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.