Elvis at Welsh Hills School

What do five-year-olds look like when they're about to get on stage to perform a medley of spring songs, including "Bicycle Built for Two," "Love Me Tender," and "Bye-Bye Love"? Oh wait--did I mention that they're also T-Rexes? Ah, yes. Suited T-rexes.

This boy is primed for a career on stage. Never one to shy away from the limelight, Jacob had another stellar performance tonight. Imagine a room packed with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. There were at least 100 people there. In spite of the fact that there were 30 children on the stage, that he was wearing someone else's much-too-big-shoes (his got lost in the costuming shuffle), and that he was in the back row, Jacob is not one to fade into the crowd.
How did he make himself present? amend the fact that he was screened by 15 other children? Why, he leapt up, of course. Every minute or so, he sprang up like a mad kangaroo--landing with a dramatic CLOMP on the wooden riser in his gigantic, big-heeled shoes. Occasionally, while he was jumping, he also waved dramatically. Or pointed at me and then himself. Or mouthed, "Take a picture." Everyone--with their eyes open wide, mouths gaping, and eyebrows raised--looked over at me, as if I am to answer for the behavior of my child when he's on stage. As if I control him like a puppet on a string--HA. I've learned that's not true. Then, they all started cracking up. I have video of this. I swear it's true. And what did Jacob think of his performance? See if you can tell:
After the show, he ran five laps around the entire school, and his Elvis-like charm even won him a picture with the lovely Sophie. And you should hear his rendition of "Love Me Tender." It'll break your heart. Maybe he'll sing it for you.

exhuberation

A fifth birthday party always inspires neologism. And what a wonder it was. The shindig had a dinosaur theme, and from Jacob's first foggy moments when he awoke, he was jazzed and trilling on about the party. He was exhuberating from the break of day. Thank God that at this age they're so delighted to play, so easy to please, and so willing to think you're a such a wonderful parent for trying to delight them.

We spent the weeks prior to the party preparing for it like it was a series of doctoral exams. We made "goody bags" for the kid-attendees. We sewed them with dinosaur fabric that Jacob chose. Into the newly minted dino bags, we put dino "planes," stickers, masks, "shamtoos," puppets, and playsets. We block-lettered each of their names on a little T-shirt, and the kids painted them by dipping little dinosaur shapes in fabric paint and stamping the shirts. That was a hoot. They were going to color in the dino mural we made, but there was too much cake and chaos to do something as quiet as coloring. In the cake picture, which is, of course, a dino scene (wildly mixing up creatures from the cretaceous and jurassic --we didn't have time to research the proper periods, and we could only swipe dinosaurs from Jacob's stash that he wouldn't miss), you can see a T-rex about to devour us. The volcano was made with a bundt pan and a good bit of cake chopping. We also erupted a "real" plaster volcano that we had made before the party. All the kids stood around and cheered like maniacs with each foamy baking-soda-vinegar-red-food-coloring-and-dish-soap eruption. After the sixteenth time, when we smelled like a pickled egg from all the vinegar, we had to move on to a less sinky activity.

Next came the T-rex pinata, which--like all mass-manufactured pinatas--would only have dumped forth its wealth of goodies for Jose Canseco with a steel bat. We had surgically altered the T-rex with a steak knife, so a kid could yank on the right string, the tail would fall off, and VOILA the candy and toys would spill out. At least, this was the theory. Instead, even after we yanked the tail off with a great deal of adult assistance, all the goodies stayed locked up inside (a bit like Jacob's birth story, don't you know), and we ended up going into the "fill pinata here" opening and digging out the prizes and throwing them on the floor. Each kid got to cram his or her hand in for a fistful. That worked, and I'm pretty sure it was less violent than a bat.

Present opening was, naturally, a highlight of the party. Kids are almost as excited to have someone else open their present as to receive one. Almost. So they hover in a knot and experiment with the loot themselves as it's passed around the room. Jacob was charming during the party and today as well. He loved everything: it was the best cake he'd ever tasted, the best candy he'd ever eaten, the coolest batch of presents he'd ever gotten, and the most fun he'd ever had. Mary Tuominen even wore a dino mask and exhuberated with the kids.

Winter Trip 2006-07

Jacob's winter trip has been dynamic. He had a great Christmas, where lots of people doted on him as smart, charming, and beautiful. He got gifts from a range of friends, but--as per our request--they were modest and mostly "heirloom" objects, rather than store-bought items.

He got to spend lots of time on the beach and he also got a special trip to Busch Gardens (a big zoo with a park inside), where he has a relative who manages the park. He got to go behind the scenes with a handler, where he got to see and interact with pygmy marmosets, a porcupine named Rosie, some rare giant birds, and two white tigers. He loved Rosie, and he got to feed her a grape and pet her.

He loves the beach and got to dig and roll in the sand. He even made sand angels. He was lucky that the weather was very warm, and he could swim in the ocean.

The friends with whom he was staying had a lagoon, a great big lap pool, and a boat. He got to go out on the boat to an island, where he caught crabs with his bare hands, tried to catch fish, and ran in the surf. He found coconuts that were beginning to sprout trees and planted them in the friends' front yard. He was very proud of this. He learned to swim half the length of the pool with a life jacket on and--by the end of the visit--may well complete a full pool length. He did this almost every day.

He is getting ready to go home, so his routine can come back, but he said he has loved his vacation.

He asked, on this trip, if his mommy could come over when he went to his daddy's. His mommy explained that, just like he got along really well with some people at his school (he said, "those are the people my personality works best with"), grown-ups tried to choose those people who have personalities that work well with theirs. People can be really wonderful, and not have personalities that work well together. His mommy told him that both his parents loved him very much, and that he was lucky he'd have such a very big family to love him his whole life. He thought that sounded pretty good.

One time on the trip, he got angry and threw orange juice on a computer. He spent a half hour thinking quietly about that and said he was very sorry. He also, for the third time, put chewing gum on a seat belt in the car. We decided that a good consequence would be no gum until his birthday. It would be great for Jacob, if we could all support his decision on this consequence, so he can learn this one.

Soon, he's going home. He misses Muggy, and he misses a couple of his friends from school. He will be glad to see his daddy.

holiday celebrations

We made a fabulous trip to COSI this weekend. Jacob had a blast.

He LOVED the Lincoln Logs and was fascinated by how big a tower he could build with them.

Later, we went into the Village, and he sang with the Welsh Hills School kids and, again, belted it out. We also watched Santa arrive on a fire truck, and went on a horse-drawn cart ride with Joanna, Olivia, Prabasaj, and Rahul. His friends even came over to his house to play for the evening, and everyone had dinner together.

Lessons in Boundaries

Jacob teaches me something new everyday. Many of these lessons are about boundaries. For example, recently, we went to the Nutcracker with Joanna and Olivia. It was after Jacob and I left early to dance around outside (and to wait for our friends, who actually made it through the whole show) that I learned that pants were optional in public.

You see, we were prancing around wildly and laughing, and when I went over to him and tickled him, he wet his pants. The kid was drenched. I asked Joanna, who had just emerged from the building, if she might have a towel in her trunk. Fortunately, she did. Jacob, however, is not a kid to wait on anybody, so the trousers, underwear, socks, and shoes flew off while we collected the towel. Judging from the looks on the faces of the people streaming out of the Nutcracker matinee in their Christmas finery--silk, satin, and velvet--with all their small children, he apparently removed his clothes in some kind of wild strip-tease. How nice that they were all confronted by Jacob, the nudist. (Don't think that whole "Nutcracker" irony was lost on any of the adults.) Jacob was undaunted, and kept a-dancin.

Lesson 1: Pants = optional, even in public. There are often things we think we need that we may not.

________


I've also learned that mental illness respects no boundaries. It is, in fact, contagious. Today, Jacob was in a great mood when I picked him up from school. There's pretty much only one thing at school he doesn't like, and that's naptime, and I get an earful about it almost everyday. Today, however, his story was different.

"Whew! Naptime was just crazy today."

"It was? Why?"

"The other kids were wild."

"They were?! Why is that?"

"I guess they caught my madness. And, really, I don't want to listen to a bunch of screaming kids. [I swear he said this.] Thankfully, I got a few minutes of peace anyway."

Now, in some ways, I knew this already. You hang around crazy people long enough, it affects your relationship to the world. It can make you crazy too. Fortunately, in this case, Jacob had finally gotten his sense of peace, and he wasn't about to be disturbed by those around him, even if it was a bunch of screaming kids.

Lesson 3: Madness is contagious, but you can still find your island in the midst of it--even if you have been the one who was mad before.

_______

The next lesson Jacob gave me was one I didn't want to learn. From the very first day of school, he kept coming home and complaining about the behavior of a child we'll call "Q," the gorgeous (and I mean gorgeous) charming, dainty, son of two smart people I know. Jacob said the kid was mean. This child has the doe eyes of a Bratz doll--and they are matched by a smile of angelic innocence. He melts people with a glance, and he's so polite. I just couldn't imagine it. Jacob told me he pushed people down. I will say it again. I was a doubter.

Then Joanna said that Olivia didn't want to go to school because she didn't want to see Q. That shifted something in my mind.

Today, when I picked up Jacob, I casually asked one of the teachers, "What's the deal with the other kids and Q." I didn't even get the whole name out of my mouth, and she was already smirking. "He's like the big brother," she said. "Big brother?" "Yeah, you know--he's the one who grabs things out of their hands, yanks their papers off the desk and throws them on the ground when they're working, pushes them around, makes remarks--you know. The other kids are really starting to stand up to him--they're realizing they don't have to put up with it--but he is just the troublemaker in that age group." Q? Not Jacob (who I adore, but, as we have established, is a mountain of sass)? Just as she said these words, Q--clearly intentionally--drove a giant dump truck right through a volcano Jacob had been carefully building up in the sandbox, crushing it back to the ground. "Hey!" Jacob protested, but his creation had already been obliterated. Q looked at Jacob, batted his long eyelashes, and smirked.

Q, that little nymph with the face of saint, was also a mountain of sass. Jacob was right--he isn't an angel; he's just a kid.

Lesson 4: Appearances do not always represent reality. Here was a gorgeous, apparently angelic boy, being a normal kid. In fact, he is the "class troublemaker," just as Jacob had said.

_______

Finally, I've learned something about holidays. Today, Jacob carved a Christmas pumpkin. I didn't even know there were Christmas pumpkins. Jacob taught me.


We got two pumpkins and made spicy pumpkin soup with one, and carved the second. It's a pie pumpkin--only about 5 inches tall. He drew the face, then carved out the eyes. We carved out the mouth that Jacob had drawn, and Jacob and I supplied the Christmas accoutrements. (Don't miss them in a first glance.)

We laughed our butts off doing this.

Lesson 4: You can carve a pumpkin for any holiday you like. Rules that seem to keep fun parceled off into neat, little, "things should only happen like this" bits don't apply.

All good lessons, I say. I'll be on the lookout for more.

growing and healing

There were two things I resisted in the teachers' report: the notion that, somehow, pretending needed to be corrected and the fact that Jacob's desire for adult company was a problem that needed to be fixed. He will develop friendships with children. He already likes some kids very much. Prescott, he says, is his best pal. Still, he prefers grown up. One of the characteristic signs of gifted children is preference for the company of adults. A lot of smart people I know were the same. (Other signs are early langauge acquisition [check], precocity to the point of inappropriate behavior on occasion [check], and curiosity and desire for reading/to read [check].) Both of these were addressed in the conference. First, they said they didn't want to stifle his creativity (I explained that his father was a creative writer, and I appreciated his creative story telling as a gift), but that they wanted him to be able to talk about it as storytelling, so he didn't suffer social consequences (i.e. "that didn't really happen, Jacob!" or "you're crazy--that's not real.") Second, Laura, the teacher admitted that it might be that play dates wouldn't necessarily change Jacob's preference or help. They talked about how he was adjusting well and said they thought he was being parented well.

He's on the mend. He's been eating since the day after he began vomiting, and, while his tummy is still a little shaky sometimes, he's definitely feeling much better. He might be coming down with a little cold (which seems rough, since he just got over the intestinal bug), but he'll make it through that too. It's a function of school attendance--this catching of everything--I'm sure.

tip top shape

Jacob is feeling fine today. He ate bountifully this morning, and had a bath. Parent-teacher conference today. Update to follow.

Halloween

This year, Jacob was a ghost for Halloween, at his request. He made his own costume from a sheet we picked out together. At first, we just put in eye holes, but that made it too hard to see, so we settled on the open face. It was raining off and on, but we still got to trick or treat in the neighborhood, and everyone thought he was very cute. He had a great time and got to eat two candies that night.



School has been good. He loves Leona and Taylor, who are teachers. His favorite kid is Prescott, and he really likes Olivia and Rahul too. For some reason, he is not crazy about Adrian. The kid knows what he likes.

Jacob has an intestinal bug today. He is at home with his mommy, resting and drinking pedialyte. Sometimes, he feels up to a bit of a movie. He'll feel better soon, I'm sure.