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.

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.

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.