Hug Twice

CJ is currently taking a gymnastics class on Friday afternoons.  The class is run through the local Parks and Recreation Department, and the list of complaints I have about it is long and varied.  But he loves it, and this isn’t about the class itself.  Sort of.

There is a lot of downtime (when you have one teacher and 10 3 year olds, it is bound to happen) while the teacher is assisting a single student on a piece of apparatus.  This past week was the parallel bars, and after each child had a turn on the parallel bars, they could play with some puzzles while waiting for the the teacher to cycle through all the other kids and get back to them.

3 puzzles.  10 children.   You might already see the problem with this.

CJ was one of the first children to have a turn.  He loves puzzles, so after using the parallel bars he happily settled in to solve one of the puzzles.  Well, after a few kids had gone, the number of puzzles was outnumbered by the number of bored three year olds, including a little girl I will call Pink, since she was wearing pink and I have no idea what her name is.  I guess I could call her Bossy Pink.

We watch the class from a balcony above the floor, where we can see and hear everything but it would be hard to actually yell down and interfere with the class because it is hard to get a three year old’s attention.  But I watched as Pink went over to CJ, told him he was done and it was her turn, and took the puzzle away from him.  He said “My turn” and she said “No” and walked away with the puzzle.  CJ walked over to the teacher and said “Puzzles?” and she said “Sure go use the puzzles” and I could see in CJ’s face him trying to figure out how to explain what he was feeling.  He walked between Pink and the teacher several times, as the teacher called over to the kids to share but never actually even looked at them, and Pink sternly told CJ she didn’t *need* any help, and I could see CJ on the verge of tears.

I wanted to go downstairs and tell that little girl off.  I wanted to interfere SO much, but I know that mommy won’t always be there to help and CJ needs to learn to figure these things out for himself.  It was soon CJ’s turn again and Pink eventually went off to cause trouble somewhere else, but I’m still both sad and cranky about the whole thing.  It is hard to watch your child be bullied by another.  Especially when you know that a little supervision over the class would go a loooong way.

After every class I write a note listing my complaints with the program and turn it in to the school’s suggestion box.  I think this week I’m sending a copy to the Parks and Recreation Department as a whole.  If CJ didn’t love it so much (despite mean little girls bossing him around) I’d have pulled him out already, even with the no refunds policy.

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Our last name is quite complex. Well, at least to everyone else in the world. To me it seems simple. When my spouse and I got married, we both hyphenated our names. Say my last name was originally Smith, and his was originally Jones - we both hyphenated them in the same manner to be Smith-Jones (actual name has been changed but the process is explained correctly). So I am Jaimie Smith-Jones and he is Matt Smith-Jones.

Well, we passed this hyphenated last name on to our children. Or at least, we meant to. It worked just fine with CJ. I filled out the birth certificate information, signed it, and his last name is Smith-Jones. With Alexa things didn’t go so smoothly. I gave birth to her at a different hospital, and when the nurse brought the completed paperwork for me to sign, the hyphen was missing. The nurse claimed that she couldn’t put a hyphen in on her system and we’d have to get it changed at the records office. Well, okay. So Alexa’s birth certificate said Smith Jones for ALL our last names (not just hers).

When I got the paperwork in the mail a few weeks later and went to the records office, I was told that I couldn’t change her last name without a court order, even though it was clearly incorrect because it was not the same last name that either of her parents have (proven with our social security cards). I needed to apply to the court to have her name changed. I tried my best to explain it was a typographical error, but they wouldn’t budge. I cried. I admit it, I was so upset that I cried in the office, in the elevator, and all the way home.

I did go to the library and get the do-it-yourself version of the paperwork. But I still haven’t filled it out and filed it. Don’t get me wrong - I want to. I want her last name to be exactly the same as ours and her sibling’s. It still upsets me to this day that the hyphen is missing. But I still haven’t. I think it is a fear of the unknown. I don’t want to mess up the paperwork and create a bigger mess than I already have by letting the nurse omit the hyphen in the first place. I really should just suck it up and hire a lawyer to do it for me so it gets done. But I still haven’t.

And until then, Alexa’s last name is just slightly different than the rest of ours. Legally, at least. You won’t see me write it without the hyphen anywhere.

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As I said in his introduction, CJ attends a half-day preschool M-F through the public school system. At the suggestion of his pediatrician at his 3-year-old well child checkup, we had him evaluated for a speech delay and it was determined that he had a significant delay in expressive language. We first tried a two day a week half-day program, but that wasn’t providing enough consistency to meet CJ’s needs. He has always been a child who is slow to adapt to new things, and the unpredictability of his schedule (he was still attending his mainstream preschool on the off days) wasn’t working for him. So we had a meeting with the public school system and decided to move him to a 5 day a week early childhood special education program and drop the mainstream preschool altogether for the rest of the year.

Well, with this change came an option to change CJ’s transportation. I had been driving him to school every day and picking him up, and intended to continue to do so. However, most of the other children rode the bus to and from school, and this was not lost on CJ. CJ is fascinated with buses, as maybe all 3 year olds are, and was very excited when he realized *he* could ride the bus. I wasn’t really comfortable with the idea - he’s only 3, and a bus seemed like a huge step. The whole bus debate came to a head though when CJ went on a field trip with his class to the library and rode the bus. That was it. CJ had a meltdown at school when I came to pick him up, and expressed as well as a child who is a year behind speech-wise can - “Bus mommy, bus, CJ bus, bus please bus.”

I thought a lot about it over the next several hours (after driving CJ home under huge protest), and realized that my resistance to the bus was all about me and not about CJ. He’s my baby still, even if he’s three, and the idea of relinquishing that much control over his whereabouts frightened me. I knew with the rational side of my brain that he would do fine on the bus and he would have fun riding it every day. But the idea that someone was driving around with my child without me - it scared me to death. But once I realized that my resistance was about me and not about him I knew what the obvious choice was.

I called transportation that day and signed CJ up for the bus. It took a few days for it to take effect, so there was time for me to get more used to the idea, and honestly, it’s been a week of CJ riding the bus now and I’m still not used to it. The bus has carseats and I feel like he is safe, but still watching him ride off in the morning, waving out the window at me, pulls at my heartstrings a little bit. It is almost like he’s started kindergarten already in my brain. Where does the time go… I wish I knew how to hold onto time a little tighter.

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Our daughter Alexa was born in October of 2006, and what a surprise she was! She was all the mellow that her brother was not. Yes, she’s a child and she has her days where she’s hard to deal with, and she does prefer to sleep more during the day than she does at night, but she has been agreeable and easy going from the start. She actually sleeps more than 30 minutes at a time and as a newborn, she was usually content to check out the world and let it amuse her vs being entertained. A good quality to have when you’ve got a big brother to keep track of!

As she’s gotten older, Alexa has shown her personality to be very cautious and methodical. She’s still on the verge of walking, which she has been for about 5 months now. She pulled up to standing rather early and since then, has slowly been thinking about letting go and taking a step on her own. But instead, she holds on and walks along edges of things and is content to do so. She won’t do a thing, from eating a new food to letting go of that edge, before completely exploring it and making sure she knows exactly what she is doing. She exhibits mastery over the things she does try in a very short time - she can crawl up our staircase in about 5 seconds flat (thank goodness for gates that keep her from doing it without mommy or daddy!) and she’s recently began building mega-block towers that will soon rival her brother’s.

She adores her daddy, and you will often find her seemingly permanently attached to him, which is a new phenomenon for all of us. CJ was always attached to me, and still is in a lot of ways, but Alexa shows very clear daddy preference. It works for me, because he gets to do bedtime with her.

We’re looking forward to watching more of her personality emerge as she grows, starts talking more [right now is the standard mama, dada, nunu (nurse), and baba (water bottle) ] and continues to explore her world.

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In June of 2004, our son CJ was born. Being that he was our first child, our lives immediately and drastically changed in ways we could never have imagined, even though we thought we knew what we were getting into. Such is the life of a new parent.

He has been both a joy and a challenge, and we love every minute of it (or pretend to when we don’t ). He has always been very particular, from his very first cry to the present day. He likes what he likes, and he will tell you in no uncertain terms (not always in words, but he gets the point across) when he does not. From sleeping to eating and everything inbetween, he seems to have been born with his very own set of rules that we’ve slowly puzzled out over time.  He is an adventurous soul, who practically ran before he could walk, and has never met anything he was not willing to climb over or crawl under.

He is now three, and he amazes us every day with his capacity to learn and grow and discover. He is curious and into everything, and he can make huge leaps of understanding that even I often have trouble following. Coupled with that, he has an expressive communication disorder, which in layman’s terms means he was slow to talk, and is still slow to talk at age-level appropriateness. His understanding of complex concepts coupled with his inability to express in words what he is trying to explain has made for some interesting challenges. He attends a five day a week (half days) preschool program to help him develop the tools he needs to bring his expressive language up to par with the rest of his peers. It was a hard adjustment for me, for it feels like he’s in kindergarten already, but he adores it. I hope to foster a love of school and learning in him that lasts a lifetime.

So that’s our son in a nutshell. Curious, bright, and definitely spirited, he keeps us on our toes and brings a unique sense of wonder to every day of our lives. And a healthy dose of pulling our hair out as well. Especially when he tries to climb on top of the refrigerator.

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