Who Wants A Dead Animal For Lunch?

I think I traumatized my son the other day. I was eating a corned beef sandwich when he came over, watched me for a minute, and then decided he wanted some. As I am always happy to get food into him, I quickly handed some over. After eating for a minute or two he turned to me and asked "Where does corned beef come from?" Without even thinking about it, I answered "From a cow, sweetheart." He looked confused for a minute and then said "Oh. How does a cow make it?"

After I finished choking on my half of the sandwich I tried to explain to him, delicately, that it wasn't so much made by a cow as it was made from a cow. Once again, I got that confused look and a noncommittal "Oh." He then put the sandwich down and walked away. When asked, he told me in no uncertain terms that he was finished with his lunch.

Any day now he's going to join PETA and tell me he's going Vegan.

Knock, Knock! Who's There?

Well, it finally happened. LR's two weeks' shy of turning four and he's discovered Knock, Knock jokes. We had a Knock, Knock scare about six or eight months ago, but it never really went anywhere. At the time, he didn't really understand what he was doing and all we got was the punchline: "Knock, Knock!" "Who's There?" "Orange you glad I didn't say banana?" He would then giggle a lot and walk away. Okay, we could live with that; at least he wasn't making us go through that particularly endless joke. (For anyone not familiar with this joke, just consider yourself lucky and move on with your life).

Now, he still doesn't entirely understand what he's doing, but he knows that it's supposed to follow a specific formula and that it's supposed to be funny. The problem, of course, is that he still has a four-year-old's sense of what is, and is not, funny. Now, I absolutely appreciate the fact that he's actually making these jokes (and I use the term loosely) up on his own and I applaud his creativity. I do. But I also have to sit through them. So far, they are all variations on a single theme and he's repeating them endlessly with all the tirelessness that you'd expect from any preschooler who's discovered a new interest.

"Knock, Knock!" "Who's there?" "Daddy." "Daddy who?" "Daddy YOU!" [followed by hysterical giggling].
"Knock, Knock!" "Who's there?" "Mommy." "[Sigh]Mommy who?" "Mommy YOU!" [more hysterical giggling].
[Repeat the above ad nauseum.]

It's going to be a very long year.

It's Great to Have Friends -- I Think

LR was still home today. But the monotony was occasionally broken because he had a friend with him. No, we did not recklessly expose another child to an ear infection and week-long diarrhea. This friend was an invisible baby bird. This particular choice seems to have been inspired by our not-so-exciting encounter with a baby mockingbird on Wednesday. (I'm still kicking myself that it didn't occur to me to take pictures until three hours after I let her go).

I know it's completely normal to have an imaginary friend; our son has an invisible menagerie. Today, it was a baby bird. Earlier in the week it was several animal friends from the t.v. show Little Bear. Another day it was a number of animal friends from the t.v. show Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. The rest of the time it is usually invisible incarnations of his friends from school; I'm sure they'd all be amazed to find out how often they're "visiting" LR.

I have no problem with any of this, although it can get a bit confusing as to exactly who is here on which day and my getting such things wrong is treated as a mortal sin. My problem arises from the way in which he interacts with them. While he is generally able to tell me where they are, he categorically refuses to speak to them directly. In fact, he insists that he cannot hear them at all and he therefore relies on me to provide a running commentary from them about different things he may be doing or watching. I cannot begin to describe just how quickly these "conversations" wear thin. "What's the bird think about this picture?" "Does he like my super bouncy ball?" "How does he feel if I lose it?"

Now, my understanding of imaginary friends, while admittedly very limited, is that they are most often used to work out some fear or problem in their lives. As one psychologist explains:

Imaginary companions are an integral part of many children's lives. They provide comfort in times of stress, companionship when they're lonely, someone to boss around when they feel powerless, and someone to blame for the broken lamp in the living room. Most important, an imaginary companion is a tool young children use to help them make sense of the adult world.

In my case, this actually provides me with a fair amount of insight. The vast majority of the questions my son asks about his imaginary friends are about emotions. "How does my friend think that boy in the book feels?" "What does my friend think about that girl who accidentally spilled her paint?" LR is trying desperately to comprehend emotions. Exactly which feelings make up which emotions; when do people feel certain emotions; what body language and/or facial expressions convey specific emotions. It's not that he doesn't experience these emotions, he has a great deal of empathy and gets very upset if someone else is sad, but he is having difficulty in reading other people's emotions.

And that would appear to be why he insists that only I can hear them, that I have to tell him what they think/feel. He is constantly trying to monitor his own emotions and reactions to things, and to understand the emotions he sees displayed by others. When his friends "comment" on these things he is able to compare their answer to his internal thoughts/feelings and he can use them as a learning guide when he truly does not know how someone is feeling.

It is extremely difficult for any child to fully understand the concept of "putting ones self in another's place" until they have gown through the five to seven year shift. They simply don't possess that cognitive ability. For children with Asperger's this problem is significantly worse. Pretty much by definition, they have a problem learning and understanding the non-verbal cues in social relationships; this includes those cues, such as facial expression and body language, that help one to determine another person's emotional state.

As annoying as these seemingly endless, one-way conversations with invisible people and animals can be, I am astounded that LR seems to have come up with what I think is a rather ingenious method of trying to learn these cues.

I should probably consider myself lucky that, at least for the moment, he does not expect me to have his Chinese friends (e.g., the ones from Ni Hao, Kai-Lan) speak to him exclusively in Mandarin Chinese. I suspect that day is coming.

Online Coloring Books and Drawing Tools for Children

I came across some interesting online Coloring Books and thought I would share. They're provided by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and while they also have conventional coloring books to print out and use, they have some nifty online drawing tools as well.

First, they have what are essentially online coloring books. They provide a wide variety of different pictures with each one divided up into small parts (they look a lot like a picture made out of stained glass). At the bottom, they have different "crayons." You simply click on the color you want and then click on whichever small part(s) you want and it gets filled-in with that color. You can change anything you've done, including putting it back as plain white.

LR has very little problem doing any of this and he's just shy of being four. Granted, he does have a fair amount of experience with the computer and he's also able to do such things as moving the page up and down, hitting the "Back" button, and closing out a window entirely. [Note to self: don't leave important pages in other open windows unless they're bookmarked]. But I don't think most children will have serious problems once they've put some practice into it even if a computer mouse is new to them. However, I should warn you that many of the pictures do have one, or several, areas that are very small and thus very difficult to color; you may want to point out to your child just how hard they are so they don't get too upset if/when they can't do it.

They also have an interesting (free) online drawing program here. This one is a bit harder to use but it lets you draw your own picture, allowing you to "draw" in a variety of colors and patterns. The have many, many other things on their "Kid's Pages," including songs and jokes among others, but I haven't tried them out yet.

All of this is just wonderful for developing fine motor control, hand-eye coordination, and computer experience. They may as well get started now, they'll certainly be using them pretty much incessantly for the rest of their lives.

They're also great for rainy days, which we've had a week of. They're even better when your child has been stuck home for nine days (see my last post) and is going very, very stir crazy. Best of all -- they're free.

Enjoy!

To Save a Mockingbird

High adventure at home today. LR is still home sick from school. His ear infection was followed by the antibiotic giving him severe diarrhea. I haven't had this much fun since he was a three-month-old poop machine. He's now been home for more than a week, but he's handling it just fine. He's not at all stir-crazy. Not a bit. Nope. Me neither.

So the highlight of our day was the attempted rescue of a baby mockingbird. I found him sitting on the ground near our front steps, occasionally making a highly motivated, but ineffectual, attempt at flying. His mommy or daddy (sorry, I can't tell which) was hopping from bush to bush screaming loudly and incessantly. Needless to say, this accomplished nothing other than drawing attention to the baby's predicament.

After ten minutes of this I decided to step in. I was able to catch and pick up the baby within thirty seconds, which gave me a pretty good idea how well he would fare with the neighborhood cat. I had LR get me a box, which I lined with a towel and the baby didn't seem all that upset, given his condition and the fact that he was now in a house with a small child. I then spent the next thirty minutes online trying to find someplace safe to bring him or at least for someone to give me some good advice.

I finally gave up and did what I should have done at the beginning. I called the local SPCA and simply asked them who I should call. I called all three numbers they gave me and sat down to wait. An hour and a half later, I decided that I should try and feed him if he was going to be a guest in my home for this long a period of time; baby birds should be eating once an hour or sometimes more.

This time, I quickly found some useful info although it wasn't what I had started out looking for. I checked with five different sites regarding the care of wild baby birds and all of them said the same thing: the bird that I had was a fledgling rather than a nestling (he was fully feathered and could hop) and the correct thing to do was to bring him back outside and leave him in a bush if his parents were still alive. Apparently, that thing we've always been told about birds not caring for their young if they smell like humans is simply untrue.

So I took the poor thing back out and tried my best. All of my attempts to put him into two different small trees and a large bush ended the same way. He clung to the branch I put him on and then very deliberately jumped to the ground, no matter how high up he was. I decided to stop trying this before he injured himself. In the end, I left him outside near a bush and hoped for the best. The one call-back I've since received (six hours later) told me that this was essentially the right thing to do and either his parents will get him back up into a tree or they won't. Such is life in the big cruel world.

And our life is currently such that this constituted major excitement for the day. I think we both need to get out of the house. Now.