Halloween 2010

He came back in 15 minutes with a HAUL of candy. Unreal.

Not his tribe

When September rolled around my son's friends all left the daycare. Most of his friends were a year older than he is; the one who wasn't left for another preschool. I was sad about it, but I knew a whole new crop of kids was coming in, and somewhere there, I thought for sure, he'd find new friends.

I started getting worried when they told me that out of 24 kids, there were six boys. There's a single boy his age. One of the boys doesn't speak any English. Another is not yet three. Another he knows from the year before, and they don't like each other that much, because that kid's older brother was also there, and was a mean kid who said mean things to my kid. (He was the one who, when they had "toy from home day" and my kid brought his Iron Man Mask that he was so proud of, took it from him, got the boys together to play a super hero game, and then told my kid he couldn't play because he had no costume. It's a good thing my kid said no, give me back my mask, please (and the other kid complied), because momma bear was there with fire in her eye and was about to march over, grab the damn mask, and smack that kid upside the head for being so freaking mean.)

But I digress.

The Boy is getting along pretty well despite all this. He has friends, the girls adore him, he tells me all the time he has fun. I keep him home when he asks, but he still prefers the daycare to shopping or groceries or errands. I arrange playdates with last year's friends.

But this morning, Halloween party day, he arrived in his now full Iron Man costume to the biggest bevy of Disney princesses I've ever seen. No other boy was in a costume; the one boy who had brought a costume came as a parrot.

I wrote yesterday that I didn't understand my son's fascination for superheroes, but dammit if this is his interest and his passion right now I do want him to have friends to share it with, and enjoy it. Oh, sure, the princesses surrounded him oooh-ing and aaah-ing and asking to try on the mask, and they all went happily off together, in costume, my son cajoling the other boy to put on his parrot costume. I know it doesn't matter that much to him -- they're all in costume and it's fun and it doesn't matter if the other boy is spiderman or a tropical bird.

But OH I wish it were different for him. I can't wait until he's done there.

Blogging with baby, take two

So the Halloween question has been resolved by my sister, who is loaning us an Iron Man costume as well as a spiderman costume -- we haven't the mask for the latter, but have it for the former, and since we found the Venom mask (of course we did! After I searched out other options!) The Boy now has three options for his choosing for Sunday. In return I loaned my sister a knight costume, but her boys are likely going as Optimus Prime and Batman. Never underestimate the attraction of archetypal heroes with little boys, is the lesson here.

It was a surprise to me, the superhero thing. The rough physicality of boy-ness. My son was a pretty calm baby who liked to read books and sit quietly playing with toys and when shortly after his third birthday superheroes hit us like a ton of bricks and haven't gone away I admit I was at first amused and then somewhat alarmed. The guns, the power struggles, the shooting of trees out the window of the car, the desire to roughhouse -- as a girl growing up with a single sister and no close neighborhood boys -- and even no close friends with brothers -- this was a complete surprise.

Eighteen months later, I still don't get it, don't understand it, and cringe when he wants to play good guy / bad guy games. But I'm trying my best to get it, at least. I read about this, about this development stage for boys, and I am at least convinced in theory that this is a.) normal b.) healthy and c.) won't lead to sociopathic / criminal behaviours later in life. The problem that I see now is one I've seen a lot of write-up about: female teachers at the primary levels that don't understand little boys.

We already have one teacher at daycare who tells me, in a concerned voice, when The Boy has been acting out some violent fantasy. And then she asks, in a concerned, lowered tone ... "He doesn't play ... video games ... does he?" Because they are the root of all evil. To be perfectly honest I think some video games are better for a child than TV, because my kid will interact with video games and even (gasp!) think when playing them, rather than turn into the slack-jawed vegetable state he gets into with TV shows. And it's not like I'm letting him play Doom or anything. He plays age-appropriate games.

(And to be fair the woman who runs the place seems to think that he's delightful and has never once mentioned to me that she thinks The Boy's play is out of the range of normal. And she's been in ECE for over 20 years, and has a son of her own, so I trust her judgement more than the teacher who has been there two years, and hasn't any kids of her own.)

But I believe the stories about female teachers not understanding boys, because I'm the mother of one and *I* don't understand it. I want to let it go, I want to learn about it, because it's important to my son. I don't want to hinder this part of him, to squash his likes and dislikes and his exploration of the world. But I am afraid that someone else will.

It's ironic, isn't it, this motherhood thing? I might not like it, I might not understand it, but I will come out swinging and defend him should anyone else suggest it might be bad. He is who he is, and I will love and defend him forever and a day.

And drive all over town for Iron Man costumes.

Rain

To someone who grew up on the temperate west coast, some times a day of all-day rain when you get to stay inside is a lovely comfort.

Genesis, according to my son

"Long long ago, before their were people, there were dinosaurs. And before THAT, there were superheroes, and supervillains. And the supervillains wanted to destroy the WORLD, and the superheroes stopped them and THAT'S how the earth was made. The green blood made the trees and the brown blood made the dirt."

pause

"But humans made this house. A long time later."

Clearly I have some work to do on his edu-ma-cation.

Sunday morning picture

There's a hot cup of tea -- a big one -- nearby, my lifeline to waking up. The day is grey and rainy, but the inside is warm and light ... if only because in waking, my preschooler turned on every light in the house. He hasn't stopped talking since he woke up, just past seven -- it's now over an hour later. The baby, awake in the night a few times, woke later, but is now enjoying a romp in the neglect-o-saucer. Every morning it's the same -- the baby, the preschooler, and the cat all clamouring for attention, all needing THIS, and RIGHT NOW and it's a wonder that I stay sane with that amount of sensory stimulation so soon after waking up.

Hence the tea.

There's yogurt and mango and muffins for breakfast, a kitchen to clean, children to bathe, laundry to do, a freezer to tidy, toys all over the living room, and bookshelves to organize, but for the moment there's tea, and all the shrieks, yowls, and words float on by, swirling chaos around my head, while I am still.

One of my goals while on mat leave is to re-organize our very small abode so it's less cluttered and more manageable for when I go back to work. I have come to realize that I must have less stuff in order to feel more organized, and so much of the stuff is superfluous anyway.

In my case, the extra stuff -- well, a lot of it is books, and books .... it's hard for me to get rid of books. Very hard. They are old friends, these books, they speak to who I am and where I have come from and I love them, so many of them. I like the fact that I own five English dictionaries, because I remember the getting of each of them -- inherited from a friend, found in university when I couldn't afford one, etc. etc.

But with children come many sacrifices, and one of those sacrifices is to go through the books, at the very least, and get rid of the ones that aren't friends so as to free up more space for the kids' things. And so I have. I have about $100 in credit at the nearby used bookstore (couldn't take cash. Now I can get more books! Don't tell me this is illogical, I don't want to know.) And today I spent some time re-organizing the bookshelves, placing them in alphabetical order, lovingly repositioning and placing and remembering each one.

It's extraordinary how much pleasure I get from the books -- even beyond reading them, just having them and holding them and looking at them and organizing them. Sigh. It might just be a sickness.

But I wouldn't be writing this out unless I suspected that at least one or two people who might read this might feel exactly the same way.

;)