A Dystopian Little Prince

Over a year ago, the first trailers for an animated adaptation of Antoine du St. Exupery's The Little Prince first appeared and promised an enchanting film that I had told myself would, along with Inside Out be a pair of movies that my son could turn to for wisdom for years and years.  Throughout the months that followed the promise of a blockbuster bringing the hordes to the theatres fizzled and left me puzzled. There were delays and delays for the English language version to be released.  In March 2016 it made a brief appearance in Canada while news came out that the film would go direct to Netflix. Odd harbingers all.

Still, I was eager to take my son to the movie whenever it would be released.  I tried reading my son a chapter a night for a few nights and then when the movie tie-in book came out I resorted to that for the sake of having a one night read. When the time came to see it in March, I headed out to see it on my own.  He was tired that particular day and the showings were scheduled so sporadically that it suggested that it would be better to see it alone if I were to see it while it was still in the theatres.

I had only come upon The Little Prince when I was in my late 20's. It immediately had an impact on me and since reading it I have probably purchased at least a dozen copies whether as gifts or replacements for leant copies that remained wayward. I currently have three copies, including a French-language version and the film tie-in I mentioned. I was going in informed and with a vested interest in how it turned out.

It was evident in the trailer that the movie was going to lean toward a telling of the story hat would indicate it's telling and themes rather than directly tell the story in the manner that St. X wrote. There was a clever reference to a modern single mom's ambition to get her child into Werth Academy - named after dedicatee Leon Werth and I thought that was an interesting sign that every corner of the book was going to be mined for its potential. As the story moved back and forth between the pilot's interaction with the modern world and his recollection of the story in the desert as he first wrote or experienced it, the story was true to its source and as enchanting as hoped.

The distinctive animation of the desert scenes had a delicate element to it which reflected in a small way the illusion that St. Expuery's story was of those drawings that he shared and keeping alive a shallower roman a clef truth to what he concocted out of his experiences when his own plane crashed in the desert. The animation lends itself to the profound and ancient rather than mere whimsy and in these scenes of the movie, the novella's wisdom is respected and delivered effectively to the screen.

If only the whole movie were presented in that delicate manner. The alternating "modern" scenes about the now-ancient pilot's efforts to befriend and enlighten the high-achiever-to-be girl next door, are of a more contemporary CGI look and the efforts there eventually test the patience of those more familiar with the original story. The framing emphasizes the importance of the story and its messages in our modern world but the reality is that the source is an exceptionally deep 108 (illustrated) pages. 

This interpretation of the story for screen ultimately fails on the dark turn the story makes during the concluding act. The filmmakers discard the fragility of the desert scenes for a dystopian sequence that calls to mind George Orwell's 1984 or Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." The sheer menace during these scenes would have prompted me to leave before the film ended if I had been watching it with my son. I finished the film on my own, but felt disappointed at the end result. Given the responsibility of adapting The Little Prince, the filmmakers blew it with their third act and that would provide some reason why the film had such an odd route to (home) screens in North America.

Parenting and Play

Last Friday afternoon, I was out with my camera and drifted into a rather quiet, verdant area that invited passers by to muse over what flowers were intoxicating with the particular scents of spring that were emanating.  I had popped my macro lense on for a few close ups to file away and to muse quietly in the state of mind that a well-crafted and maintained garden can inspire with and get into that zone with the camera.

I was not in complete isolation there. I was a few minutes walk from English Bay in Vancouver and there was the pop and twang of tennis nearby to draw my eye in that direction. Cars were circulating in range of the tennis court and, a little closer to me, a mother was with her friend and her child. From where I stood, I could tell from the toddling stride toward the road that the child was around 15 months old. From the bucket hat and overalls I assumed it was a boy. As he tested his stride and the limits of his independence, his mother got up from where she was and managed to get him to play peek-a-boo.  If I were in that situation, I would have bounded toward the boy in headlong pursuit, panic and over-protectiveness getting the best of me. Peek-a-boo would have been well done the list of interventions to keep the boy out of traffic, no matter how light it was.

I too was rapt in this moment of play and watched as mom escalated her hiding in the game and the boy, giggling, started coming back towards his mother. I am still blown away. From the moment I saw that, I tried to think of ways that I could use play instead of panic to get Gabriel to "get" what I'd prefer him to be doing.  The first thoughts are that it is too late for some of those things where he is too headstrong or rambunctious to settle down and get my point. My attempt at role-playing him through the situation where he bit a classmate at daycare was one possibility and while it was a calm and rational moment for me when trying to discipline or teach him, it is one of those things that I'll have to file away and try to use with him later.

I'm sure there is always a type of play that will help you make a point to your child when teaching certain things and the key is to keep calm and figure out what types of play work best when trying to teach your child the things that you want them to know. When it happens, though, it is magical.

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.

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.