while I'm thinking it would be off-base or inappropriate.

With the question how emotionally honest I am in my thoughts and the New York Times piece opening with the account of a father's insistence that his toddler son tough it out through his vaccinations until the child seems to be transformed for the worse into an emotion-oppressing he, I have to take pause and wonder if I'm doing the same as this father in my own way.  That induction into masculinity, with all of its rigour to mute sensitivities and don a "masculine" facade is something I cannot pull off, was something that I dreaded for so long that I can recall saying around a campfire twenty-two years ago that I dreaded the possibility of being father to a son.  I sensed or hoped that being a father to a daughter may have given me better odds at asserting influence on masculinity.  Playing a protective role and gradually providing the model that a daughter would seek in a future husband seemed to have better odds than trying to steer a lad through that minefield of masculine BS.

I recall holding out the hope that Gabriel would be a more sensitive and reflective lad but laughed at the moment he dashed that notion.  He propped up next to me on the sofa one afternoon as a few-month-old and suddenly launched himself head-first to the floor.  This little guy was going to be getting scrapes and scratches, bruises and boo-boos and lots of them. The chatty, heartbreaking extrovert was going to be leading me into new territory.

Gabriel has had his share of tears, on occasions when a band-aid will ease the day, but there are more occasions when he is not getting something he wants. If he doesn't get something he wants he will cry (popcorn, Lego, more TV...) and he does not take our "no's" very well.  We are not quite inclined to put a stop to those tears, but we do want to make it clear that those occasions are not going to be won be waterworks and sobs. We are conscious of spoiling him and would not want to let his tears earn a harvest of things that he doesn't really need to have.

I realize though that there are too many occasions when I try to control a situation when his emotions are strongest and that my impulse is to find the more expedient route and get him into bed, or get on with the next part of the day without dawdling over whatever mood or curiosity has taken him off course.

Today on holidays, the closing ample through the gift shop did just what it was supposed to do and the emotionally honest thing might have been to shake my fist at the owner-operators of the Enchanted Forest with abandon for their cynical eye for harvesting the pockets of parents with the crap they have for sale. (I digress...) By the time we got out of the gift shop (fist shake again), Gabriel was intent on having popcorn at whatever expense. We told him no. The lesson I learned today was not to simply say no and let him know that he's been good and that we are not punishing him, but simply that the popcorn is not the thing for him on an empty stomach.  The remaining walk to the car was one of great resistance as the lad simmered over and peaked with him slamming the door open into his mother. Dad the Expedient intervened with a grab of the arm and things boiled over.

With the article in mind, I knew this was not the time to tell him the tears were not going to get him anywhere. At this point, the emotions were too countless to sort through: anger, guilt, pain, hunger and a sense of being denied what he thought he deserved.  I pulled myself together after realizing that he was not going to sort through all of those and articulate his understanding of what happened or what his motivations were.  We sat down in the grass for a few minutes and he cried himself out. As he calmed down I tried to help him sort out what he was going through and what he was feeling. For him, the popcorn was still the priority, something that makes me think that we need to work through the challenges of dealing with his guilt and taking responsibilities for what he did out of anger. Perhaps, in good time, a little more practice and the assurance that the truth will not always lead to unwelcome consequences we will help Gabriel ensure the widest possible range of emotions comes out as they are required.

We'll sort it out.

Three-Wheel Metaphor

In my own case, riding a bike began the spring I was seven. A green bike glimmered in the backyard when I returned home from catechism on a Saturday morning, its banana seat and the high Harley-style handlebars of the era the clear features of that vehicle.  That year there were no strider bikes or trailer bikes and this bike offer training wheels either.  I rode and fell, rode and fell and even rode and spared myself a scrape or two by getting my feet off the pedals and to the ground before an elbow or knee met its fate with gravity. Looking back it seems like it was the whole summer but in reality it may have only been a few days and I was getting into trouble for venturing out of the backyard and into the tentative residential traffic of Courtney Road.

Forty-plus years later, Gabriel is starting earlier than I had. He has already had a spin or two on a strider bike (although I'm more proud of his ability to out-run a kid using a strider in the playground this past "winter") but the bike has never really come up on his radar yet and he hasn't pleaded for bike time yet. However, this summer will be the one that we remember for the trailer bike. On Father's Day my wife and I had out mountain bikes fixed after being abandoned to the storage room after one or two spins in 2008 or 9. The plan was to get back out there and introduce Gabriel to riding via a trailer bike that friends were handing down since their daughter had graduated to her own mountain bike.

After picking up the bikes and walking them home, I learned that the trailer had incidentally been offered to someone else. (I can't recall if we were asleep at the switch or if the bikes was offered spontaneously.) A week later, the trailer was back on its way to us and we were quite self-conscious about how it ended up back on its way to our possession. I worried that there was a confession and a request for return. The first rumour that made its way to us was that the child it was intended for did not adapt to the trailer and that it was willingly returned. The actually story was that our friends' daughter reclaimed the bike with a from-the-mouths-of-babes announcement of the original plans for the trailer bike.

All that build-up was beside the point, however. Gabriel has taken to the trailer bike with great enthusiasm and little risk of bruise or scrape thus far. He has enjoyed his rides from the trailer regularly announces from his rumble seat position that it is the greatest thing ever.

The front position, for me at least, has felt more challenging. The addition of about 60 pounds of lad and trailer make the manoevering of the bikes a bit more uncertain. Turns require more thought and calculation to ensure that things go smoothly and I don't spill the lad to the street. Inclines and stops pose their challenges too, and there is the sense of impending lurch that makes me conscious of how close we are to oncoming traffic.

All of this occurring while every move and tweak in the seat behind me is transmitted to me by the aluminum tether that binds us. It is a little nerve wracking to feel that shift in weight behind me and not know what the lad is doing to cause it. I was never sure how well he was balanced behind me. As each wobble came through me, I tried to compensate with my weight and experience to keep things steady. There were times when his curiosity prompted him to look away rather than keep his eyes focused ahead. There were others when he was standing on his pedals or had his elbows on the handlebars instead of his hands. Each of these challenged me to steady myself and assert the calm and balance to get us through and keep us straight and safe.

When he was doing something that made things unsteady -- as he tried to find his balance and shore up his wavering attention span -- as we proceeded forward I gave into the urge to admonish him for the imbalance I was feeling. I wasn't always sure what it was he was doing and there were times when I yelled without know what he was actually up to. By the end of the first ride, I realized that it was best to keep steady and provide the balance and example he needed while he sorted himself out and learned what he needed so that he could strike out on his own without me able to worry about him from my seat with the incomplete view.

That about sums it up, doesn't it?

Time Lapse

The Lad® has spent a week at his grandparents. He has been out there before for a few days at a time and there was some concern about how the grands would have managed with him for a whole week, but unreliable sources (my eyes) indicate that they are not as worn out as we may have dreaded.

The passage of a mere week, however, was marked by some significant albeit ineffable changes in The Lad®. There is a bit more maturity in his voice as he speaks and last night he was casually talking about as he put it, his "little girlfriend" from the swim classes he took while he was with his grandparents. For a more obvious sign of growth was his use of the word "unraveled" to talk about the metres of toilet paper heaped on the floor under the roll. He gave me the sense that the toilet paper fell off on its own rather than encounter his own kittenish curiosity with the roll. I digress.

The changes that occurred this week, apart from the vocab, made me wonder how much you can actually miss by always being there. Were the changes in his tone, the look in his face and the confidence that probably came from a week of fun swimming matters of course that are too subtle to catch each day? It could be that the changes are less perceptible when you are always on top of him, but I'm pretty sure that the version of independence that occurs at Baba and Papa's, not to mention the new social circle at swimming lessons, prompted the changes we noticed after a week apart. As minor as they were they are undeniable.

What will we notice after summer camps a few years from now?

As Ever, On the Cusp of Transition

I should treasure this day for the more fleeting moments of childhood that adorn calendars on the theme of innocence or some such attribute of early youth. The sight of him stopping to smell a neighbour's flowers as the thunderclouds loom and darken. His fascination with the spores of a dandelion as he sends them into flight. The translucent down on his upper arms as I put sunscreen on his arms. These are all things that we try to convince ourselves that we saw and treasured, but there is the risk that we have a template of our child's growth and experiences that we assume conforms to a catalogue or a parenting magazine rather than be mindful and conscious of them as the occur out of the corner of our eye.  Today I can assure myself that I did indeed take note of them, and magnified those moments.

There was much today that made me note that those innocent explorations and discoveries will pass. The cool years, much like those thunderheads, seem to loom. With Gabriel at 4 1/2, I may be getting ahead of myself but it is hard to gauge how precocious each generation of kids is actually becoming. That aside, I'm conscious of how my earliest memories take me back to age 5 and also noticing the ways that Gabriel is asserting himself more and expressing his wishes.  I get the sense of the quest that will shape the next decade of his life as he seeks friends and acquaintances to fill the ineffable void that only a sibling can fill. There are also the times when he wants to play with his mother or I and we fill the time as well as we can - ever, in my case, conscious of playing in a way that gives him the lead and lets him set the rules and the standards of mastery.

Today, on a Saturday morning, the challenge was to get him to listen and as a result of that challenge it took him about three hours to get out of his pyjamas and dressed for the day. The carrot was that I'd play with him when he was ready for the day. Despite that, the hours drifted by and he only got dressed when he was ready to go out late in the morning while I mentally checked off the moments that we were setting aside in exchange for a stand-off that may have ultimately been about redefining independence or influence over one's day.

As for Gabriel, he has made his expectations of me clearer and clearer. Whenever he makes an extended visit to the toilet he expects two books to be read to him, even if their length leaves his dangling legs asleep and piercing him with pins and needles before the second "happily ever after" is checked off. This morning I was in the middle of something far less important and he called out "I've been waiting," in his effort to nudge me to set things aside and read Charlie Brown while perched on the side of the bathtub.

For all the sense of transition that the day posed, it is a normal one where the poignant glimpses are too brief and too easily overlooked.  Instead, the negotiation between two wills becomes the highlight - the dramatic highlight stripped of any of the gentle sense of passage or childhood that came with those more photogenic moments. As he sits for a calm moment with his first-ever bowl of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream cooling his stomach, and I brace myself for the task of assessing the ROHSI (return on housespace investment) of the toys he doesn't think he's outgrown, I want to take a moment to attach the same appreciation of the moment as I have to seeing him become more expert with the camera. He's not growing up in every way at every moment, just a few ways at a time.

The Lad Unplugs for Summer

For the second time in the last four days, my little showman and chatter-upper extraordinaire has sought solitude. He has made a clear effort to excuse himself and get some quiet time to decompress or just chill.

On Sunday, he sat by himself in the Star Wars camp chair that he has in his room and tonight he flopped into bed, each time plowing through book after book for a while to find some quiet time. He has done it before and it has always been good to know that he has identified books and time with them as a refuge. It was the end of the day and there was some comfort in what he surveyed in each book, even though he is not up to reading on his won yet.

There is the sense that things are a little off of late.  Apart from being a little hard to induce into listening to dear old mom and dad, he confessed yesterday to feeling tired and angry because he did not have the chance to nap during daycare yesterday. Naps, however, have not been part of his routine since January. He also said he was a little angry a while back because his hair was too long and he wanted to have it shorter - an aggravation that he might regret us accommodating if we give him a cut as aggressive as he wishes.

Tonight as he lay in bed looking through a Dr. Seuss anthology and asking that the music in the living room be turned off, his supper barely touched it was a reminder that summer has thrown him for a loop. In my own instance, recall the discombobulation that comes with the long days that spike one level of energy with the extended daylight and erodes the sleep that is just as important for the regulation that it brings. He struggles with it, but the quiet time with the books is a sign that he has a strategy for dealing with it.

The strategy and his willingness to acknowledge when he is angry are blessings that I cannot cite from my own childhood. Perhaps my parents would be more capable of citing this than I could in retrospection. Still, his willingness to drop out for a while and cut off the stimulation is, for an extrovert, a knack that I am quite happy to see.

As he came out of that quiet time to proceed with the rituals of bed time there was a burst of energy and foolishness, but it faded to calm as he went through the brushing of teeth and tongue, his vitamins and the two bedtime books I read him.  Summer will probably sustain the alternation between suppertime listlessness and childish chaos for a few weeks but I am thrilled to see that he can cope with it from time to time.

Now, if I can just get him to reshelve his books.

Books For the Inner Child

With some kids lit or entertainment there is the unique pleasure of the wry wink to the adults. Something about rabbits being good at multiplication in Zootopia, a sight gag that pays homage to the Godfather trilogy or a wry, sly pun that lets the reader know that the author knows who actually has to read the book. Perhaps one of those elements lies dormant in a child's memory or imagination like a buried treasure awaiting maturity for revelation.

I have, however, come across children's books that leave me wondering if a child needs the message or moral of a story.  Maybe it is a little early for a child to think seriously about the place you will actually go as Dr. Seuss described them and as my Philosophy of Education professor read to the class at the end of our year with him. He was, with Oh, The Places You Will Go, an early adopter, one who had identified adults' needs for that particular message and shared that with my classmates and I in 1990 without any trace of irony or the weariness that might have followed 10 or 15 years later when it was, like many aptly-written stories or lines, unfairly rendered cliche.

With the exception of the countless variations on stories of fire trucks at work and similar tales, there are stories with clear messages in them that are both a pleasure to pass down as they are to share. Whether it is the criticism of tyranny in Seuss' Yertle the Turtle (to name only one of his) to the more recent description of the boundless and growing unconditional love Nick Bland describes in The Runaway Hug or the timelessness of friendship in Marianne Dubuc's buried treasure of The Lion and the Bird, those theme-rich children's stories thrill me when they come down from the shelf.

There are other stories that make me wonder if a child actually needs to hear them. Or, to be more specific, whether my four-year-old needs to hear them yet. The first story that comes to mind is The Little Prince, which -- length aside -- might simply prompt a child to say, "Well, of course" at each of the passages from the book the adults hold onto like talismans or mantras to navigates them through the baffling rationalizations and foibles adults find themselves prone to.

Beyond that classic, there are other stories that I have come across that baldly express to adults something that we need to hear. Koji Yamada's What Do You Do With An Idea is the compact and beautiful complement to the numerous weighty tomes on creativity that have emerged like April dandelions in the last few years. It foregoes the theory, the psychological research, priming exercises and reflective practices that so many adult-oriented creativity books contain in favour of an extended poem about the life span of an idea. Yamada points out all the stages along the way from the nascent discovery of a thought to changing the world in a matter that one can memorize over time. This is not to say that a child would not get it - just that they are more likely to think, "Well, of course."

In his book The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim talks about the distinction between the conscious, subconscious and the preconscious, saying that it is intrusive to make our preconscious thoughts conscious. Stories can help us ensure those preconscious aspects of our character or our interpretation of the world are reinforced and perhaps ensure a child that it is okay to believe certain things that might be drawn into doubt at times that would make even a four-year-old ask, (as he has), "What is this world coming to?!"

For adults, getting lost and reassured in a lesson on creativity, the whimsy of a desert-stranded pilot's reflections or hallucinations on adulthood and mortality or a mantra that assures you of what makes a family a family seem better suited for adults in need of the courage or evidence to believe in certain possibilities at a time where the safest place in the world is in a bedtime fortress of pillows and blankets burrowing into an illustrated truth delivered from a wise, succinct storyteller.

Holding Him Back

"So, what have you decided?"




I'm in the dentist chair, puzzling over the question. My dentist adds that he read my post about whether or not to send Gabriel to school this year and I muster a nod of recognition. The topic of when to start a child in school is an exhaustively discussed one and, for the most part, the advice I've received is a chorus of, "What's the rush?... I waited... My daughter was fine early but... my son was... well... uhm..." Or struggled, or what have you.  Parents of the autumn-born who were particularly experienced and informed on the subject and the advice was all valuable. There was also a serendipitous barrage of articles on childhood and education that advised us to sit tight and hold him back a year more. Last week, we even encountered a parent who had found her 18-year-old son foundering and dropping out of his first year of university -- an account that made me ponder the math if her son was still only 18 years old in the spring after his freshman year.

Unwittingly, he is looking forward to the graduation from day care that the rest of his classmates will celebrate.  He is not, however, going to graduate with his friends. The social disruption for him will be a challenge. Close friends that he has had a lot of history with will be moving on and his friendships with those kids may end or require a lot more work to maintain as routines change. The social connections are already changing form as this fork in the road emerges.

Still, we have to look long term rather than reinforce the social expectations.

As great as he is in our eyes (except for when he is too tired to listen to us or insists that his diet consist exclusively of starches, or as I put it, "his whites") we would rather not have him spend the rest of his childhood and adolescence pressured into playing catch up. If we made the move to include him with the older peers who are moving on over the next little while we will be doing him an injustice. With an extroverted only child, who is at turns a nurturing leader of younger kids and displays great vulnerability trying to find a random kid to play with or be accepted by, we suspect that he will play to his strengths if he stays behind with kids who are a little younger than him.

While his daycare suggested there was a risk of Gabriel getting bored while in the same room for another year, I recalled a concept from my studies in Education - over-learning. If he is covering similar topics or themes in the coming year, I am fine with that. I get the impression that Gabriel is more of an analytical mind and that he may continue to process familiar knowledge in different ways. (Recently he wanted me to "play" with his Hot Wheels with him. For some reason our play consisted of sorting out all his dinkeys and separating the Hot Wheels from the non-Hot Wheels cars.

If he grows bored with too-familiar lessons and stories, perhaps there is an opportunity for him to play more of a nurturing or empathetic role. Since making our decision to keep him in daycare for another year, we told the daycare that we are prepared to adapt what we do at home to ensure that we are on the same page as the staff at the daycare in encouraging the leadership, empathy and social development that we would like to support in the coming year.

We have been conscious from day one of Gabriel being big for his age and my wife and I still tell one another that he was never that small when we see newborns. We have always seen his size as presenting a mixed blessing when he is in school and it is probably better for us to embrace that and get him accustomed to that size distinction rather than try to get him to blend in with a group of kids who are three to nine months older than him. When he is with younger and smaller kids we can prompt him to be gentler with them and perhaps he will get the sense of the responsibilities that come with being the big kid and take the opportunity to protect with his size and maturity.

All in all, we have concluded that it is better and lower stakes to hold him back now rather than pressure him throughout his school years to keep up or hold him back later in life when the stakes are a little higher than they are now.

The Discovery of Calm

For about a month now I have been trying to figure out an option to my overwrought urgency whenever Gabriel is on the verge of endangering himself. Usually it is nothing more than an attempt to keep him from wandering off a berm by the side of the road and into traffic. I will begrudge the admission that I might let paranoia get the best of me when it comes to Gabriel's well-being.

Another inner dialogue that I have been having of late surrounds my tendency to postpone Gabriel squirrel away a moment to myself before giving him my time. It is a bad habit, even though it is nothing more than me saying, "Let me get my glasses," when he asks me to read, or a chore of some sort I want to do first. I have made the vow to not blow him off anymore. May be not quite anymore but nudge that up the requisite six or seven dozen percentage points that are easily in range.

And so those two things converge...

Music class is finished and we are looking at a 15-minute wait for our bus. Gabriel normally fills the time in the best ways he can dawdling through the garbage, balancing himself precariously on slabs of concrete and exploring whatever the landscape might provide - a range of activities that empties my quiver of "Stops," "Come here's" and "Look out's" that I try to deploy in the face of preschool curiosity and boredom-busting. Impact: zero.

On this occasion, though, I've taken a more relaxed approach. I'm still immersed in a novel -- Andrezej Stasiuk's Dukla a jaw-dropping novel of breathtaking imagery and writing, by the way. The novel is just a diversion for a deliberately relaxed vigilance.  Gabriel does his thing and I keep my attention divided between him and the book. Given the chance to utterly endanger himself in the face of my restrained silence, he does not. He diverts himself with ryegrass or indian grass (I believe), which he yanks out of the ground and stacks.

"Can you help me?"

My cue.

I put the book aside and join him, without delay, taking directions on how he wants me to proceed as we address the stack he is building. I show him how to strip the spikelets - those little bits on the end that evoke the thought of bran or wheat - off the stalk of grass and add them to the pile. I offer to take direction from him and determine if a grass with a coarser, larger set of spikelets would suit his purposes for his pile or construction of grass.  We passed our block of time in this fashion and when the bus arrived I reminded him to pick up the toy truck he insisted on toting along throughout our Saturday.

And I learn to lay off and ease my vigilance to something more detached. I give Gabriel a little more room to roam and more independence and I get a little more calm (and reading) to myself. In that moment, I get the calm island that I have, to this point, failed to squirrel away to myself time and time again. Control relinquished and a balance between father and son is struck as rarely before.

A Lesson to Save

A month ago, I took a shot at achieving a goal that I had been targeting for a while: qualifying for the Boston Marathon. I had spent much of the winter preparing to meet my Boston Qualifying (BQ) goal and headed to Vancouver with the hope that the climate and altitude would give a further boost to my pursuit of the target. The race proceeded well and I was at a promising pace up until the 35K mark when cramps set in.  "Set in" seems a bit too euphemistic actually for the pain that stabbed through my left calf. I tried to run through it a few times, but I resigned to caution in the face of the pain and the looming mid-morning heat.

I walked most of the last 7K, watching the Boston Marathon qualifying time tick away and then the possibility of a time in the 3:30's and then eyed the threat of finishing in over 4 hours.  I picked up my feet and jogged in the last kilometre or so, to summon up a bit of pride that took a particularly hard blow as some idiot in leather thongs trotted passed to glory and the serated stigmata of the leather's carve through his naive feet.

Toward the end, I just wanted to see my son for a welcome smile.  We have been in the habit of finishing together.  The first time I did it, I carried him across the line with me and since that time he has been eager to grab my hand and run through the finish gate with me, thrilled to get that feeling and my medal to boot. Like Jim Valvano, I'd like my son to get practiced in the rituals of victory and celebration and visualize the thrill of the finish line.

On this occasion with disappointment blooming, I wanted to see him for the comfort if nothing else. I slowly scanned the crowd for my wife and my son and thrilled to see them along with my brother- and sister-in-law, who were wary of the mild insanity that congregates around marathon courses. My wife hoisted my son over the high fence and despite everything, he felt light and we were ready to run it in for the finish.

We crossed the line together and my son beamed up at me as he does at the thrill of running as fast as we can when we are coming home from school and he has asked me to hold his hand and run as hard as I can until his spinning legs cannot keep up and he either slides or takes flight upon giving up the effort to keep up.  For him, these few hundred metres to stop the clock are perhaps just another occasion for that thrilling, everyday ride with his dad.

I stop as soon as we cross and I give him a hug and I ask him, "How'd I do?"

He replied, having heard that I would have been 35, not 62 minutes getting to the finish from the point when he last cheered me on, "It was really long."

"You proud of me?"

"Yeah."

And I told him that I too would be proud of him in the face of his disappointments just as he was proud of me and that no matter how bad he would ever feel, I would always have his back.

It might be a lot to lay on a four-year-old, so the picture helps.  I'll be able to remind him or show him that moment when he feels that way and tell him of how disappointment can burn and linger and that in the end it doesn't change anything about the way I feel about him.  Actually, it would likely just make me prouder.

A Dystopian Little Prince

Over a year ago, the first trailers for an animated adaptation of Antoine du St. Exupery's The Little Prince first appeared and promised an enchanting film that I had told myself would, along with Inside Out be a pair of movies that my son could turn to for wisdom for years and years.  Throughout the months that followed the promise of a blockbuster bringing the hordes to the theatres fizzled and left me puzzled. There were delays and delays for the English language version to be released.  In March 2016 it made a brief appearance in Canada while news came out that the film would go direct to Netflix. Odd harbingers all.

Still, I was eager to take my son to the movie whenever it would be released.  I tried reading my son a chapter a night for a few nights and then when the movie tie-in book came out I resorted to that for the sake of having a one night read. When the time came to see it in March, I headed out to see it on my own.  He was tired that particular day and the showings were scheduled so sporadically that it suggested that it would be better to see it alone if I were to see it while it was still in the theatres.

I had only come upon The Little Prince when I was in my late 20's. It immediately had an impact on me and since reading it I have probably purchased at least a dozen copies whether as gifts or replacements for leant copies that remained wayward. I currently have three copies, including a French-language version and the film tie-in I mentioned. I was going in informed and with a vested interest in how it turned out.

It was evident in the trailer that the movie was going to lean toward a telling of the story hat would indicate it's telling and themes rather than directly tell the story in the manner that St. X wrote. There was a clever reference to a modern single mom's ambition to get her child into Werth Academy - named after dedicatee Leon Werth and I thought that was an interesting sign that every corner of the book was going to be mined for its potential. As the story moved back and forth between the pilot's interaction with the modern world and his recollection of the story in the desert as he first wrote or experienced it, the story was true to its source and as enchanting as hoped.

The distinctive animation of the desert scenes had a delicate element to it which reflected in a small way the illusion that St. Expuery's story was of those drawings that he shared and keeping alive a shallower roman a clef truth to what he concocted out of his experiences when his own plane crashed in the desert. The animation lends itself to the profound and ancient rather than mere whimsy and in these scenes of the movie, the novella's wisdom is respected and delivered effectively to the screen.

If only the whole movie were presented in that delicate manner. The alternating "modern" scenes about the now-ancient pilot's efforts to befriend and enlighten the high-achiever-to-be girl next door, are of a more contemporary CGI look and the efforts there eventually test the patience of those more familiar with the original story. The framing emphasizes the importance of the story and its messages in our modern world but the reality is that the source is an exceptionally deep 108 (illustrated) pages. 

This interpretation of the story for screen ultimately fails on the dark turn the story makes during the concluding act. The filmmakers discard the fragility of the desert scenes for a dystopian sequence that calls to mind George Orwell's 1984 or Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." The sheer menace during these scenes would have prompted me to leave before the film ended if I had been watching it with my son. I finished the film on my own, but felt disappointed at the end result. Given the responsibility of adapting The Little Prince, the filmmakers blew it with their third act and that would provide some reason why the film had such an odd route to (home) screens in North America.

Parenting and Play

Last Friday afternoon, I was out with my camera and drifted into a rather quiet, verdant area that invited passers by to muse over what flowers were intoxicating with the particular scents of spring that were emanating.  I had popped my macro lense on for a few close ups to file away and to muse quietly in the state of mind that a well-crafted and maintained garden can inspire with and get into that zone with the camera.

I was not in complete isolation there. I was a few minutes walk from English Bay in Vancouver and there was the pop and twang of tennis nearby to draw my eye in that direction. Cars were circulating in range of the tennis court and, a little closer to me, a mother was with her friend and her child. From where I stood, I could tell from the toddling stride toward the road that the child was around 15 months old. From the bucket hat and overalls I assumed it was a boy. As he tested his stride and the limits of his independence, his mother got up from where she was and managed to get him to play peek-a-boo.  If I were in that situation, I would have bounded toward the boy in headlong pursuit, panic and over-protectiveness getting the best of me. Peek-a-boo would have been well done the list of interventions to keep the boy out of traffic, no matter how light it was.

I too was rapt in this moment of play and watched as mom escalated her hiding in the game and the boy, giggling, started coming back towards his mother. I am still blown away. From the moment I saw that, I tried to think of ways that I could use play instead of panic to get Gabriel to "get" what I'd prefer him to be doing.  The first thoughts are that it is too late for some of those things where he is too headstrong or rambunctious to settle down and get my point. My attempt at role-playing him through the situation where he bit a classmate at daycare was one possibility and while it was a calm and rational moment for me when trying to discipline or teach him, it is one of those things that I'll have to file away and try to use with him later.

I'm sure there is always a type of play that will help you make a point to your child when teaching certain things and the key is to keep calm and figure out what types of play work best when trying to teach your child the things that you want them to know. When it happens, though, it is magical.

Instead of Anger

Once again at daycare, I caught a more stern countenance from the staff as I arrived to pick my son up at the end of the day.  There is an element of performance or ostentation to the communications and the most important or obvious part of the dialogue at this point communicates to me, "Something's up," or "We didn't have a good day." I brace myself and call him over as I'm told there is a report for me to sign. I review the report and add my ink in my assigned task. My face is all scowls and furrows as I shed all desire to nudge in an additional few minutes of play time before we roam home.

He has bitten one of his classmates. I have edged toward livid but know that a rant is not going to get me anywhere. I still approach the border of rant, with the litany of the base questions that get me through the walk home. Does Mom bite you? Do I bite you? How would you like it if N bit you? I dread writing them down again for their utter lack of originality or constructiveness, but that is what I was left resorting to.  From there I get a sense of needing a different approach, a strategy that will give him a different approach or outlet rather than urging greater and greater levels of self-control.

The conversation turns and we get into the details of what happened, which I already gathered from the report. Earlier on in the day, he bit a girl in a fight over a spoon. For clarity and context I have to add -- despite it making me sound like a 4-year-old -- that he had it first. For whatever reason he was expected to give the spoon over and in the escalation over said spoon, he bit the girl. The conversation lead to the topic of sharing, but it was clear to me that sharing was not quite be what I would be encouraging. In reality it would be capitulation that I would be insisting upon: keep giving you her her way and... well... she'll walk all... over you. Everyone would. 

No Gabriel, sharing is a little more complicated than you'd like or hope it to be. Your conflict-averse father knows that all too well at his age.

By the time we got home my mind was onto the topic of what he ought to be doing.  I ushered him to his spot at the kitchen table and brought out the green plastic IKEA spoon that is core to his breakfast rituals - green being his favourite colour.  I gave him the spoon and tried to role play what happened this morning. He didn't play his role with the emotion that he had in the morning. It was loosely gripped and it was easy for me to pluck it out of his relaxed fist rather than take him the brink of the conflict he was in prior to the bite.  I never quite got him to act it out as vividly as I would have liked, but I did make the case that it was time to inquire when something was leading to conflict or disrespecting his boundaries.  (The boundaries conversation will be for another day.) I tried to instill in him the question, "Why are you doing that?"

In the role play, however, Gabriel didn't abstract well enough to pose the question to me. Instead he felt compelled to answer it and he never quite got around to asking it.  We discussed it again when my wife got home and tried to coach him on using the question throughout the evening and we will do it over the coming days and weeks as well. Hopefully he will be able to employ it and make the effort to defuse a situation before it gets to the point that it did in daycare yesterday morning. My hope is that the question will bring about another level of consciousness on the part of both protagonists in this rite of childhood. I would dread Gabriel merely receiving the response, "Because I want it," and flounder with the challenge of coming up with the appropriate follow-up question. Perhaps the question would give his friend the chance to ask herself the same thing or give him the time to tell her to get another spoon elsewhere rather than insist on the one he had.

On the topic of daycare, I hope this is not too jarring a transition, last night I wrote our daycare to inform them of our desire to keep Gabriel there for another year to ensure he is more developed before thrusting him into kindergarten and onto a gerbil wheel of perpetual catch up throughout his schooling.

Should He Stay or Should He Go

As a November baby, Gabriel's timing or age or development -- whichever of these terms best serves to define the question of when he ought to start school -- is fraught with more reflection and inner debate than if he were born in the first half of the year. We have, revisited the question many times and each time nodded to ourselves that the best course is to keep him back one more year rather than rush him along. It is not a decision we have come easily to. I may have come to it a little more easily and my unwillingness to sleep on the decision to enrol him in school in September may belie a stubborn streak that I am very reluctant to acknowledge otherwise.

Gabriel is a big kid for his age. That was the story from his arrival and when I compare his size to my own during childhood, he is seven months ahead of me in his height and weight. The first things that come to mind are the expectations that will be thrust upon him because of that size. His peers will look up to him and expect him to do some of their heavy lifting on the playground or in other venues of uneasy childhood detente. Teachers will over look the birthdate in the class register and erode him with expectations of superior development and performance to go along with the size of the child. Those things are obvious, and there is a part of me that acknowledges how old his mother and I are and would like to hold on to him a little longer and at the same time do all we can to ensure that he is as independent as possible when he finishes his public schooling and comes to that cross road.

Earlier this year, Nadine had asked the question of whether he ought to start in September 2016 rather than 2017 and we mulled it over one more time. Four years and 10 months is a bit of a lag behind everyone else and it would be better to have him over-prepared than under. There may be those questions of him being bored if he waited a year longer and there would be the fact that he would be that much bigger than his peers when he finally gets into the queue but I would feel better prepared to talk to him about the advantages and onuses of his size than rebuilding confidence on a regular basis as he tries to catch up.

Earlier this week, the conversation emerged again at his daycare. We had a parent-teacher meeting at the daycare where the teacher in his room indicated that he had a hard time focusing and staying still in class.  I've noticed this in his music class on Saturdays as well. Despite this challenge with attentiveness, however, his daycare teachers feels we ought to consider enrolling him for kindergarten with the rest of the kids currently in his daycare class. Comparisons were made to another boy in the class who have had same problem with attentiveness and another who is slightly younger than Gabriel, but surpasses him for focus and calm. The daycare teacher asserted that she would be able to settle him down within a few months to the point that he would start working on his penmanship a little more, but that remains some distance off. We have witnessed him calm and focused to play with Lego or construction trucks, but my experience of late has been that it has been a slightly more difficult to retain his attention for books at bedtime. He has always been a challenge to settle down for bed; from day one he has seemed to have felt that he would be missing something while he slept.

One question we did not ask during the interview was whether her timeframe was accurate if Gabriel was only in class three days a week. On his days off, he has had the opportunity to go to gymnastics and rock climbing classes. The other thing that is obvious is that he has a lot of energy to burn off. He does have plenty to burn off and I have often joked that our efforts to wear him out are actually just improving his endurance.

I am not sure how much Nadine has given second thoughts to enrolling him early, but one indicator is her comment that the daycare wants to fill his seat with someone else. Further to that it would be a challenge for them to have Gabriel in a group when he is with a group of peers that are that much younger than him. There is the threat that he would be bored during the coming year of daycare, and that it would be a challenge for the teachers there to keep him engaged when they would be, focusing their energies on the majority of the kids. It would be an opportunity for him to take on a role to further develop his social skills and still pursue the valuable task of getting him to focus a little better.

And with that jumble of confessions and contradictions, I have shared the dilemma of when to enrol the lad in school and disclosed enough background for an "expert" to diagnose him with something and reach for the prescription pad. We are not, however, looking for a diagnosis to over-label or to simplify, medicate and discard what is first and foremost "boyhood."  We'll keep modelling calm.  I'll see if my intermittent practice of kanji prompts him to sit and work on writing his alphabet.  I'll keep telling him to keep chugging hard and not to stop and cry when he sees someone he wants to catch up to or pass when he is running.  We will keep him on his path and at his pace.

An Incident and A Recurring Character

First off, I have a special place in my heart for this girl.  She was a cue to me on perhaps the first of those growing-big moments for Gabriel.  Nadine was about to return to work after her year of maternity leave and she did not have the heart to take him to daycare on that first day.  She knew that she would be crying the whole day, so I took Gabriel to drop him off.  The details of the logistics to get in the door and do whatever administrative tasks there were completely escape me.  The clearest memory of that morning was the moments spent saying, "Goodbye."

(The reality is that after only blogging for the last six months of Gabriel's life, it is privilege to flash back to this story.  But, as I often do - see - I digress.)

After getting him undressed and sitting him down, I told Gabriel that I was leaving and I did not get much or any response from him.  He remained seated and apart from me, taking in his surroundings and observing. He was not too troubled by my goodbye and my wave, so I did it again just to make sure we had an understanding.  And after that I did it again.  I still worried that my footsteps to the door would provoke a response but he remained still, indifferent to the possibility of being left there alone. Then this girl, who is six months older than Gabriel, was plopped down near him and he got off his bum and crawled toward her to hang out.  I was appropriately ignored, so with a wry turn of the mouth I headed for the door.

After changing daycares due to a lack of space, we eventually, in December 2014, found our way back into a daycare that was 500 metres from our home.  One afternoon when we took him to get oriented, there she was again and I got a warm sense of familiarity about the place and the connections Gabriel would form and reform there.

In the year that has passed Gabriel and this girl have been to one another's birthday parties and she happened to give him his first Star Wars toy, effectively introducing him to that entire universe. His first playdate, which wasn't a complete disaster, was with her and another boy and we have grown fond of the feisty waif who has been a part of Gabriel's orbit time and again.  We look ahead to the possibility of them parting when she starts school in September and wonder if that will close the chapter where they have known each other.  Hopefully, that won't be the case, but kids grow in their on ways.

Today, however, when Nadine and I found ourselves negotiating the terrain of uneven truths of our first, "So how did it happen" debriefing of his school day, it was her again.  I got a call during lunch that Gabriel was in an incident at school and that he was okay but that his wire-rim Harry Potter-evoking glasses were knocked off and then stomped on.  By a girl.  (Advice to any parents buying glasses, no wire-rims!!  Feel free to gather friends and kin around your computer monitors to join together in a course of, "Duh!"  If it didn't happen today Gabriel's glasses would have likely met their end in short order regardless.)

When I arrived at the daycare to pick him up, I peered in on him to get a sense of how the day and the incident were effecting him.  At first he looked quite different without the glasses, different enough to suggest that the incident had left a lingering mark on him.  Either that or he got plenty of playground smudged into his face.  Before I could get face to face with him, I was called into the office to review the paperwork for the incident and signed it.  Between the call with Nadine and my arrival I wondered what Gabriel may have done to provoke it and by the looks of the report he seemed to have been relatively innocent.  Just as I was leaving the office, Nadine texted to say the girl's mother emailed to apologize.  I laughed at the realization but felt awful that it was her and wondered about how her folks felt about it.  The cookie is tough in this one.

When I finished the paperwork with the daycare staff and picked up the remains of his glasses, I headed to the playground to greet him.  He was as cheerful as always and announced that "[She] stomped on my glasses!", as if announcing that he saw dinosaur bones or a particularly unique digger at one of the two construction sites nearby.

We walked home and I waited until Nadine got home to spare him two rounds of interrogation.  Of course we did not get the complete story from him, especially as tired as he was at the end of the day. I suspect that it would be fair to say that he was not completely innocent.  He did say that the two of them were angry at one another and that there may have been an issue sharing a book but we will never know exactly what instigated it.  We just know that the two of them have left yet another milestone in one another's lives.  Here's to more peaceful ones.

The Comfort of Ritual

I wake up with my legs telling me, like Obi-Wan with some Jedi Mind Shit, "You don't need to do hills this morning." I did hills 36 hours earlier and the legs don't have much life in them. So, it being Saturday, I settle down at the laptop to write and edit.

Gabriel shuffles into the office at 6:55 to express his bewilderment that the 7 on his digital clock -- we block off the minutes -- still hasn't appeared. I've been grumpy with the weary legs and now the train of thought that has encountered this barricade for the day. When we are all up and I'm assured no one will be disturbed, I storm through the chores: dishes, laundry washed and into the dryer, an older load folded and an even older one into dressers, night-time diapers disposed of, recycling done with a bracing moment contemplating the cool, grey dawn as boxes are punched flat.

As soon as he was up, Gabe said he was hungry and after serving him his two requests, he still hasn't eaten more than a bite or two, he's still in his pyjamas and the clock is ticking down toward departure time for music class.  I've issued the threat that if he doesn't get going there'll be no music, no pizza and no time with the camera. I know that keeping the promise would mean idling around home fending off his requests for TV until I land on that sweet spot that gets him doing something else though not rewarding him.

He buys in, however, and he's dressed, self-fed and bouncing impatiently in the hallway while I get my shoes on.  He has even done his homework for music with his closest approximation to colouring inside the lines -- the first victory of the day.

The morning has turned and I can look ahead to all those things that we anticipated. He runs up the hill and I try to teach him micro lessons about pacing and getting up the hill without having to stop. My legs are dead, but moving a little and keeping pace with him. 

The transfer between the train and the bus leaves a window of time that I've gotten into the habit of filling with a stop at Starbucks. Tea and a cookie for me; juice and a rice krispie square for him make for a quiet moment. Usually there is just one other occupied table in the cafe and there is a calm in neutral territory.  He contemplatively works through his square and the juice seems not to overstimulate him despite its sugar.  He is unprompted with his thanks, his expression of love for running and his comment that this grey, Russian-novel, morning is a beautiful one. It truly is. I marvel at his resilience and his knack for wiping away the significance of my scowling efficiency in addressing what apparently needs doing. 

This is needed and it resets my entire weekend. He marvels at the tall apartment across the street, counting the floors as I snap a surreptitious shot of him pointing up and counting to sixteen. The conversation leads to the word "opposite." I evade the definition and ask him what the opposite of short is and he's off.  Big, up, on, in, tall, young and new, down, left and here. He gets them all without struggling with the curveballs and I can praise him each time. We share our treats, and when it is time to go he wants to help carry my hot cup of tea to the counter for the take out lid and I wonder if these twenty minutes a week will add up for him the way they do for me.

Meyers Briggsing the 4 Year Old?

Bedtime currently is a complicated affair. The Lad's fascination with forts has regularly left Mum or Dad tearing themselves away from reading the epic dinosaur-trucks constructing a swimming pool tale to ask, "Are you paying attention?"  Over the course of 3 or 4 weeks of this, we have yet to get a response that indicates comprehension or attentiveness.  Worse still is the fact that his insistence on using every pillow in the house for his forts leaves Mum and I trying to figure out what combination of pillows we have been bequeathed with as he snores the night away on a pile of about a half dozen pillows of all sizes.

He has insisted on the pillow forts at his grandparents as well and can get in a pretty cranky mood after a fort collapse, despite the flimsy materials of down pillows and blankets that he resorts to for his construction.  Is this a phase?  Time will tell.

Lego and jigsaw puzzles fill more and more of his day, not to mention the living room and bedroom floors.  There is one 45-piece puzzle that he has put together and immediately taken apart to reassemble that elements of the pieces - big chunky pieces for a toddler - are breaking apart and the finished work is best described as gap-toothed.  He has moved on to puzzles with more pieces and they pose a little more challenge, if only because the individual pieces aren't cut in a manner that accommodates a better fit.  These are the first thing he wants to do in the morning and it would be easy for him to distract himself (and us) from dinner to work on a puzzle that he started in the morning before breakfast.

After building some pretty complex Lego sets on his own, he has taken to coming up with his own Lego creations that do not follow any instructions and helping him in the task is something that is challenging for me.  My recollections of my Lego peak involved me carefully drafting floor plans while putting together houses with good circulation and plenty of windows for each room in the house.  When Gabriel asks me to help him build a house, however, things are more spontaneous.  He occasionally gives me direction getting the walls up as high as possible.  In return, he would resist my suggestions to install windows somewhere, anywhere in his edifice.  We would settle into a rhythm of building the walls higher and higher, ensuring that we don't run into each other or get too ahead of one another.

I am cautious to ensure the bricks overlap for stability and strength, but I have let go of my desire to have the building be one colour.  When it came time for building a roof on our most recent group effort, though, he let me construct layers of the overlapping flat pieces to close in toward the center in an efficient light cover on his building.

While he has demonstrated some aptitude for music at times, it has been (slightly) less frequent of late.  The most recent was him singing the non-throat-shredding parts of the Foo Fighters "These Days" a month and a half ago.  At the moment, the building and puzzles have been his main preoccupation with the exception of Star Wars but that is another story or seven.  I recall a Mi' Kmaq gentleman telling Nadine during Month 6 of the pregnancy that Gabriel was going to be a lawyer, but it may be that the current phase is a sign of an engineering aptitude that his uncles would embrace.  It is far too early to tell much of anything.

The Acrophobe's Son

My own issue with heights can be traced to the nefarious influence of Looney Tunes cartoons.  I was walking up the stairs in our home as a 3- or 4-year-old and tried to climb them in the same way that Tweety Bird - lacking my length of limb - made use of both arms (ahem wings) and feet to scramble onto each individual step.  After succeeding on enough steps to get near the top, I shed whatever vigilance it took to keep all four limbs strategically placed on a step and... down the whole flight I rolled.  I don't believe I sobbed or anything that brought attention to my Chuck Jones influenced effort. I just swallowed my pride and walked up the steps upright, with a new fear firmly embedded and a dollop of playfulness gone.

Since that time, the legs quake at certain precipices, oblivious to the minor feats of engineering that will undoubtedly assure my safety - as I have often been told. I have kept my feet away from trapdoors in the floors of cable cars. I have steered clear of the view from skyscraper windows. I white-knuckled through a flight in my uncle's float plane Cessna in 1984 and gulped watermelon-down-the-throat-hard when he released the controls and told me to take over as the plane dipped.

If one needs evidence that opposites attract, exhibit A would be my wife: mountain girl. Born and raised in the Rocky vistas of Canmore, Alberta, she has had a long affinity for the mountains and her own long, unscarring history of rock-climbing - both indoors and out.  Gabriel has often demonstrated his mother's indifference to heights while I on a regular basis white knuckle from a distance at his forays up monkey bars or the other apparatus that catch his eye at the playground.

For the last month, he has been able to up the ante with participation in a more structured rock-climbing class.  He had been a little skittish about the climbing great heights during the first few weeks, rarely climbing any higher than two or three metres off the ground.  Each session my wife and I would watch as he climbed about two metres up the wall and called out, "Down." We would talk to the class instructor and she assured us that he was making progress. Gabriel would assure us that he was not afraid of heights and last week he boasted that he made it to the very top of the wall - an assertion of pride that went unchallenged despite the evidence to the contrary.

We had resigned ourselves to not signing him up for another class given his reluctance to get too far from solid ground but on the last night of the class he made steady progress up the wall.  My concerns that my anxieties were being transmitted to him finally abated and I applauded and fist-pumped to him as he beamed up from the floor after his belay to solid ground.  Meanwhile, my legs quaked as the waifs scrambled up and down the walls.  I had seen enough and I retired to a chair in the hallway and buried my nose in a book.

A Message

On Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk, tapping away at the computer when Gabriel came in, clutching a teddy bear and alert despite just getting up.  He looked at me in a way that was vaguely reminiscent and then he gave a small tug at the hair on my right wrist that was familiar, though he had never done it ever before.

That moment, with the tug on the hair, me at the desk, the precise distance between us and the angle of eye contact still haunts me two and a half days later.  Gabriel's gesture, for it is more gesture than action to me, took me back 25 years to another occasion when I sat at a desk, my hirsute arms evoking curiosity in a young boy.  He is a boy who has been in my thoughts throughout the 25 years that have passed.  For a time, I pondered naming Gabriel after this boy, but with the reviews in, it seems we did a decent job of choosing the name that we did.

The boy's name was Marcusi.  With my son, I might have dropped the terminal "i" or made it a middle name, but the time for that musing has passed.  Marcusi was the lone boy in the first class I taught when I began my teaching career in 1991.  He was the youngest in the class and we bonded over hockey in particular but recollections of him evoke memories of him visiting my home for soup and Oreos, the boundless energy with which he brought the milk to everyone's desk, the way he played Ebeneezer Scrooge during our second Christmas concert together and the insistence with which he protected me.  A wealth of fond memories for a teacher after two years in the classroom. Outside the classroom, I recall the unbelievable, fortuitous opportunity to take him out for dinner to a sports bar in Montreal where he marvelled at the array of televisions that ensured he had every chance to keep his eyes on the game between the Penguins and Blackhawks in 1992. His curiosity about the lemon wedge in my Coke earned him a wedge for his water and one of my indulgent smiles.

But the memory of Marcusi's tug on the wrist might be pre-eminent among my memories for its intimacy and boyish wonder.  When Gabriel did the same, it brought so much of that time back to me that it has been overwhelming. Perhaps there is some vague universal in that act or gesture - that a plurality of boys have that habit of pulling wrist hair - but it has ineffably connected Gabriel and Marcusi.  When I think of the angles as our eyes met, I am certain that my chair heights then and now were such that I met Gabriel's eyes at the same angle that I met Marcusi's nearly 25 years ago.  When I consider the Inuit belief that a name is handed down because of the belief that an ancestor's spirit is embodied or reincarnated in the child, I get spooked by the common gesture.

Marcusi is no longer with us.  He would be 35 if he were but he took his life in September 2001, just as he turned 21. There were issues even when I. Was teaching him when he started abusing solvents because of bullying.  I managed to stop for a while and he even graduated from high school - no small feat for an Inuk.  There are time when I wonder if there was more I could have done, especially having taught during those formative years but there was only so much impact I could have in the course of the years that followed my departure from his village when he was twelve. He even kept in touch by letter while I was in Japan.  A teenaged boy writing letters? Mailing them halfway around the world? You would readily acknowledge that he's rare, but I'll tell you he was special.

For me, the repetition of that gesture was so many things all at once - cautionary, spooky, puzzling, spectral and reassuring - and a harbinger of second chances.  It is a reminder of how fragile and fleeting childhood and innocence can be.  I will need to be vigilant about the things that will challenge Gabriel in the years ahead and I will need an internal strength to prepare him and to face them with him.  If there's something mystical or spiritual at play in this echoed gesture as well, then I take from it the message that the too-brief dry run with Marcusi was a gift and that there is a lot of him in the boy I had half a mind to name after him.

Ink Smudge Eureka

    "Letters and bridge, or crosswalk?"

    Gabriel chants "Eenie Meenie" to make the decision, repeating "Miney" twice at the end to land "Mo" on the "Letters" route home from daycare.  It is called the Letters route because the "Saint Barnabas Anglican Church" printed into the concrete provides Gabriel with all of the letters in his name except for that "E" which is a few metres away to indicate the corner of Seventh Avenue NW.

(When it rains, it pours?)

    For the longest time we would stop and pick out the letters in his name, make an exaggerated point to the E's on the corner and then spot the "L" before resuming the walk home.  When it was snow-covered, he kicked away the deep, heavy snow to find the writing, but lately he has had less and less interest in identifying the letters in his name.  This afternoon he is more interested in splashing and kicking in the puddles and the writing lay immobile with out notice or significance.

   Nadine and I have been reading to him constantly.  I infamously whispered passages from Haruki Murakami's brick-sized tome 1Q84 during those newborn days and he arrived to a room more than well-stocked with Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak and myriad others that we have read to him ever since.  His visits to the library are constant and I recall him having a massive meltdown one afternoon as he sat naked on his bedroom floor at 4:55 crying that he wanted to go to the library, which was closing at 5.  Books are part of his routine and, even though he can glaze over indefinitely at the sight of an iPad and treats us to a litany of requests for just one more episode of a TV program before supper, bedtime or getting in the car to go somewhere, he does from time to time plunk down quietly with a book and immerse himself in the images, the turn of the pages and the cadences recalled from countless readings.

   He has regularly finished sentences for us as we read and recently, I have made a point of pushing him a little, framing a word with my fingers and telling him what it is or asking if he can recognize it. He has put up a bit of resistance to that and tells me to read it or that he does not want to.  Perhaps it is simply a matter of it all feeling too much like work for him, but I push a little bit.

    Parallel to the reading has been the occasional nudge to see if he will write anything and start working on his letters.  Whenever there are birthday cards to send we get him a card too and he will pick up the pen in his right hand, gripping it between his index and middle fingers and his thumb and giving it a go.  The results have been consistently original and doctorish.  Think abstract rather than representational.

   For some time now I have pondered modelling writing as a habit for him, but have not gotten around to it yet.  For the most part I write at the keyboard and when I do pick up pen and paper it is usually when I am on my own, rather than for the sake of making a witnessed performance of it.  As the adult colouring craze has emerged, I recall the meditative component of practicing kanji when I lived in Japan and thought that it would be a good two-birds with one stone move and make it rather authentic for Gabriel at the same time.  I have the paper and the notebooks that I used to practice in and it would make my effort at penmanship a bit more authentic.  If I start practicing my Roman characters it could cause a bit of concern about the integrity of my faculties.

   Before I have actually had the chance to sit down and work on my kanji and see if Gabriel asks, "What are you doing?", instead of, for example, "Know what?", the time comes for us to get cards in the mail for my father's birthday.

   I head into Gabriel's room with his card for his grandpa and ask his to write something in the card. On this occasion, for the first time, he makes a deliberate effort at copying each letter from the text of the card.  He got his "G" backwards, but that may have been a consequence of me telling him, "It is sort of a circle with a line..."

(Yes, he has had alphabet books.)

After getting past the "G," he fared better and provided not only a reasonable estimation of his name but a sign that the little guy who has been putting up concerning resistance to reading and writing might let Nadine and I sort him out on his printing before he can conclude that he can entirely forego it because of keyboards and touchscreens.