I've Got to Admit It's Getting Better
My son has reached a lot of development milestones this year, but one of my favorite is that he’s willing to sit down and watching baking shows with me. He decided to join me when he caught a glimpse of Halloween Baking Championship as the contestants were making something gory. I don’t enjoy the bloody stuff so much, but my kid does, and I’m mostly okay with that when it comes to fantasy. Or cakes. He watched a full episode with me and readily remembered the bakers’ names and what they had made. “Remember when Melanie laid down on the floor?” “I can’t believe Justin quit.” “I think Oksana’s going to be the winner.” (I had to remind him how to pronounce Oksana’s name, since it’s one he hasn’t heard in real life.)
This tickles me very much. I’ve been surprised by how well he actually pays attention to what’s happening on the show, instead of getting distracted by thoughts about something else he would rather be doing or watching. He also sat with me when I started watching Is it Cake? (hey, I need dumb diversions from the real world) and seemed very interested in which objects would succumb to a knife and reveal themselves as realistic cakes. He quickly picked up on the show’s vocabulary and started describing things we saw on screen as “cakey”. I’m not sure why this development is so striking to me; it just seems like he’s becoming more in tune with the wider world beyond his specific areas of interest.
He really is developing quickly. More than once in the past month, he has said he wanted to be alone in his room, freeing me to sit on the couch and read books for much longer stretches than I’m used to. On weekends, we’ve been hearing him wake up and take the first 30 minutes of the day to play or read on his own. This is amazing. We are used to him heading directly for our bedroom and chatting our ears away, no matter the earliness of the hour.
He is calmer, still a headstrong little kid, but less likely to fight our parental requests now than when he was still in kindergarten. I find myself subtly bracing for pushback when I tell him to do something, then relaxing when he complies. All of his challenging behaviors from the last six-plus years have been teaching us how to handle him: use a friendly and encouraging tone, don’t harp on it, give him a minute to respond and finish up what he’s doing. On a recent weekend, I overreacted to a pants-soiling accident that required us to leave the pumpkin patch that we’d only just arrived at. Ten minutes of running through the corn maze was all we got for the admission fee I’d paid, intending to take him around the full expanse of the farm and buy some apple cider. I didn’t yell, but I spoke to him harshly, and he seemed weary of it. “Don’t get so mad,” he said.
Pretty simple, Mom: Stop getting so mad. Shit happens. It was still early October, with plenty of time for pumpkin patches, and I was more enthusiastic about it than my child was to begin with. He could have changed clothes in the car so we could go back, but he preferred to go home, and I was ready to be mad about that too because I secretly want him to be more like me, an “out and about” kind of person. The fact is, he likes being at home with his stuff and his mom and dad and his dog. Where’s the problem?
The less I create problems for him out of my own impatience or preference, the more he is free to blossom. He’s been expressing himself more creatively lately. When he writes, some of his letters are backward, but his thoughts are clear and the words follow a straight line. He draws imaginative, scary creatures using bold, smooth strokes to form multiple heads and sharp teeth. When he sings, he experiments with vibrato to imitate the singers he’s heard. (Around this age, I probably sounded the same way singing “Part of Your World” over and over again.) He shows me how to do a celebration dance when he’s achieved something he is proud of.
His seventh birthday is approaching quickly, and I hope it’s going to be a good year.