Quick Hitters

I. Garbage Trucks
Every remotely interesting outside noise is now a garbage truck to Owen. Like most little boys he is fascinated by weekly arrival of the big garbage trucks (one for recycling at around 8:30, one for the waste about two hours later) and runs to the window to watch in reverent awe. Lucky for him, most of our street uses a different company that collects on Mondays, so he can see the neighbor's garbage truck go as well. ("That isn't our garbage truck," James comments "our garbage truck is BLUE.") I sort of wish that the interest in garbage trucks was the reason that Owen so routinely throws inappropriate objects (stuffed animals, books, sheet music, unopened mail) into the kitchen trash can, but I suspect these two phenomena are unrelated. He just likes to throw away inappropriate objects.
But anyway, all of the neighborhood school buses are now garbage trucks.
<Noise outside>
"OH! Gah-bage twuck!"
"Owen, I think that's just a school bus."
"NOo! Gah-bage twuck!"
"Well, why don't you go to the window and check?"
<pat-pat-pat>
"Gah-bage twuck?"
Even when he discovers that the noise WAS in fact a school bus (we live across the street from an elementary school, you know, so of course it's usually a school bus) he pops right up at the next big vehicle noise with an exclamation of:
"OH! Gah-bage twuck!"

II. Gymnastics
J and I were recently talking about how James (who, it turns out, reads pretty well) may not like the idea of us writing about in him in our blogs. But we need to remember his first day of home school.
He did great with the actual school part. He worked on worksheets, made messy letter A's, and thoroughly enjoyed his new pencils and crayons. But he was nervous about gymnastics.
"I won't do the high parts. Alexa will do the high parts."
(We signed him up to do a class with Alexa, who'd been taking for over a year.)
It went poorly from the beginning. For one thing, Alexa was almost immediately pulled off the floor because of some error in her registration. And then James, who had made a genuine effort to follow along with all the warm-up stretches and exercises despite his nerves, got completely lost in the first five minutes of calisthenics.
I figured that in a 4-5 year old class they would spend some time explaining each element that they were doing for the benefit of those kids (like James) who had never heard of a "straddle" or a "crab walk."
That wasn't how it worked. Most of the class had apparently been enrolled before, and the handful of newcomers apparently didn't mind wandering about through their classmates or taking their mistakes casually. James, however, was breaking down into tears. Each time the coach (who never even introduced himself to the kids) shouted another instruction about "jump and tuck" the tears welled up a little bigger in his eyes, and he looked around the gym, trying to find us. (Owen was trying as hard as possible to break free from J and make his way out onto the various apparata, so she was restraining him.)
James stopped trying to follow the class and covered his eyes, sobbing. One of the adults tried to help him and then motioned me onto the floor. I walked out to meet him.
"I want to go home."
"You're doing fine. Keep on trying, do what the coach tells you to do and if you can't do it the first time, that's alright. Just give it a try."
"Will you stay with me?"
I told him I couldn't, but I ended up tagging behind his group for the rest of his hour. He had finally regained control of his tears when the group started to move to other spots in the gym. The next forty minutes were a painful exercise in reminding us of how little James has done in the way of walking-in-straight-lines, listening to non-parent adults giving instructions, or imitating other kids his age. He floundered badly. He cried often. He went out onto the trampoline when he wasn't supposed to and was scolded, and then was too teary and embarrassed to go out when it was his turn. He walked through areas he wasn't supposed to when he followed the line, and when he found something he enjoyed doing a little bit he became so engrossed in it that he didn't hear the coach telling him to stop or to stay in one place.
Owen was babbling as we walked out to the car, but the rest of us were silent.
I helped him into his carseat and looked at him.
"That was awful." He whispered and hung his head.

We had a talk that night. He insisted that he didn't want to go back. We talked about how to listen to the coaches, how to watch the other kids, how to practice some of the new things he had learned, and about being brave and trying something you weren't good at.

The next day J was reading books to Owen in the library when she heard some thumping in the living room. She looked up. Through the legs of the dining room table she saw James standing by the couch, practicing straddle jumps on his own.

I think it's great that he's smart and well-spoken and reading, but I don't think I've ever been more proud of him than when I heard he went and practiced those straddle jumps by himself.

Last Tuesday I took him back to the gym, and he didn't say much on the way there. J stayed behind with Owen, trying to minimize any distraction from her being there. He was nervous as they started the warm-up. They went right into some new skills, and I could see the tears welling up, but he kept it together. Once that was over and the line was forming to move to the other side of the gym he came running over and asked me: "Are you going to go come with me?"
"Try it on your own. I'll be watching here if you need me, but start on your own."

He wasn't great. He still doesn't walk in line particularly well, and he gets nervous around the tall male coach in particular. But he did much better. And when the class let out he came flying into the shoe area and gave me a silent, squeezing hug and actually let me pick him up and hold him.

He knew he'd done good work.