Monday, October 10, 2005

Cheese, Gromit

No one else wanted to go see "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" yesterday so Matt and I went by ourselves.

I called Dad so he could talk to him but he was gone. Matt talked to all the other kids though. And Tricia and I talked about some things. I think if he would have stayed in Arizona he would have ended up in the "bad" school and would have gotten beaten up a few too many times. Now I don't necessarily think that one good lesson in when to keep their smart mouthes closed is something that's crucial to most smart-asses, but multiple poundings by mouth-breathers probably wouldn't have done too much good. Perhaps exactly the opposite. :/

One thing she said though made me think and there seems to be a big difference in our outlooks. She said the psychologist told her he does better with written instructions than verbal ones. This could very well be true from what I've seen, he consistantly doesn't write down his assignments in his planner. And thus consistantly forgets things he needs to do or tell me (he called me this morning at 0726 to ask if I could bring his swimsuit to school on my way to work).

But I think that he needs to be prepared for the frustrations in life and always catering to his strengths rather than occasionally putting him in places where he's weak isn't a way to reinforce that trait. Now I don't think he should always be dumped into places he's weak but if we don't mirror what life will throw at him how are we really helping to prepare him?

And he has a very serious problem with surrendering when he gets frustrated. And how can you help him learn to deal with frustration without putting him someplace where he sometimes faces it? But if he faces it too much then we're just setting him up for failure and his self-esteem is so low that we need to build it up with earned successes before we try to temper it. I guess I need to consider how to teach him how to deal with frustration (without going too much into my personal 'five paragraph field order' method of how to plan for when things go South). He's learning a bit of it at karate and that might eventually teach him a lot of it, as well as reinforcing a "never give up" sort of mindset (well enough of it to be healthy).

On a happy note, Jack has decided that he wants to rejoin the game group. And John suggested last week that we invite Brand to join since it seems like Marlin & Yvonne won't be able to come back to us any time soon. We'll have to move from Tuesdays to Mondays or Wednesdays but that shouldn't be a big shift, since we came from Wednesdays before. And we'll likely move to a two game bi-weekly format since he can only play every other week. I've no idea what we may play in between but we'll come up with something. And perhaps Doctor Feu'u can rejoin the crew.

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