Should He Stay or Should He Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Incident and A Recurring Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Comfort of Ritual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meyers Briggsing the 4 Year Old?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Acrophobe's Son

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

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

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

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

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

A Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ink Smudge Eureka

    "Letters and bridge, or crosswalk?"

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

(When it rains, it pours?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Yes, he has had alphabet books.)

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