The Dawdle: Lessons for Dad from the Walks to Daycare

We have had the good fortune of a great, supportive daycare for the last few years. A few days ago we found ourselves quizzing Gabriel on continents he learned and can add that his math is coming along too.  The care and attention he has received was a key factor prompting us to hold him back a year. One major advantage of that daycare, however, has been the location.  Daycare is a scant 500 metres away and apart from allowing me to pick him up and drop him off, it has meant walks to and from daycare to bookend our Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.

At the start of the day, there is the hustle to determine if he wants to walk with me or get a drive with his mother and to get him out the door.  On the night before, it may actually be a strategic move on our part to ask, "Who's walking you to school?", instead of the more neutral, drive-with-Mom-is-a-possibility use of "taking." (As I write this, I wonder if there is the slightest component of a quiz or a call for an expected response in our question rather than allowing him to flex some independent decision-making.) Getting him fed, dressed and out the door ends with him wanting to sprint down our apartment hallway to start our day.

The walks are consistent. I am always in more of a rush to get going and ensure that I'm at the office in time for the start of my day.  At the end of the day, there is less urgency on my part but the speed of his walk is dictated by his mood and energy level at the end of the day.  There are days when he wants to play king of the mountain on each pile of snow.  On others, he pays homage to the same tree (stump now, actually) that got knocked down in a hailstorm in June 2015. Some days he is exhausted and inconsolable. We race each other or run holding hands for the sake of speed without the competition. I am unrestrained in my paranoia about the traffic that is around and striving to ensure that he is vigilant about the cars.  We examine the skies on the predawn walks to acknowledge the huge moon or the colour on the horizon that promises a beautiful day makes us heed the coming of night.  We pause to take in the towers of downtown.

My mood is a factor on those walks as well.  In reality, I am writing this post to work through and trade in my own rush to get home for the presence to take in that dawdle more appreciatively.  My desire to cover those 500 metres quickly can take the opportunity out of the walk because of my poor perception of time. We do race from time to time on the walk home so I ought to take it when it comes.

If he wants to take a different route and walk through a path of large boulders to test his balance, his will wins out, as it should. When I am in a rush, I wish I could pressure him to pick up the pace or take a more direct route, but ultimately this part of the day, unbound by the walls and fence of the daycare is a moment that is his own. Apart from the simple exercise of the walk, there is a measure of independence that he can exercise by stopping the way he does and dictating a change in route if one appeals to him. Ironically, despite the independence that we might associate with the car -- it is mere mobility that a car provides -- it may actually be during this walk that he can develop autonomy with each step he does or doesn't take.  Whether I am holding his hand or a few dozen metres away beckoning him to catch up or cautioning him to watch the car there is an independence that he can exercise with each (watched) step he takes.  The talks about the day become familiar as he talks about a friend he had a hard time with.  I try to tell him to ask how his friends are rather than distancing himself and wait for the time when he can tell me he did and that it worked.

It will be years before I know if these walks amount to anything resembling an independence or autonomy that car-bound kids lack. In reality it will be a theory tested by evidence that I select quite carefully. Next September, when he starts -- as he already puts it, "real school" -- the walk will actually be a little shorter and we will start to grapple with the question of when to let him walk entirely on his own.  I started that walk one my own right away.  It was a 200 metre walk (thank you Google Maps) and I only had one residential street to cross.  Gabriel's will be a little longer and cross a major thoroughfare where moving violations occur with regular, cacophonous frequency.  As I did in the 1970's, I am confident that Gabriel will, when we allow him, be able to navigate that route with the good sense that I did.  For now, though, we will dawdle.

The Same Boy

The question is already asked: "Where did the time go?"  Gabriel is only five now but the time has done what it intends to do.  I never quite get in the moment as often as I could or ought and I'm looking ahead, wondering what a particular bout of rebellion or rambunctiousness will amplify to when he is older and bigger and I am forever pondering the butterfly effect of a moment that got away: I'm impatient for a moment or inattentive and there is that erosion of the connection that sends him down a path that reflects so badly on me.  Robin Williams used to raise that self-doubt by contrasting two futures: one where is child is accepting a Nobel Prize and at the other extreme asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

There is probably no advantage in looking back rather than behind.  The ideal is to be in the moment and absorbing the opportunity as it is.  There are the easier moments that are still and captured. Looking at his awed, rapt face as it is bathed in the blue glow of the screen in a darkened theatre and he is transported and transfixed one of those few times (to date) that he has had the experience of a movie.  The uncertain but committed buy-in to the excitement of the first New Year's Eve he stayed up for.  There was the sense that this was a Big Deal, and he threw himself into it, but he was in no way certain why.  The tentativeness as he rushed to the video of the countdown was subtle, undeniable but amusing.

The routines are harder to get that stillness and contentment within.

A few days back, Friday, he and I were together for the day and there was little that I could interest him in doing out of the house.  All he really wanted to do was put together Lego and, to my surprise, he was not quite engaged enough in that to finish it all the way through.  He would recruit me for long stretches of the construction and it was more likely out of his disinterest in the task than a desire to include me in something other than sorting through the pieces for him.  He was not interested in any of the outings I've normally gotten him to leave home for and the lone exception, a trip to the playground was clearly scheduled for, "The middle of the afternoon."  No earlier.

When we finally got outside and headed to the playground, he dawdled and played in the snow, stopping regularly to kick and stomp at it wherever it captured his imagination more than the destination did.  After a few hours of cabin fever around the Lego, the delays in the walk taxed me a little.  After stretching the distance between us a few times and never prompting him to catch up, I managed, somehow, to flash back to the same walk years earlier -- I somehow make that sounds like decades, when it is just 2-3 years -- when he did the same thing, but was only able to call it, "No." He is the same boy.  I waited and watched as he Godzillaed a few mounds of snow to dust and moved on to the next.  When he finally caught up, I rested a hand on my head and reminded myself that he's the same boy. At the same time I suspected that this particular fascination with the snow would get buried in maturity and expressed differently, if at all, as he gets older.

At the playground there were reminders again. We were alone but he was untroubled by the solitude or the cold and he took to the same routines as in previous years.  The swing captivated him but he graduated out of the bucket and into the big swing.  I pushed him for 30-45 minutes as he struggled to pump himself into motion.  Godzilla was not able to crush the snow down sufficiently to give him the room his feet needed to pump.

In that rhythm, standing behind him and taking his guidance on how many hands to use and how hard to push, I ceased to look ahead or back and I just settled into the task of pushing him just right each time as the snow seeping into my shoes.

Game Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Playground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masculinity and the Post-Gift-Shop Meltdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll sort it out.

Three-Wheel Metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That about sums it up, doesn't it?

As Ever, On the Cusp of Transition

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

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

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

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

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

The Lad Unplugs for Summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books For the Inner Child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holding Him Back

"So, what have you decided?"




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Discovery of Calm

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

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

And so those two things converge...

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

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

"Can you help me?"

My cue.

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

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

A Lesson to Save

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You proud of me?"

"Yeah."

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

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

Instead of Anger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should He Stay or Should He Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Acrophobe's Son

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

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

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

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

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

Ink Smudge Eureka

    "Letters and bridge, or crosswalk?"

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

(When it rains, it pours?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Yes, he has had alphabet books.)

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

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.

Satisfied but not Taking Credit

The Lad riding the last stretch to the 

finish of his first 5K.

For about six years, I have been a rather serious runner and the highlight of many of my races has been high-fiving Gabriel, giving him a kiss as I pass by or grabbing his hand at the finish to run the last 50 metres and let him get my medal.

I am not getting too carried away with early plans for his running career and heading into "runner dad" mode - if there is such a thing.  He is still too young to put that kind of wear and tear on his body and I'd insist on him minimizing his running until he is in junior high at least. However, he enjoys sprinting down the corridor of our apartment building when we are coming home from daycare and he is familiar with my running rituals and idiosyncrasies. I've actually made more effort to interest him in photography than running, but he might be taking the sport into his own hands. After each of my races lately, he has taken my race number to keep in his room and he keeps a few of my medals on the closet door in his bedroom.

On December 31, I ran in a 10K race to finish the year and told my wife about the opportunity to walk 5K at the same time. Once we confirmed Gabriel could join her without having to pay an additional registration fee, she signed up with the plan to bring him along for a walk.  My plan was to finish my 10K and then backtrack on the route to meet them as the completed their walk. Much to my surprise, however, they had covered more than half their distance when I crossed paths with them. Gabriel had amped up the urge to run the first half of the 5K, dragging Nadine along until he conked. (Nadine suggested that I (of all people) needed to work with him on his pacing. I'm not the best example of that.)  Throughout his run, he earned praise from the walkers that he blitzed past in the flash-upon-foot-strike sneakers he raced in. He ate up the camaraderie of the race. By the time I caught back up to them, he was beat and tired. He rode my shoulders the last 500 metres to the finish.

Since that race, Gabriel has taken his running to another level.  After a few months of him insisting that I taken his hand and run him as fast as I can for a little sprint, he has run off ahead of me on our regular walks to the LRT or other regular destinations.  The biggest thing for me is that it is so much faster than was the case when he was prone to get distracted by a stick on the ground, a rabbit or an excavator.

It will be interesting to see if this is nothing more than a passing phase that ends as soon as I hit "post" on this addition to the blog or if he remains interested. The biggest thing right now is how well he sleeps when he covers a lot of distance in a given day, but given how conscious everyone is about children's fitness, it is good that he enjoys it as much as he does. As we ran home from day care today, Gabriel boasted about how much energy he was getting from his run - confirming my facetious concern that the regular exercise was more likely to enhance his endurance than wear him out. However, given how few boys and men run compared to women, it could be an opportunity to not only maintain his fitness but get some satisfaction in the achievements he might accrue. In the last half-marathon I completed, there weren't any teenage male competitors.  If he has inherited my (knock on wood) resilience and the other physical assets that have allowed me to continue improving at my age, he can find the release and satisfaction in that outlet.

I just have to keep him off asphalt for the next 10-15 years - the ultimate "do as I say and not as I do."

Five Stages of Grief in 68 Minutes

This afternoon, the optometrist, or opthamalogist, I'm not inclined to quibble, turned her back on my wife and I to have a one on one with the dude: "Gabriel, I have to tell you that your eye is broken."

A moment before, she had let us know that something was up while Gabriel occupied himself with eleventy bajillion dollar equipment she uses for eye exams. She showed us the scans of his eyes and the accompanying data on each eye. One measured something with a 1.50 and the other a 6.75 - a stark discrepancy. "Broken," though, for its simplicity to the ears and experience of a four-year-old sent palpable chills through mum and dad. I gave into to the urge to caution him to stop playing with the precision equipment, only to have the opto-expert chide me with, "Chill out, Dad," soon to be reused by my preschooler with some regularity, I'm sure. We booked another appointment to confirm the issue while I tried to recall the occasion where his reluctance to use his left eye presaged his efforts to get his right eye out from the shield she used for today's single-eye tests of his vision.

Mom's face reddened and eyes moistened. I was stoic and tried to joke about it. There is expectation that it'll correct itself with the proposed intervention of eyeglasses and further hope that he will take to wearing his glasses as I do. 

The walk home was somber and I pondered the restaurants we passed as a respite to stop and change the atmosphere. I passed, conscious that my appetite for sushi - the first option to present itself - surpassed that of my fish-phobic wife. I was not in the mood for the daily ritual of pulling Gabriel by the hand and running as hard as I could to drag him and his scrambling legs in my wake. It was only after some insistence that I relented and tugged him along. Even Mum trotted along. 

It is not the first time we have had a medical issue that sent us reeling to worst case scenario. Before he turned 3 months old, we learned that there were concerns about how his hips were aligning and he spent several months in a hips brace that kept his legs splayed until there was confidence that they were settling into their sockets the way they should. We know it could be worse and we ponder that aloud in first world problem terms as we acknowledge that we caught it and can intervene, and that elsewhere in the world, children do not have opto-experts near at hand and insisting on annual visits.

Gabriel is oblivious to his issue as far as we can tell. I moved his Toys R Us Lego catalogue to his left side so that he might use his weaker eye a little more. I also recall Gabriel's first evasion of his left eye. When I first introduced him to the SLR camera last month he peered through the viewfinder with his right eye and repelled my efforts to get to his left eye, the more balanced posture with a camera. It was of little comfort to recall that. 

The rest of the night unfolded as it usually does and I mustered the goofiness to try to read the first few pages of book to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" until the cadence mercifully veered away from that melody. Gabriel demanded that I keep singing the book that way there was nothing resembling the chorus. (Whew.) If I write a children's book maybe I'll set it to the melody of "Everlong."

We have, for the moment gone from grief to acceptance and we'll return to the opto-expert next Wednesday to flirt with denial and bargaining for a few moments before our charming little daredevil becomes bespectacled.