If it’s the winter of certain years, it’s time for the Winter Olympics. That quadrennial occurrence where we all watch sports that we’ve no idea how to play or score, but that we’re going to be glued to anyway.
The last time the Winter Olympics happened, the Monster was just shy of two years old, and we’d not yet gotten a diagnosis. We had some inklings that something was wrong, but that was then.
So a lot of what we’re doing this week is seeing if we can get him interested in the Olympics at all, if there’s any sports that grab his attention more than others, if there’s anything that sticks in his head and comes back out of his mouth. (It’s also just a nice change from having PBS on the television for the bulk of the weekend.)
And granted, it’s not like he’s not seen at least a few of these sports – I watch hockey when I can on television, and I curl. (And he went with me to the 2012 US National Championships, wherein I figured out ways to keep him occupied for the six hours of competition.) But then there’s sports like figure skating, or ski jumping, or bobsled… and he’s not seen any of those yet, since they’re not really often on television aside from the Olympics.
But it’s like a lot of other activities to try to foster some awareness of the world around him, to give him opportunities to socialize. I know that, despite most of my coworkers not knowing about a lot of these sports, they do talk about the Olympics at work… and I have to imagine that at school, they’ll discuss the games at some point. Maybe I’ll luck out and something’ll stick, and he’ll have something to talk about with other adults over the next few weeks, as opposed to burying himself in the iPad or other distractions when we’re out.
We’ll see.