The Summer in Review

My goals for this summer with Eric were pretty straightforward:

1.     Increase his ability to wait without restlessness and boredom causing a tremendous amount of yuck behaviors that then need to be managed by teachers, aides, etc.

2.     Teach him some "boy" things to do, at least get him started.

3.     Improve his ability to summarize life experience and fiction (which is a HUGE challenge, as you either get a step by step massive accounting of everything, or nothing of any importance at all)  by writing book summaries and writing his sister.

4.     Take him to social environments where I can observe his raw interactions with peers without so much intervention on my part.

5.     See if he can swim enough to save his life yet.

6.     Make all of the above seem like we were just "having fun" and never let him know there were "goals and objectives."

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The pool provided #4, so I killed two birds with one stone there.  He can save his life 80% better than ever before.   His raw interactions are quite raw.  He is terrible when trying to engage other boys to play.  They are dismissive of him because he doesn't understand how their social structures work, and he gets frustrated at their aggression (always it's masked as "play" but let's call a spade a spade, in little boys the name of the game is dominance by physical mastery of sports) and he responds with inappropriate reciprocal aggression and things just go downhill from there.  Granted, at the pool we go to, the relationships of the boys who go there every day are well established, so the core groups are going to be dismissive and hostile to any newcomers, but they were especially disinterested in the "weird kid" who wanted to play with them. 

Much younger girls, on the other hand, he has gotten better at interacting with.  They are smarter, which helps, and don't mind talking all the time, which covers up his lack of conversational skills.  Also, they tend to be more tolerant of his oddities.

There were some interactions with oddball, geeky boys and their dads that went quite well, so that was encouraging.  His inability to throw or catch things is going to always be a problem with casual interactions in a play setting.  He gets better every year, but it's a struggle.

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I lucked into a way to combine #1 and #2:  fishing.

He hates fishing, but he's spent a great deal of time watching me fish, reading while I fish, breaking heavy metal tools thwacking the rock-hard dirt with them while I fish, lying on the bench or the pier moaning about how long I've fished while I fish, and getting a good look at fish from the outside and inside.  What he does not like is that his rigging gets caught on the rocks because he won't follow instructions on how to properly get it to shore and he doesn't feel like beating the learning curve.  Oh, and sticking worms on hooks is "gross."  He likes catching fish, and he really likes cheering when I catch fish, so I'll take it all as a win.

As to the patience factor...I've put him through a great deal of deliberate immersion in boredom.  He has managed it better and better, as I've lengthened the amount of time spent at each session.  At first, he'd decompensate at two hours, now he doesn't really lose it until six hours or so.  Of course, there remains the difficulty that in order to get him to be patient, he needs a steady supply (about every hour and a half) of things to eat, but we worked out stuff that isn't so health-unfriendly and have managed that problem.

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Discovered something about Eric and writing:  he absolutely MUST use a keyboard.  He cannot write at all by hand.  It's just pointless.  His ability to communicate tanks to the point that it's just gibberish, probably because of the motor skills involved requiring way too much concentration.  On a keyboard, he writes quite well.

We had a time starting the process of learning to write outlines.  BUT---he is now on board with the idea that an outline saves time and life energy!

His letters to his sister are pretty funny, I have to admit.  We're up to four paragraphs, amounting to a full page of single-spaced, arial font, full margins text.  He struggles with transitions, but that is to be expected in fifth grade.

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We also went to two sci-fi conventions, helped film a commercial for a third, and went to Houston to see the Houston Gilbert and Sullivan Society's production of The Sorcerer.  The first, TimeFest II, even included his grampa having a panel about the making of the new Dalek.  At the second, he won the children's costume contest with his insane Dalek Thor get-up, and had a much better time than at previous conventions.  Again, he had to manage boredom and waiting, but with some strategically timed walking around, and a game of Doctor Who Monopoly, he definitely enjoyed the wait.  The commercial was for Geekonomicon in December, and as soon as they get it edited together, I'll share it on here for everyone.  He tolerated the waiting around of TV filming magnificently!!!  I was very proud of him.  The Sorcerer has its own blog post...if you're curious, scroll back.  It's totally worth it!!!

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All of the minifigs have come to "stare at" the giant R2D2

The big surprise of the summer was Legos.  He was given a gift of several lego sets for his birthday, and I gritted my teeth in preparation for having to supervise lego building and lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  To my surprise, he was quite self-sufficient, for the first time ever.  I bought box after box, and even though I did have to help disassemble and reassemble some more complex ones, the lessons garnered from the assembly were fabulous.  R2D2 was the only one which required me at every stage, but it had 2127 pieces and deep mechanical parts that had to be right or the stuff would not work.  It's a beautiful thing and when he lined up ALL of his minifigs in a circle to "stare at R2D2," I couldn't help but laugh.

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The school year starts next week, and there are many changes that I fear.  Since we watched all of Clone Wars over the summer, I now quite happily have an older Jedi's voice in my head at these moments telling me to "not center on your anxieties" which is a weird effect of watching tv.  It's like a situational earworm that isn't a song.  It's useful, though, for a catastrophizing person like myself.