I think that I don’t write about R enough, sometimes.

Obviously, the Monster and how Autism affects his big brother (and all of us) is the purpose of this blog, and therefore R gets overshadowed by said big brother, but…

(Speaking of which, I’m running a poll on the tweet-feed right now.  Does R need a (real) nickname on the blog?   Feel free to weigh in.)

Monday afternoon, I had to go down to the curling club to do a pre-game scrape, since we were supposed to have finals.  (The game was rescheduled without my knowing, and… well, the blade wasn’t in shape to actually do the scrape.)  I offered to take R with me down to the club to get him out of the wife’s hair, since she had a few things to do around the house, was being a general pain in the ass – as four year olds are wont to do – and loves going to the curling club.  So when she said yes, I offered to him, and he was off like a shot…

And he was very good about it.  He walked slowly with me while I was walking down the ice sheet to pull the scraper onto the ice, sat in the chair on the far side while I was going over the preliminaries (up to the point that I saw the note on the log that we should not scrape with the blade until it’s rehoned and remounted), and through my re-parking the scraper and coming back down. Yes, we briefly wandered off into letting him hold onto a junior-sized brush and my showing him how to properly hold it to sweep, and talked about how, if he gets toilet trained before next season, he can play in Middle Rockers and I’ll get a bigger locker to share with him, but then we had to get back in the car for the forty-five minute drive home which, being four years old at dinner time, meant that he needed a snack.

So while we were in the drive-through line at Chick-fil-a, he had my “Live Loud for Autism” sweatshirt over his lap as a blanket and noticed my club name tag on it.  “You have a blue badge on your sweatshirt with your name on it,” he announced from the back seat.

“I do at that,” I said back.  “It’s my name tag.”

“It’s a very impressive badge, Abba,” he said.  “I wish I could have one like it.”  (This veered off briefly into a conversation about what does ‘impressive’ mean, and does he understand the great words that spill out of his mouth, and the answer is – mostly.)

“Well,” I said, “if you get toilet trained, you can have a name tag next year when you’re curling.”

“But then I need a cool sweatshirt like yours to put it on,” he insisted.  This kid knows how to butter people up, yes…