We're very lucky.
Jack is the sort of child
we all assume we'll have
when we decide to have children,
and the sort of child
less experienced parents
congratulate themselves for.January and February 2004
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Blogs we read:
2006-06-07 - 16:12
5/31/2006
Mamma, I adore words!
Mamma, I adore words
Jack said this to me one morning, a few weeks ago.
We were resting quietly. I was sitting on the stairs with Jack on my lap. It was early in the morning and he had his head on my shoulder, gently waking up.
I don't know what inspired it. He must have heard something like it. But it's true enough. I responded,
Yes, I know you do, baby. I know you adore words. I do, too.
He nodded. After a moment he asked for some Weetabix.
I'll probably never know what inspired that moment of insight. I guess I don't need to. But it was sweet.
6/6/2006
Have you heard?
The latest assault on obesity -- don't be strict with your kids!
Yep, they've discovered that strict (or permissive) parenting makes kids fat.
Is it just me, or does this endless pursuit of the "crimes" that "produce obesity" seem to reaching the stage of absurdity?
Being strict, being permissive, overfeeding, feeding the kids junk, not forcing them to exercise... Big Pharm (the major pharmaceutical companies) have declared that there is an obesity crisis, and "it's all your fault". But they have an instant cure! (Never mind the small details like morbidity and mortality rates far beyond what would be accepted for any other condition are considered perfectly acceptable if the goal is weight loss.)
Oh, on the same page, there's a link to an article about a proposal for "standing only" classrooms, to force kids to use more energy.
Yep, that's just great.
There are solutions to improved health that don't involve pharmaceuticals at all, never involve additional morbidity or mortality, and reduce stress and improve overall health and quality of life without the punitive methods and dangerous drugs that seem to be all the rage, but those can't be used to get rich, and they don't promise to make us all look like movie stars, so they'll never catch on. It's so frustrating.
Learning Jack.
Rod and I have been coming to "learn" Jack better as he's gotten better at communication.
A few months ago, it came to my attention that Jack was way behind his peers in the manual dexterity/writing skills field. While other kids were drawing 'representational" (if not identifiable) art and starting to practice writing their letters, Jack couldn't reliably get a mark onto the paper with pencil, pen, marker, or crayon.
Not only that, but he was far from even slightly interested. When we sat down in a restaurant, he picked up the crayons and handed them to us and asked us to draw for him or write for him. He refused to try for himself.
I thought I saw a place where Jack would need a lot of work and may even have had a "handicap", so we started researching how to help him catch up.
There's a lot out there. Know what eventually worked? We told him why it mattered.
Once we explained to Jack that this was how he would learn to write words, like Mamma and Dad do, he was not only willing, he was eager to practice. He started asking to spend hours a day "doing school", and always he wanted to work on worksheets to practice writing.
At first we gave him simple dotted
lines to trace, and we worked up to zigzag and then curved lines, and then on to parts of letter shapes, then to letters, and then to words. Jack went, in the course of a month, from unreliably getting a mark on the paper to being able to trace letters almost smoothly and then to write them more or less recognizably without tracing.
I don't mean to imply that he's ready to take dictation or that he'll be writing the grocery list any time soon -- he writes, but he may still be a little behind what his peers are doing. But he moved forwrd so fast! He has even started to draw "representational" (and completely incomprehensible) art, just like his buddies!
Of course, his interest in reading dropped way off while he was so focused on writing, but last night he started to ask me to read book after book to him and I realized that his focus was starting to balance out again. That was nice. I'm proud of his hard work and how far he came so quickly, but to tell you the truth, Rod and I got bored long before Jack did. It takes a lot of energy to help a young man to focus that intently for so long.
Reading, my own true love, is a lot easier.
But the real lesson here was that Jack is someone who needs to know why he's doing something. Most children benefit from some explanation of why things matter, but to Jack it's crucial.
Walking, walking, walking
I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it here before, but I am diabetic.
I was diagnosed just about exactly 10 years ago, and until the day Jack was born, I prided myself in extremely tight control of my blood sugar.
Then Jack was born.
It's not that I cared less about my own health, but Jack kept me so busy that I found I just didn't have time to test regularly or to do the other things I'd learned to do to control my blood sugar.
I balanced my food intake as best I could, and started taking oral diabetes medications to "make up the difference" but otherwise, I went on a prolonged diabetes holiday. Not a great idea, but I knew it was temporary and I trusted my formerly tight control to grant me a grace period before "too high" became "dangerously high".
I also continued to have my blood tested by the doctor, to keep track of how bad it was getting, and over the three years i watched my HbA1c climb from a pretty near normal 5.7 on the morning Jack was born to a far scarier 7.6 at the beginning of last month.
A quick look at our life told me that Jack is now big enough and independent enough for me to go back to making care of my health a high priority. A look at my blood sugar told me that it was getting to be pretty important that I get my sugars under control if I want to be there with both feet on to dance at Jack's wedding.
I mention this by way of explaining that Jack has become aware of blood sugar as a concern at the ripe old age of three. He asked me to test his sugar a few days ago and decided he didn't like it very much. But he watches with great interest as I test and asks me "are you going to test your blood sugar" with great regularity.
He is also learning that a high reading means an adventure!
You see, there are really only two ways to bring down a blood sugar high. One is insulin and the other is exercise. But insulin can be dangerous and it shouldn't be used to bring down a blood sugar less than 200. I do occasionally get readings that high, but my high readings are more likely to be between 150 and 200.
So, when I have a high, I put on my orthopaedic walking shoes and off we go for a long walk.
I am someone who has always been bored unless I had a goal or at least a destination when walking. I was a "power walker" less because i enjoyed the act itself and more because it kept my mind occupied if I walked up near the limit of my ability.
Jack has taught me that speed doesn't matter as much as I thought it did.
He is fully capable of moving a lot faster than I can, but he doesn't take that approach to walks. He prefers to stop and look and enjoy and explore.
Not a bad outlook on life, really.
And interestingly, an hour of exploring as a leisurely meander seems to be just as effective as a one mile power walk. (Though I can get back to what I was doing a lot faster if I just power walk for a mile. That takes about 15 minutes.)
It's pretty important to me that Jack come along whenever possible, though, I want him to learn to see caring for diabetes as a normal way to live.
I have diabetes. Rod's father had diabetes. Jack's odds are looking decidedly tipped in that direction, too. It will be easier on him if the accommodations that will keep him healthy are already "normal" in his world. Walking and exploring his world are a part of that -- I could move faster if I just power walked to the grocery store and back, but Jack wouldn't be learning much from that. By taking him with me, I (hope I) am helping him to develop the habit of thinking of a walk out into the world as an adventure -- taking care of oneself can be fun.
That's the theory, anyway. It didn't seem to work with my older kids, but we do what we can.
Reminder: clicking on the photo of Jack in the column to the left will take you to the photo album of his most recent photos.
