What Sticks

The Monster’s last day at Middle Rockers, 2016-17 season

Ordinarily, I handle getting the Monster to his school bus anyway, and then leave straight for work.  The point of this being, if his school bus is late or doesn’t show, I can then run him to school before it starts without my wife being made to run a huge loop to drop both kids off.  While she’s on Injured Reserve, this responsibility still lands square in my lap.

So of course, today being his first day back at school after spring break, the bus didn’t come.

Fortunately, R didn’t have school, so he could stay home (and “watch Mommy” while my wife’s resting in the den) and I could run the Monster to his school.  His bus being AWOL was the least of today’s concerns – I was fighting with the cable company, and trying to shake off my fatigue since I’d been up a few times during the night and hadn’t had enough coffee… (Seriously.  Passover can’t end soon enough, for me to be able to grab a quick pick-me-up at Starbucks…)  So I got him together, got him into my car, and zipped over to the school.

Now, I’m friendly enough with the school staff, and they know me by name.  The school psychologist was in the lobby when I arrived, and we started talking about things while they were confirming that the Monster’s bus was delayed, and the conversation turned to… curling.  Specifically, that he apparently brought up curling with the Monster before break and got a very excited response about ‘stones’.

The Monster’s the kind of child who will say ‘yes’, if he thinks that doing it will make you happy.  One of the things we work on regularly are trying to build the skills for narrative language, for answering W- questions with real answers, and preferably not trying to fake his excitement to please us.  In this case, it’s also good that he’s managing the association, that he can work from a term to something that’s meaningful to him, and can express that without prompting (when he feels like it).

It definitely does make me happy that curling seems to be something he enjoys.  Just means I’ll have to sign him up again next season…


So about the picture.  On the last day of Middle Rockers, we played a game we call ‘short game’ – you have to stand in the hack and, without sliding out, deliver a stone into the house.  You can’t do take-outs (where you throw it forcefully to push other stones out) and in this case… we did it in the dark with glow sticks.  For once, this was something the Monster could do exactly the same as the other children, without too much guidance or adaptation.  Now if only R would pay attention long enough to follow directions in these cases…

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