Mr. Social

I think that one of the greatest pleasures I've gotten from motherhood so far is watching Sam start to view other children as friends rather than indistinct blobs that take his toys. Since our little preschool ordeal a few months ago, so much has changed. We went to the playground a few weeks ago and were walking down the hill and met up with a father/daughter pair heading there as well. Sam ran up to her with a giggle, and when she smiled back, he took her little hand in his and walked with her to the playground saying, "I'll show you the sandbox." The dad and I looked at each other with some serious raised eyebrows. "You'll have to look out for that one," he said. "Oh, no," I replied with a grin, "YOU'LL have to look out for him."

It's become glaringly apparent that he likes girls. A lot. And preferably a little older. Way to go, Sam. One four-year-old in the cry room at church got the Sam treatment a few weeks ago when he took her hand and led her to his train, then they rolled around together under one of the pews, giggling crazily.

All he wants these days is to interact with kids and make friends. Sometimes, it's heartbreakingly poignant to observe, as I think about all of the social gamits he'll be running in the next few years. At REI a few days ago, he found a group of older kids huddled together in a little fort, and started playing peekaboo with them. "Go away, baby!" they yelled at him. Sam just laughed at their enthusiasm for insulting him, and continued to play. One day, though, he'll hear what they're saying and understand it. And then, my precious, outgoing little boy may have some questions.

Jokes

Boy, do I have a lot of catching up to do! Since it's the night before Christmas eve and there's lots of packing a wrapping to do, this will have to suffice.

Mark was teaching Sma to do knock-knock jokes tonight, which was hilarious. He even made up his own:

Sam: "Knock-knock!"
Mark: "Who's there?"
Sam: "Banana!"
Mark: "Banana who?"
Sam: "Banana sock!" (Falls down in helpless laughter)

Nice Monster

First, an update: Sam has been doing MUCH better in the behavior category. His preschool teachers were great about incorporating my discoveries and ways of dealing with him, and he had a very successful day on Wednesday. We went to McDonalds for lunch to celebrate.

In other news...we now have an imaginary friend. Sam has talked about nice and mean monsters for a few months now, but just recently Nice Monster made an appearance. Yesterday, I was not allowed to help Sam with the potty because Nice Monster was helping him. We have to leave the gate open upstairs for a few seconds when we go up so that Nice Monster can come up, too. And at bedtime, he decided he wanted Nice Monster to put him to sleep. My excitement may have tipped him off though...he quickly changed his mind and decided that Mommy AND Nice Monster should put him to sleep.

I'm not particularly worried about this, and don't think I should be. It's actually pretty cute. When Nice Monster starts to tell him to jump off the roof, he'll be asked to leave. But for now, I think he's here to help Sam through a lot of adjustments he's had lately - new room, new sibling on the horizon...Nice Monster is welcome as long as he pulls his weight.

When preschoolers attack

Preschool drama. I picked Sam up from school, where he goes for about 2 hours on Wednesdays, and the teacher pulled me aside.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" Uh oh. I know that teacher voice.
"Has Sam had anything, uh, BIG happen in his life lately?"

I told the teacher about his new room, and she nodded reassuringly. He apparently was rather aggressive toward the other kids that morning - pushing, hitting, grabbing toys, etc. They'd pull him aside and talk to him about using words, etc and I was nodding along, but the whole time I was thinking, "Oh my gosh. He's going to be THAT KID." I think the very kind teacher saw that look in my eyes, and she reassured me that her oldest son went through a tough phase like that, and now he's a delightful adult who runs his own business. Great, so he's not a serial killer. Oh, and Sam managed to get himself bitten by a little girl, complete with little pink tooth marks in his arm. The teachers were extremely apologetic and I'd feel sorry for him, but I think he had it coming.

On the way to the car, I chatted with Sam.

"Sam, I heard that the teachers needed to talk to you today about sharing."

He nods and looks at his hands, not looking at my face. "Mmm-hmm."

"If you want a toy, what can you say?"

He says in a canned voice, "Please, can I have a turn with that when you're done?"

Ok, that's a start.

I think this was a wake-up call for me about helping Sam develop these skills. Beyond preschool, he doesn't spend a lot of time consistently around other kids, and when he's at preschool they've got about one teacher for every 6 kids or so, and it's not fair for me to expect them to know all of his triggers, see trouble brewing, and head it off, let alone help him with every single interaction - that's my job. It's one of the reasons I chose to stay home, so I can do all of these things, not just the fun stuff.

So, today we went to an open play time at a local community center. Before we went in, we had a little talk:

"Sam, there are going to be other kids in there, and toys that you'll share with them. What are you going to do if you'd like to play with a toy?"

"Please, can I have a turn with that when you're done?" Sounding a little less canned.

"Good, honey. And you know I'll be there to help you if you need it, ok?"

"Mmm-hmm."

So, we go in and we have the place to ourselves for about 15 minutes, and then the flood gates opened. About 15 kids in the preschool came pouring in, taking over all of the riding toys and the bouncy house. I braced myself. Sam immediately went after the little girl on the motorcycle he'd most recently been playing with, screaming and running after her. Here we go. I scooped him up and walked him to the corner.

"Sam, she's taking a turn with that right now. I'll let you down when you can use words instead of scream."

He nods, and I let him down. He runs up to the girl again, and to my surprise says, "Can I please have a ride with you?"

She thinks about it and sizes him up, then nods. He delightedly hops on the back of the motorcycle and she scoots him about the gym, Sam giggling the whole time.

It brought me a lot of insight about why he behaves the way he does. I really, honestly think that he loves other kids, and wants to play with them more than he wants their toys. But, he's just so intense about it. With one little girl, he ran up and started talking in her face, then said he wanted her to take her finger out of her mouth and take her glove off so he could hold her hand, which he tried to accomplish by yanking her hand out of her mouth and trying to pull off her glove. She looked slightly shell-shocked. I can just imagine that at preschool he had some sort of interaction like this, and instead of me being there to sort of coach him through it, the kid rebuffed him or got mad, and it escalated into other ways to get the attention of the kid, then his frustration set him off on other negative attention-getting behaviors of the rest of the day. As a contrast, I helped him through that first interaction with that motorcycle girl, and things went more or less pretty well for the rest of the time we were there.

So, I have a new plan. If he throws something, grabs something, hits someone, or does any sort of other negative behavior, even if it's coming from an excited intense mood rather than a mad one, I calmly pick him up and take him away from the situation, where we have a little chat about what went wrong and how to do it differently. I hope at the very least he'll get the idea that if he does any of those things he gets a time-out, but I also hope that he starts to absorb how to do it better and that it sets him on that better path.

On the way home, I had another insight.

"Sam, I am so proud of the way you played with other kids today. You did a great job using your words and sharing toys."

He's gazing out the window. "I made that boy scream."

He's thinking about the one other time we had trouble, when he excitedly hit a boy who was playing in a tunnel, and I removed him to have a talk about it. Amazing - out of all the good interactions he had, he remembers the one that didn't go well. Is he going to be like this? "Good job, honey, you got mostly A's!" "But I got one B, mom." Is he going to take not pleasing people, especially those he's close to, really hard? I'll have to be sure that he knows when he's done well, and that it matters to me just as much if not more than when things go the other way.

Own room!

Big news! After painting, moving and hauling (thank you, Erik and Laural!), Sam now has his own room upstairs. Mark and I have moved our bed downstairs to the basement. And guess what? Sam loves it! We talked to him about how if he wanted either of us during the night he could just call out and we'd hear him over the monitor and come right up. On the first night he slept until 5 before I got the call: a very calm "Mommy, can you come up?" Today, it was 6:30! It's a far cry from his 7:30/8ish wake-up when he could crawl into bed with us, but I can deal with it for the trade-off, and he's been taking a longer nap during the day to make up for it, which doesn't have me complaining. Sam loves his set-up so much that before his bath last night he did a little Sound-of-Music-style twirl in the middle of the room, threw himself on the bed and exclaimed, "I LOVE my own room!"

Here's the funny part, though: Sam may have adjusted just fine, but I have yet to have a night where I don't wake up around 3 or 4 and lay there in the dark listening to the little sleeping sounds over the monitor. I'm trying really hard to wait until he asks for me before I wander upstairs so that I'm encouraging his independence, but it's hard. It's funny how I was so worried about how Sam would adjust to this change, and it ends up that I'm the one having trouble with it!

Logistically speaking, I'm finding that things are much less crazy than I thought they would be. Mark is gradually moving his things downstairs and is showering and getting ready down there, and when Sam wakes up I head upstairs to his room (where my clothes are still in the closet and my toiletries are in the bathroom) and get ready for the day up there, pretty much just like I did before we moved the bed. Laundry and garbage just gets hauled up from the basement and added to the pile on laundry and garbage days, and I really don't go down there again during the day. So, apart from our sleeping time and places, not much about our routine has changed. We'll see how it shakes out with a new baby in the mix, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Anniversary

"Hey, Sam, do you know that daddy and I have our anniversary on Thursday?"
"What's that?"
"It's when daddy and I got married."
Pause for thought.
"I"m married, too, you know."
"Oh, really? Who are you married to?"
"Mommy!"
"Oh, you're married to mommy?"
"Yeah! When's our anniversary?"
"I don't know. When do you think it is?"
"Monday!"

Pregnancy

I feel like I should add something about my pregnancy, since I haven't written much about it. I'm starting to learn that that's the way it goes with second pregnancies. At this rate, if we have a third I'll probably just be completely surprised when he or she pops out. I was pregnant? I guess I was too busy to notice...

Anyway, I feel great. Like, GREAT. Better than I did with Sam, and that was pretty great. I told someone yesterday that I feel like there's energy shooting out of my fingertips. In the last week, I single-handedly painted a wall (removing and then replacing all of the furniture and hangings on said wall) and moved all of the books and shelves up from the basement. The living room looks fabulous, and it's actually a place I enjoy hanging out in now. But instead of being tired after all of this work, I feel like I'm ready for more. We go to the park and I chase Sam around and do underdogs over and over again, laughing and running. Everyone looks at me like a crazy pregnant lady for not just sitting on a bench, but I don't care. I feel great! I suppose I should enjoy it now, because I'm sure there will come a point, either before or after the baby is born, when all of this energy is a distant memory. But for now, I'm just enjoying feeling like a superhero.