Once More? (please...)

He's a substantial size for his age. At six, he probably weighs as much as I did when I was 10 or 11 and for months now I note that the Big Wheels that were all the rage during my suburban youth had a weight limit of 65 pounds, which my son is just three pounds shy of. If he asked me for one, I'd have to decline and rather than try to explain the math I'd have to tell him he's too big. In a wiser moment, I might have the clues to tell him, "We'll see," rather than issue anything definitive.

Tonight, though, he's disconsolate and its an hour past his bedtime. He got his first fidget spinner and after a little over an hour, he set it down of a crowded playground to spare himself the risk of it falling out of his pocket to never be found again. As trendy toys are wont to do, it disappeared. He scoured the playground again and again, his fatigue and emotions conspiring to drag him into an abyss that nothing could console. He retraced his steps and reviewed the possible locations where he may have left it, his calm holding together but giving away to the loss of the toy and perhaps even the disappointing realization that, in this world, fidget spinners disappear when they are given the chance.

I was quietly miffed at the obsession delaying the bedtime we had already compromised on, but I participated in the search and kept my cool. When the search was finally abandoned we start back for the car.  Gabriel a few steps ahead of me, but his feet were leaden with the loss.

"C'mere."

He stopped and turned. I extended my arms to give him a hug.

"I'm proud of how you're keeping calm right now, but I know how sad you are. It's okay to cry."

He did.

"Want a ride?"

He nodded and turned his back to me and after one failed attempt at the hoist, (which was less comedic than I would have liked) I got him onto my shoulders. There was a time when I could not get his legs far enough down my chest to feel he had his weight where it ought to be. He was once too top-heavy and I had to pull on his legs to keep him from falling backward of his perch. This time, the weight pressed on my back and neck.

I moved slowly as a few of his tears drizzled onto my forehead. The weight told me, "This isn't going to happen too many more times."

"Really?", I thought.

"Really, really."

I put him in charge of navigation as we crossed streets. He kept his eyes on traffic and gave me the required warnings about the oncoming traffic to keep us out of harm's way. We talked along the way while he lost himself in the sensation of the 5-days' growth of hair on my bald head against his palms and fingertips. I told him about "easy come, easy go." I didn't give him the acidic take on it, but reminded him of the things that he has worked hard for and hung onto. I let him know that everybody else wanted that fidget spinner just as badly as he did, even though few to none of them had to wait as long as he did for his one treasured hour of owning one.

I didn't make any promises, but I'm sure the next fidget spinner will not require as long a wait as today's.

His next fidget spinner will, for me, mark the walk with him on my shoulders tonight. An occasion which will be one of the very last few where I not only carry him, but perhaps ease the brunt of loss as well. I will have to walk next to him while his feet are weigh the the gravity of sadness and loss of will. I'm not sure if I can ease future pains as easily as I could tonight, but if that is the case, I anticipate that the pain will double on those occasions.

Lizards and Siblings and Sugar Rushes, Oh My!

A child’s birthday party is now an occasion for some time away from the responsibilities. It is not the oasis that a child’s stretch at the grandparents can be, but it is a break to dawdle in a cafe for a few hours. The conversation gets to be distracted and meander wherever it wishes rather than aim to be inordinately adult. The parties are becoming a recurring visit with the same characters, snapshots of parents only known by their children’s names. A drop-off to get a sense of how close to the template the occasion is, a moment to get reacquainted and perhaps ensure contact info has been shared or updated and then the next few hours proceed.

If the party goes well, the kids let you know that they’d love to do that themselves. Over the past six years there have been gymnastics parties, indoor playgrounds, Chuck E Cheese, zoo visits, baking your own pizzas, a visit to a fish hatchery and the occasional family-hosted games efforts. Our variations on the theme included a science-oriented party where kids could make their own slime and do experiments with dry ice. (It did actually go over well because rather than despite the slime. With the kids, anyway.) Today’s party featured lizards and amphibians. 

Despite our impulse to cringe at the thought, we were intrigued and Gabriel was all in. Our arrival was a quick refresher on the familiar themes: the harried final preparations; the awkwardness amongst the kids about gifts before there was a designated place to deposit them; the uninvited 3-year-old sibling who has turned up for every classmate’s birthday party for the last 12 to 18 months. (I don't believe anyone has had the nerve to tell the children's father that only one of the kids was invited.) A more recent wrinkle in our party preparations is the dubious trust we place in Gabriel when he insists he knows the right present for his friend. Okay, but I was wary about his insistence that Ninja-go Lego was the ideal gift for the birthday girl. When getting the gift with him the day before I forgot to get a gift receipt, which probably earned me the standard disapproving sigh issued in all instance of paternal indifference, "Men."

Ahh, onto the lizard man.

He arrived in a pick up with his menagerie stashed in two Rubbermaid containers, one of which had holes punched in it for ventilation. My first thought was the resemblance - in both appearance and demeanour - the man bore to a lumbering, monosyllabic neighbour. 

He settled in and perched his containers on one of the fold-out tables that the community centre was replete with. With the preparations were completed in the next room and the kids streamed in one-by-one, he sat with arms crossed in front of the two empty benches the kids would perch upon for the showing of the animals. Terse would sum up his demeanour. He would pose no threat to Jack Hanna's reputation for charming audiences. Once the kids settled in, he gruffly insisted on silence to not disturb the animals by being too loud. I was left to wonder if he had the animals merely so he could insist on silence in every possible situation. "I have geckos here!! Shut up!", he could likely wail to neighbours who broached his tolerance for decibels. He did not quite go that far, but his opening statement expressing his requests for proper behaviour included an extended treatise on the difference between stories and anecdotes, which would start with "Once I..." or "My mommy...," and questions, which started with "Who, What, When, Where and Why." He would answer the questions. I decided to play it safe and forego asking, "How old" and "How big" questions. The distinction between questions and anecdotes had, I suspected, more to do with the one nerve the birthday brood of six-year-olds was standing on rather than the noise sensitivities of the reptilian.

Needless to say, the lizards and toad bridged the gap their handler was reluctant to broach. After the kids had the opportunity to see their first gecko, toad and snake of the morning, I concluded the handler was not going to get much friendlier or more talkative. Gabriel was caught up in the textures and wonder of each creature and tea beckoned. I took my opportunity to slip away.

At party's end, the adults agreed that the animal handler left them wanting for something more. I felt that he was more frightening that the animals could have possibly been. So far Gabriel hasn't expressed a desire for the same gent to do the party for his 7th birthday and the birthday girl's mother added that her daughter had actually gotten into LEGO Ninjago thanks to Gabriel's influence and that it was better for her than Barbie dolls. 

And for those things I am thankful.

Fear and Loathing the School Lunch (Break?)

With my son in the school system now, I am participating regularly in the monthly school council meetings. On Wednesday night my presence as one of the two dads that regularly attend meetings earned me a welcome greeting from the school principal as I came in. By name. (I suppose it is a safe time for principals to know me by name. Right?)

The meeting was similar to previous meetings that I had attended. Familiar topics were covered but an interesting one came up this time around: the length of the school lunch break. It turns out that the students only have a 20-minute break for lunch and at that point it is time for the kids to get outside for a bit of playground time before launching into the afternoon. One of the parents raised the concern after volunteering to join the kids for a visit to City Hall.  During the tour the kids were asked about whether or not they composted food and from that discussion it came out that the kids are composting a good portion of their school lunches because they don't have time to eat. From what I could gather from the discussion, the lunch break is limited, in part, out of deference to the school bus schedules that require the school day to wrap up at a time that squeezes the rest of the day to a degree that limits the flexible use of time throughout the day.

My son only attends school in the mornings at this point, but it still caused me some concern. For all of the signs that the school is doing creative progressive things with the way they are teaching the kids and engaging them in other topics and issues - whether it is in merely retaining a music program for the kids or making empathy a theme for the kids to discuss and learn - there is the niggling feeling that the institutional machinery will impose itself.

It is easy to get your back up against the bureaucracy or other efficiencies that schools embody for the sake of educating kids in the way that they do. I could also crank up my anxieties in the way I could when I had the sense that the system was no better than the most disengaged teacher and that the needs for control over the kids, numeric assessment or measurement of performance, a limited range of perception of children's abilities and interests... I could go on.

But... lunch break?

The impression I got from the discussion was that the length of school lunch -- 20 minutes of eating time -- was a matter that the school administration was aware of and that they just had to come up with the best, most flexible solution. Still, they are hemmed in by the school bus schedule which ultimately sets the tone for the the beginning, end and lunch of the day. The questions this scheduling raises are significant. How structural is this problem? How many people, how up with the school board need to be involved in resolving it? Does the principal have the autonomy to come up with a solution that aligns with what an education ought to be and what our schools were built for? The answer to a lot of these questions may be nothing more than, "Well... uh...," unless of course the suits manage to find the right track to do platitude karaoke to.

There is, granted, a dilemma in the question of how long kids ought to have for a school lunch. The goal is to get the kids fed and given some outdoor time during the time allowed for lunch and ensure that the day ends when it is supposed to. In all of that, there appears to be a lot of rigidity. I would not want me son to have all the time in the world to dawdle through lunch, but at the same time I would not want him hitting the wall in the early afternoon and being less able to learn because he did not have enough time for lunch. While I would respect some expectations that he take responsibility for feeding himself promptly, there is the lingering anxiety about his routine being regimented or mechanized and lunch being the thin edge of the wedge that contributes more than it ought to school success.

I have told myself from the outset that it will be up to me to help my son succeed in school and not to leave it entirely up to him and his teachers to determine what he learns or what skills he develops there. The lunch issue is one example of how the System can -- intentionally or not -- demand conformity in the face of cumbersome short and long-term consequences. At this point I feel that the people I would be working with at the school will want to come up with the creative solutions and I will have to figure out how to counter this and come up with ideas and solutions that may resolve this when my son, who is easily distracted from his food at the best of times, faces that time squeeze September.

The Bicambrial S-Shaped Snow Fort

The east wing of the project, after about
45 minutes of construction

A meander through Riley Park was aimed at a stay in the playground, something to postpone the inevitable request to sit in front of the TV on a sunny Saturday afternoon. He, in snowboots, wanted to break ground through the virgin snow while I choose the well-worn path to keep my feet dry. It was not long, however, until he was changing his path to follow my steps and spare himself a demanding trudge.

That well-beaten route lead to an abandoned snow fort that was just asking to be augmented with a few more bricks. Gabriel quickly took interest in the snowy citadel and set about excavating other snow bricks to add to it. There was an odd machismo that took over. Gabriel's voice deepened as it has on occasions when one needs to take charge of the situation or fulfill the essential role of foreman on the project. He turned into this hybrid of engineer and battle leader as he looked at ways to build the fort higher and to set aside the perfect pieces to fulfill the role of gun or missile. His focus toggled between the two mindsets fluidly as he set about ensuring the structural integrity of the fort and the effectiveness of potential weapons. I followed orders as well as I could, though I did insubordinate at times to pursue the possibility of procuring a piece of snow large enough to serve as the fort's roof. My efforts caused a pair of collapses, but these were quickly repaired and I aimed for closure at the top. Gabriel, however, wanted to make sure the walls were low enough to allow snowballs to be launched at potential opponents.

The snow was the appropriate solidity to make huge bricks that probably weighed over 30-40 pounds and will leaving a tell-tale imprint on my back and hips tomorrow morning. There were loose chunks nearby which we added to the walls with ease but before long a fun part of the process was to jump on the edge of the snowpack to break off a chunk and then heave the whole piece over to the fort or to break it up into smaller pieces that were easier to heft and to brick into the structure.

It was enchanting to see how Gabriel's mind went into his version of project management speak as he set specifications for how it ought to be done and want he envisioned for the outcome of our work.  He tested the walls for their resistance to large snowballs, he uttered "stability," and "strength" with an authority that suggested that play was an opportunity to unleash vocabulary left dormant and untouched in the ho-hum of everyday school life. That deeper voice may have been this pent-up desire to command. I'm not sure why it came out as deep and authoritative as it did, unless it is the influence of the Han Solo voice in the Star Wars audiobooks he listens to. He even surprised me by declaring, "Cut" at the end of my video of the completed project.

The entire exercise in breaking the snow and putting into place ultimately lead to another wing of the fort being constructed. Gabriel's original intent was to add an exterior barrier to the fort but in short order it was connected. In keeping with the spirit of project management, a few other boys and their father took an interest in the fort and before long the five of us were adding to it and there was this vague sense of some landmark of an ancient civilization emerging from our efforts. I know, I know, it will melt or get kicked over at some point. We are anticipating just enough melting and a wee bit of a freeze to solidify the structure and extend the life of the structure before it relents to the next chinook or the coming of spring.

As Gabriel's plans for the fort unfolded and as the project expanded it was remarkable to see him in near-rapture as he chugged away in pursuit of his completed vision. The hefting and breaking of snow and its placement in the walls of the project as it unfolded kept him in motion for nearly two hours, oblivious to hunger and fatigue. Eventually, thirst got his attention but only after I coaxed him on our way to home. We will look forward to visiting the project over the next few days, but it was most fun to see him play foreman or boss for a few hours as the fort unfolded. 

To Walk Alone

It is just 400 metres. Just.

But it is the walk to school and as much as I want my son to develop the independence he would have in walking himself to school, it ain’t 1972 (when I walked half the distance and crossed only one street rather than three) to get to school when I was in kindergarten. Another factor that may have influenced that was the challenge my mother would have faced of dressing my younger brothers to get them out the door to do the walk along with me.

He made his request to walk to school on his own and, as is often the case, a resolution of sorts emerged before the day was out. Unfortunately, it merely happened to be an opportunity to cop out rather than take the topic as far as we could. The out of school care (OOSC) program he is in, coincidentally enough, sent out an email a few hours after his request to me. In the email, they reiterated their need for the kids to be logged in when they arrive for they day. They did not, however, make it explicit that it was the parents’ responsibility. If I wanted to close down the discussion, I could say that OOSC wants or needs his mother or I to log him in and out when we drop him off and pick him up.  

I want him to have this responsibility and the trust, confidence and independence that would go with it but now it is something that requires a great deal of negotiation with his school, or the OOSC program. It is quite easy to say that times have changed but the institutions have girded themselves with such rigorous caution against liabilities. My wheels are already turning about the negotiations that I could have with either the school or OOSC to discuss him going on his own and, at OOSC, logging himself in. There is a strong possibility that older kids in the program walk themselves there and log themselves in.

For about 2 1/2 years I have walked my son to and from daycare regularly and we put our steps in throughout the week to other destinations, so covering the distance is not a factor and at every intersection my loop of "look both ways, watch the cars" has played incessantly. He actually stops and waves cars through ahead of him, so I now have to coach him up a bit on asserting his own rights at an intersection but at least he is erring on the side of caution. For the third street crossing he has a well-worn pedestrian overpass that takes the concerns of looking both ways out of the equation. At this point, though, I find it frustrating that I have to rationalize this brief walk to the extent that I do because it is unsupervised.

I am confident that the risks, if any, are minimal and that the consciousness of stranger-danger or traffic are in part a factor of our collective fears, being normalized rather than mitigated. The only other people I see when I walk him to OOSC or school are another parent who lives on the same floor on me taking her daughter, and two cyclists coming north on the sidewalk and prompting me to squish to my left as my son walks the top edge of a low cinder block wall he climbs every morning. I know this walk.

There seems to have been a trade-off between low-probability tragedy and in favour of the guaranteed loss of independence and autonomy, not to mention a higher probability risk of a child getting hit by a car given the number of parents drive their kids to school now. There is also the spectre of parent-shaming looming on this matter of letting a child venture out on their own.  It is easy to say that it is not that much time each day for a parent to drop off their kids and it is a good time for my son and I talk each day.  The city, however, is not as dangerous as we convince ourselves it is and having my son develop the skills to navigate himself through the city on foot or by transit are things that would give him the autonomy that I had when I was his age.

When I raised this with him on our walk home he had forgotten about it but I doubt that it will be for long. I will likely wait until it is light in the mornings again and venture carefully toward ramping him up toward this walk or similar walks and assure myself that he can do it and assure him that I want to give him this independence.

Coaching

For Calgarians, soccer season is an eight week interval between the last icy gasp of winter and the start of summer holidays. This year, rather than subjecting us to the discomforts of standing against a brisk wind making us wish we had another layer of down, a blast of snow seized the first week of my son's U6 season outright rather than leaving any questions about how cold it might get before it was determined that the kids were better off with their normal, sedentary evening routines.

For week two, we congregated at the local community centre where nets are aligned in pairs across the soccer field and went through the routine of scanning the team app that we signed up for to determine who else was on our children's team and who the coach was. My son knew that he was on the same team as one of his closest friends from daycare and further to that I knew that among his teammates was the five-year-old most likely to do a 10-metre knee slide across the field with his shirt pulled over his head and beckon the crowd's complete adoration. I'm not kidding - it is the kind of thing that sticks in your head. Last year, this kid was the only one wearing cleats, and he showed up every week in an authentic Real Madrid kit complete with Ronaldo's or somebody's name and number. 

I scanned the roster on my phone and found the name of a "non-player" and as the queries about who was coaching mounted, a lean sixties-ish guy with a silver beard acknowledged his name and added that he thought he had made it clear that he said he wasn't available this year. Fortunately enough, he decided to come out to watch his grandson play and he would pitch in.  He turned to me and asked, "You know anything about soccer?"

"I've kicked a ball." I didn't bother to add that the last time I kicked a ball, about ten days earlier, my efforts redefined the word "errant" and left me humbly chasing my shot up the road to throw the ball back over the fence it sailed over. I played organized soccer up until I was 15 and I had played pick-up off and on. As for coaching, I knew that I would have to take turn at some point but I thought I oiled wait another year or so. I was going to definitely miss one week and that was enough for me to rationalize putting it off another year. I was not sure if I could muster the extroversion to elicit the excitement among the kids to play or get the focus for drills that I would expect myself to aim for despite it still being the time of, "Same team, same team!" and "When's snack time?"

I was ready to coach and pitch, though feeling a bit of stage fright about trying to drill them on things for the half hour of practice that preceded a loosely officiated game. Twelve hours after the fact, it has just dawned on me that .I could start them off with some stretching and that vaguely remembered game with the numbers or something. I don't even like stretching.

Instead of taking the pressure role of leading the kids in their early paces, I seized the opportunity to lay out the cones that separated the field into units for each of the four teams. I grew hesitant with each step as I acknowledged that nobody else was laying out cones for any of the other teams. A voice in my head chided me for not jumping in and taking the lead even though the current volunteer as coach was not too reluctant to accept the task that was thrust upon him.

"You go in net with these guys. Okay?"

I immediately started to wonder about how competitive I was going to be and with each save I wondered if I was going to hear the hue and cry of parents who would complain the game wasn't fair and that I ought to let the kids-only opposition score enough to keep it fair. I was a hockey goalie growing up and those same instincts took over quite quickly. Still, I made a point of letting a goal in early to put the other team ahead before knuckling down and stopping shots aggressively. I thought I was getting a sense of how our team was doing, but they did not score as much as I had thought. There was one little pocket rocket, with plastic shin pads the glimmered with a metallic blue sheen, who had pretty good speed and a good sense of footwork with the ball and he got some decent breakaways on me and scored a few. On a separate occasion, I pulled Gabriel aside to point out a crestfallen opponent who was taken aback by a push Gabriel delivered. As the ball hit the twine behind me, the coach gently chided, "You! Penalty for parenting."

Snack time followed and I was off the hook and managed to escape the wrath of parents who thought I was playing too hard or too well. Instead, the little pocket rocket came up to me and said, "I score three goals on you." He was cute and I liked the way he played, so I gave him a fist bump instead of replying, "Two. You scored TWO, kid." With that, I was off the hook for this week, but I suspect it will be time to dust off a stretching exercise and a few games to get them enjoying some drills.

Adding Each Thread

      My apologies for opening with a mind-blower but, I fear being wrong about love.
It is not a matter of misjudging the entire element (love) and its power. I trust it and recall frequently the occasions when my French-speaking grandmother, in halting English, would gather our attention to assert word with the reminder that it is above all things and that it will be an answer, a solution and your bedrock as well.

     With my grandmother as a reference the nuances or calibrations of love's expression dog me and leave doubts. There are my insistent doubts about my over-protective impulses. Even though my son, signalled to me, with a head-long dive off the sofa when he was barely able to hold himself in a seated position, that there would be a trip to the emergency room to set a broken bone in my future. Despite that, I still let a vigilant, perhaps paranoid, bark slip whenever he is straying into probably minor risks. The vigilance does not express that love as well as other ways available, at least not in the immediate term.  Beyond that there are, again, the nuances of the long-term consequences of that preemptive attention. It is probably better to let him get into trouble and learn his lessons the hard way - as long as they aren't hard lessons.
     Apart from the vigilance, I have come to realize not to presume adequacy in expressing myself to my son. There may be self-imposed limits that are hard-wired into me without my recognition. Conscious of the largesse that has come his way as the only child, grandchild, and nephew, I am wary of gifts and want to ensure that he truly appreciates what he receives as an expression of a friend's or relative's fondness for him and the value they give to the time they spend with him. Yesterday, a dear, older friend whom Gabriel and I regularly lunch with on Saturdays gave a smallish package in a large yellow envelope and was advised that it was something for him to share with his parents rather than open immediately.  On the way home, I thought it was best to modify Gabriel's expectations so I told him that the gift was our friend's way of expressing his affection and his appreciation for the time we spent together. When we arrived home, Gabriel asked if he could remove the package from my bag and open it.  Rather than being the keepsake or heirloom that I feared might turn Gabriel off or need some time to earn its value in his eyes, I turned out to be a package of four large chocolate chip cookies. Right in G's wheelhouse.
   Despite my amusement and relief that the gift was something tangible for a five-year-old, I am remain conscious of the value of our time together and prefer to give him that and share a variety of experiences with him that broaden the connections between us. One aspect of my fear about being wrong about love is the assumption that one connection or association would be enough for us. Whether it is the bedtime reading, the station-to-station sprints that are a part of our journeys, the drowsy chats about music as consciousness gives way (finally) to sleep, the work we do together or more, I still wonder what the next thing will be to connect us and create another link in the bond between us. I believe that relying on only one or a handful or the tried and true amongst those connections makes too much of an assumption about the adequacy of a connection. I do not want to presume one of those connections is a high tensile connection and learn much, much later that it was gossamer thin and inadequate for the task of preparing Gabriel for the rest of his life and assuring him that I have his back.
     The sheer abandon with which he delivers hugs and kisses and "I love you's" to those around him, me included, is reassuring but I do not want to settle for the possibility of creating a single tether between us, when a web can connect us and reassure me of a link to him as time passes and the bonds of certain books, for instance, are outgrown. The thing I am conscious of as he grows is the need to express my love of him and my value of him in a manner that grows and evolves as he matures and finds new ways to express his desires, his feelings and himself in a range of ways that are as articulate and varied as he needs.

As Memory Begins

I have been conscious of the curtain on my past prior to age five, a stage of my life that is murky and staged among the relics of fading Kodachrome images and even black and whites, the most vivid being of me bathing in a tin washtub at my grandparents' in Quebec.  Even the first year of school in 1972, at age 5 1/2, is vague, but the period around the start has long marked the distinction between remembered and unknown.  There are vague memories - one of toddling lost in an airport or train station - but that among others may be from the realm of dreams rather than remembered experience.

With Gabriel now at that cusp - where memories he will be retained into adulthood - I have become more conscious that the time we spend together is actually getting stored away in his thoughts to leave more lasting memories. These current moments are not going to be buried in his subconscious to lay dormant to well up during his dreams and leaving ineffable traces on his consciousness.

At this point I can confidently say that he will know me for the sprints that we have from point to point and that he always wins when we are walking somewhere.  He will know, by rote, my paranoia about traffic at intersections and through parking lots and my insistence that we hold hands. (I have no idea when I will relent and trust him to walk alertly at my side.)

These clear memories are taking root as our bond becomes more tangible and a point of reference for him throughout his growth in the years ahead. If he takes up running more seriously, he will definitely remember my coaching moments about not looking back when he runs, and instead to listen for the clamour of gaining footsteps and heavy breathing to know if a competitive threat the approaches, or to watch for looming shadows if the light and route affords him that.

Last night, the recall was being wired with several sprints on the sidewalks to the train station and then from our stop onto home and I was filled with this contentment that I was not just getting him home but making memories as well.

When we got home Gabriel may have been picking up on my reflection as well.  He wandered into the office that was his bedroom after he was born and mused about it being his room.  I played the role of docent and told him where his crib used to be, though I forgot to tell him where he was rocked every night.  I did disclose to him, however, the occasion when I proudly hoisted him high out of his crib and rattled his head off the spinning ceiling fan.  I still remember the look of shock and shattered trust as the startling pain impacted him repeatedly and it was good to have that moment to fill in the past a bit and let him know that Dad is humbly fallible.  (I might have even given some context to one of those subconscious memories that are lurking about.)

The comforting realization is that apart from the routines that are familiar to him, there will be more likelihood that one-off events will now stick with him without repetition.

Dad Still Has Work To Do... and a Chance

Monday mornings. Need I say more? For all the times that I might get a chuckle on this blog from a moment or an anecdote about Gabriel's personality, growing pains, experiences or various rates of progress, it is time for me to be transparent and fess up as well.

I had to leave home early for a meeting and Gabriel asked me if I could build some Lego. It was 6:30 am and maybe it was on me for scheduling a meeting so early but when Gabriel gave an exasperated sigh, I rose to the bait. I cited the attitude in the sigh, fed up with his early wake-ups and his refusal to do much constructive (eat breakfast or get dressed) when he did.

I immediately regretted and chided myself for not letting him get past his sigh and accept the disappointment of me not being available to spend the morning with him.  That may not have been possible but it would have been a lot better for me to let the sigh go and see if he could work his way past it.  Instead I showed him a lousy way of dealing with disappointment and instead of having the patience to show him a calm to model, I blew it.  It is going to take me that many more calms and detached occasions to absorb his frustrations and see him through to the other side and his own calm and perspective about his emotions and how to manage them.

You never know when the big moments are, but it is easy to acknowledge that patterns or constellations that snowball.  There is this sense of frustration and failure and when he rolls his eyes or empties his lungs with that sigh of exasperation, I have this anxiety that it is all slipping away -- that these moments are going to be the highlights he looks back upon most often; these will be the occasions that he struggles to unpack because he needs to work that much harder to make sense of them and find a positive sense of himself despite the other moments. I worry that he will look to define himself or find satisfaction in possessions and objects rather than strong relationships and good deeds. I worry that my efforts will set the stage for a tumultuous adolescence and more battles, little communication and sending Gabriel on a quest for a more tolerable male adult to hang out with.

Easy to blow it or blow it out of proportion, I just have to figure out which I'm doing.  Not that it would be impossible for me to do both at the same time or to create a vicious circle between those two things.  When I'm not bouncing back and forth between making a mess of things or panicking about screwing up the job, I'm trying to overload a moment with a maxim or life lesson. [sigh]

Today was an up and down day. Gabriel was tricky to get into gear and out the door in time for the commute to music class but once he was out the door, he fully committed to the word, "Boogie," and stayed in gear as we powered up the hill from our place to the train station. The bonding over our Saturday morning island between the train and the bus brought the day or the week back to the state that I would love for it to be at.  As I write this, I dread the occasion when Gabriel turns that routine down at, you know, that age. I tell myself that it will happen, more in an effort to brace myself for the possibility than a specific case of pessimism.  (I will cop to a broader, more general case of pessimism.)

The rest of the morning unfolded relatively well. Music class ended with him in a state of lethargy or restlessness and I'm trying to determine if it is boredom with a class that is going too slowly. Two days earlier, my wife and I were puzzling over what to do about music classes for Gabe, who at 18 months surprised me by identifying different arrangements and orchestrations of the same song, but now has lost interest in his Kodaly classes. An hour later, he was arranging coins on Nadine's iPad cover and telling us what notes the coins were.

Okay.

He has expressed boredom with the other part of the Saturday routine, pizza with friends of mine that he has been dragged to since the bucket phase, and I was content to set that aside for the day and get on top of a few chores that I had on the to-do list.  He was good with that and when the urge to get to the loo prompted a detour, we found ourselves sitting down for burgers for lunch. I was conscious of the battles I was losing -- his preference for condiments over the meal and his sudden unfounded affinity for salt on everything -- when an elderly man say next to us.  He indulged in Gabriel for a moment but settled in for his lunch and a brief reading of Jeremiah from his well-worn and post-itted (is that a word?) Bible.  After he finished reading he packed to go and stood between the tables to tell me how I was doing.

Basically, he said he had worked with a lot of parents who didn't know what they were doing and kids who were lost because of their parenting and added that Gabriel and I were great together. To be frank, I cowered at the compliment and wanted to defer it in every way possible.  I write this not in an effort to get a few more variations on, "No, no you're fine," but to give an insight into the discomfort I felt at such a compliment at the end of the week I've had. I turned to Gabriel to more or less tell him he didn't have to agree with that and he gave me a confident nod and a thumbs up. He is incredibly generous and far more forgiving than I am. Hopefully, he'll give me a better chance at this than I give myself.

Preludes to The Talk

"You're the one that's telling him."

"Yeah, yeah."

Each time that exchange occurs with my wife, I shrug it off, confident that it will be a while yet and that I'll stick with the basics, be as honest as possible and give him the age-appropriate information he needs without building up some myths about storks or such. Whenever the talk comes to mind, I recall the children's book on the topic I received, highlighted by a successful sperm dressed in a tuxedo and top hat and a vague cartoonish illustration of man and woman in bed under a blanket the keep me in the dark.  I wonder if the top hat takes the questions of speed and motility off the table in favour of fusing the presentability or chivalry of the man with the one in a million odds that the successful sperm overcomes but those are the challenges for a writer of children's non-fiction.  (I still might want to track down that book, though.)

There have been regular signs that The Talk is growing nigh.  There was an expression of his desire to marry his cousin that needed to be addressed and then there are discoveries that leave my son in wonder at the changes that are already occurring in his body.  The reality is that there will probably be a series of smaller talks rather than a Joycean information dump with long meandering thoughts stringing out across my consciousness as I tiptoe through the pubescent minefield and deke around my discomforts and facts with the incompetence and transparent bluster of a press secretary.

Two nights ago, however, my son slipped away from the table and returned with his Star Wars book, one that features long accounts of the original trilogy of movies.  He plopped the book on the table and asked us, "Do you know what my favorite part of Star Wars is?"

We shrugged in helplessness at the myriad answers that we could choose from and then he pointed his finger at the book, "Princess Leia's costume."

I never took to Princess Leia.  The whole buns on the side of the head thing lost me in 1977 and by the time the slave costume came to be in 1983 I had moved on.  For my son, however, after a steady diet of anthropomorphic trucks, OCD animals, empathic sheep, mischievous dinosaurs and talking trains -- to mention a few of the characters he has encountered in film and book -- Leia has been an oasis of femininity.  The appeal of the slave outfit to a five-year-old, though, raises a red flag or nine.

"She doesn't want to be wearing that."

"Why?"

"She's Jabba's slave."

"What's a slave?"

(Thankfully, there's no dog collar on her in his book.)

"A slave is forced to do something they don't want to.  If she doesn't do what Jabba wants, he would throw her in the pit with the... with the monster."

"The Rancor."

"Yes." (He does know more about Star Wars than me.  And he knows that he does.)

I continue, "She's not dressed like that because she wants to be.  You have to ask if she wants to be dressed that way."

The questions stopped at that point and there could have been a lot more I could say about how to treat women or regard them but that will have to be for a day that seems to be coming a lot sooner than I had anticipated.  I did not go on a long harangue on the treatment of women and the need to look beyond the exposed skin, and hopefully I can keep that one in my back pocket for a lot longer. My realization is that there will not be one talk that will tidy up the topic and let me walking away clapping the chalkdust from my hands. It will be an ongoing dialogue that will never close or end.

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.

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.

Saturday Lessons

The morning was not quite what I hoped. It did not turn into a sitcom domino of disasters, spills and snowballing delays.  There was a stagnancy and lack of enthusiasm or direction. After not getting to bed until an hour and a half past his bedtime the previous night -- the lad too tired to even know how to cooperate through the wind down routine and calling his mother (and not ME) a "bully" at one heated point -- there is a familiar, odd perversion of the biological clock that ensures he gets up early whenever he goes to bed late.  He was not particularly difficult, but that lingering sluggishness buried any momentum toward preparing for the day and getting ready for music class as quickly as possible.

I had been telling myself the night before that he was likely to wake early and that while it could be a long day with occasional crankiness, it was best to find some way to just 'roll with it' -- not exactly my strong suit. Nadine has work today and her own routine gets her out the door before we really need to get going. Gabe and I have an extra 10-15 minutes before we have to head to the LRT and we are booted, toqued and gloved with the promise that he has the pep to run up the hill. As we approached the station, our train pulled up at the platform and Gabriel started talking about the need to run to the train.

 "You never run at the train," calmly telling something that I have had to say a few times to him.

 "We can run, we can get it."

I have always padded our music class routines with the possibility of a missed train and was able to hold my ground and hope that he can pick up on my calm lack of urgency and get the lesson that he should not run to catch an approaching train. We chorused our exchange of "never" and "we can make it" a few times until the train pulled away. We had 12 minutes until the next train; enough time to return an overdue (roll with it, roll with it) Toopy and Binoo DVD to the library. That done, we returned to the platform to wait for the next train. 

There was a mother and son waiting as well; the son slowly working through the last dregs of a can of jalapeño Pringles. Gabriel asked me while eyeing the chips if we had snacks and the mother, with a chronic rasp the belied a more hardscrabble life, told him, "Of course! Everyone has snacks!"  In my case, snacks amounted to a chia-blackberry squeeze pack, some apple-cinnamon rice crackers and a Larabar, all of which I intended to dole it with a bit more discretion. I'm not sure if they satisfied his Pringle-whetted appetite.

The ride on the train is always a wonder for him. He kneels on his seat and looks out the window, over my shoulder at the sights that strobe by, percussive blurs of lampposts passing across the lenses of his glasses as he waits to see downtown.  I let him know that the Peace Bridge is coming into view and he shifts to look east as we cross the Bow River into downtown.

We get off and make our way to the bus stop for the next leg of the journey.  He enjoys taking the footsteps route across the Enmax grates in the sidewalk but he finds the individual trucks and and buses too noisy.  Perhaps it is a matter of those noises standing out that much more without the cumulative din of weekday traffic as a base line.  We put the package for the chia-blackberry snack-beverage-gel thing in the garbage and come to our stop.

While at the stop, he finds a discarded (3/4 full!!) beverage cup from Subway and starts emptying it out through the straw, trailing a brown version of urination Braille across the snow, while I ask him to stop before he soaks and stickifies himself if the lid finally gives way under the weight and pressure of his shaking and art making.

In the middle of this, I tell him that Anakin Skywalker grows up to be Darth Vader. He hasn't seen any of the movies yet, but he is getting a steady diet of whatever Star Wars books he can get and he tells me he likes Anakin because of his heroism in the primer reader equivalent of Episode II. My disdain for Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen and the prequel trilogy prompt me to give my warning about who Anakin really is, but in the end he is a big Darth fan anyway. He stares at me slack-jawed for a moment and I wonder if I have permanently cast myself or him as the spoiler of all stories.  He is undaunted by the revelation and I smirk at his command of the Star Wars canon, recalling my own ability to devote so much mental real estate to hockey trivia when I was in elementary school.

I also taught him the phrase "catch air" during a particularly bumpy ride on the bus. He is puzzled by this and points out that his mouth was closed and I give the example of a kite catching air and y to make the distinction between catching air and catching your breath.  With each bump that follows, he points out that he has indeed caught air again.

With those two lessons passed from father to son, we arrive at music class and I file my train-rushing lesson for later and later again.

After music, the day continues with a bus ride to pizza for lunch. The Saturday pizza tradition goes back to Gabe's bucket phase and it has been nice to see him grow into the routine and manage to eat half of his pizza. Lately, when we take the bus, he insists on taking position in the very back of the bus.  The back row was a factor contributing to how much air we caught on the shuttle bus and with the 73, there is often a character of some sort who Gabriel has no timidity about.  Today, it is a man with an air cast on his foot and a surreptitious can of beer that he keeps hidden in his nicotine stained hands rather than sipping from openly, his deference to authority heightened in front of the 4-year-old.  He talks about how he broke his leg at work and how has myriad rods and screw in his leg and is going to be laid up for about 14 weeks. I wonder how much mature content Gabriel actually absorbs here in the backseat and I look ahead to rides he will have by himself. I'll be better served by deft interrogation than backseat prohibition when those days come. Perhaps I'll have to trade him today's character for whoever he ended up sitting with.

Lunch is uneventful as he zones out in front of a Paw Patrol marathon on the iPad while my lunch time cronies sort through the bishop's gaffe on LGTBQ rights a week earlier. Gabriel only raises his eyes from the inane puppies to greet one of the staff in the restaurant, who has seen him regularly since he was in the bucket phase.  They have an indelible connection and when he sees her, he rises from his spot on the bench, strides over me and gives her a huge hug, feet off the bench and pressing as much warmth into her as he can.

On the LRT home, he finally catches up on the sleep he passed up on at 6:20 this morning and when I turn to tell him we are at our station he is out, face planted firmly into the back of the seat. Now in the hang of rolling with it, I read until we go all the way to the end of the line in Tuscany and commence the return trip back to the southeast. I watch him sleep calmly and with a stillness that makes me tune my senses for the confirmation of each light breath, something I have not done since he was just a few months old.

After about 45 minutes, he bolts out of his repose and looks around, all bewildered and bedheaded. We get off to make to catch the train home and the lad still finds himself out of sorts.  We wait for the train to takes us back to the northwest and he needs to be held and comforted, such is his state. He is still tired and uncertain of where he is and how he ended up in this unfamiliar place under these circumstances. The nascent independence he asserts all too often and in such unexpected ways is gone and for this moment he his younger and vulnerable. I manage to roll with it and as he burrows into me, I let him know that he is getting heavy. It is a warning as much for me as him that those cuddling totes across long distances are getting harder and we are perhaps down to the last few.

And I tell myself once again, to roll with it.  Somehow.

Name Games

In preparation for Gabriel's fourth birthday party - sure to be a future post - I have had to distribute handwritten invitations to daycare friends that we do not have email addresses for.  I took care of that last week and the RSVP's have come in accept one. Last night, Gabriel mused about there being two boys with the same name at day care. With names trending the way they do, it would not take much for that to happen.  Given Gabriel's certitude that there are two boys that have the same name and the slow or completely absent RSVP, we had to weigh the possibility that I gave the wrong boy the invitation and that he and his parents, nonplussed by the invite by a boy he hardly knows, disposed of it.

After pondering our options, we decided to send the older boy - okay his parents - a letter indicating that we may have goofed with the invitations and given it to the wrong boy. We didn't wish to uninvite the child, but we kindly request an RSVP one way or another.  If we got a response indicating that the boy was not going to attend, we would be able to invite the boy that Gabriel had wanted to invite and had not yet RSVPed.

Convolutions galore?  Hang on.

I penned a light-toned, cordial note to the older child's parents with a self-effacing apology for any confusion and my aforementioned request for an RSVP.  We wanted to be able to confirm who was coming and, if possible, invite the same-named boy that I may have overlooked before it was two late. (I am already mentally writing the apologetic, sorry for the late notice introduction to any replacement invitation we issue.) I head to the daycare early, without Gabriel because it is his day off, to drop off my note. I stopped shortly inside the door trying to appear nonchalant and purposeful for my solo visit to the daycare to drop off my note.  I nodded confidently to parents I knew who were dropping off their kids while I hovered in a room other than Gabriel's looking for the name of this boy that we were convinced there were two of.

No such name.  After scanning the list four or five times to make sure that my bleary pre-dawn grasp of reading material and focus without my glasses was not completely failing me.  Finally, I gave up as my confidence in justifying my presence evaporated.  However, given the circumstances that brought me into the daycare with this note, I thought it best to spare anybody the trouble of bringing their morning routine to a halt to sort out what I was actually trying to explain with the birthday invites, the confusion over two kids with the same name and our need to get an RSVP and you have a sentence that is getting a little too long.  At 7:08 in the morning, it is hard to justify postponing someone's date with their morning coffee to describe and collate the layers of confusion that had fallen upon me and brought me to the daycare without my son.  In the face of that, I just feigned confidence that I knew what I wanted to do and that could possible, somehow achieve my assigned mission. The letter that was in my hand, hovering above the class list started making its way back to my pocket because there appeared to be no child to give it to. For confirmation, I asked one of the staff at the day care if there were two boys of this name. Nada. I turned for the door well after I gave the staff the wrong impression of me.

As I headed on to work, I was convinced that I had fallen victim to my son's first relationship with an imaginary friend.  We tried to sort through the mystery and discovered that it was simply a matter of Gabriel giving the name to a boy he did not know. He decided, on what grounds or formula I do not know, to just call this other, bigger boy that he regularly played with "Big H-----," after the younger boy, that I can confirm I did indeed invite.  He just has not RSVPed yet. If this older boy is at daycare tomorrow, I'll try to figure out what the boy's name is and take the opportunity to sort through the inner workings of Gabriel's mind to figure out why he reused the name on this other boy.

The party should be easy compared to this.

Growth Spurts and Tough Talks to Ponder and Forego

One of the highlights of each fall has been "school" pictures of Gabriel that have been taken at his daycare.  The proofs from this year's efforts sit in front of me and in the place of the unconscious playfulness from the sets when Gabriel was on the cusp of 2 and then 3 years of age there are two options to choose from which are a stark contrast from those previous sets.

Apart from the fact that there are merely two carefully posed shots instead of a set of nine which were enchanting with their spontaneity, there is the suggestion that Gabriel has stretched out and that there is a leanness which indicates baby-fat has been shed and there is that boyishness seemed to be looming, but now is clearly evident.  In previous years the shots included moments of closed-eyed laughter and an impish smirk that suggested a bit of interaction with a photographer who knew how to capture the age group before them in all their innocent beauty.

Self-portrait, feet. Gabriel Hanlon, October, 2015.

As Gabriel approaches 4, the suggestion in the pictures is that he is more ready to engage with people and take direction - albeit from a photographer.  The poses show more evidence of a cue or request being acknowledged than a playfulness that was deferred to when he was younger.  The shots seem a little stiffer and no where near the poignancy of the shots from last year and the year before.  These shots, commemorating 2015 and his fourth autumn mark a different phase.  Much of what has happened seems to indicate that as well.

Two days ago when I spoke to him on the phone there was an attentiveness to the conversation or a clarity to his train of thought that made me think that time jumped ahead a year rather than a few hours since I had dropped him off at daycare.  Apart from that, he flipped the bird for the first time during Thanksgiving dinner, an indication that his surroundings are not as insulated and certain as they used to be. As he approaches school age, there will be more and more occasions where his peers initiate him to those less innocent skill sets and the hard conversations begin.

There are other hard conversations to weigh as well and with those the reminder that he is still a few years away from memories that will stick with him. One of my rituals with Gabriel from as far back as "the bucket stage" has been to take him to pizza with friends on Saturdays.  He has graduated from the bucket to his own place at the table and a pizza of his own.  Earlier this week one of those friends from that Saturday ritual, Mike, a stoic retired train engineer who particularly bonded with Gabriel, passed away after a few years of health struggles and informing us each Saturday that he was tired.

As I ponder breaking this news to Gabriel, I am inclined not to bother.  During Mike's final illness over the last few months, Gabriel never expressed concern about his absence and I wondered if it was a case of him not recalling Mike in his absence.  As I lean toward not sharing the news with him, I suspect that he has already forgotten Mike, though I hope there may be some trace recall of the particular fondness that they had for one another and an occasion where Gabriel asks after him and allows the opportunity to recall a friendship and discuss a simple reality of the passing of time.