Home Sweet Home

It's interesting. When I get on one of these kicks where I am serious about looking at other houses, the end result has always been to come home after looking to discover that I really do love our house. It's not even a fixating on a specific thing to love about the house or where we are; it really is a deep kind of contentment and appreciation for what we have.

Tonight we spent about an hour at the prospective house, and I think Kerry and I both left feeling rather confident that even at a lower price, we're pretty lucky to have what we already do. It needs work. It looks lived in. New carpet would feel nice. Decent furniture would be extremely satisfying. A family room that we actually wanted to sit in would be welcome. But the basic bones of what we have are just fine. Enough space, but not too much. A useable layout. Nice features here and there. So many things to do all around us. As safe a place as you get these days for kids to play. Friends for them. There's really very little to complain about except the commute.

Tomorrow morning we are going to the Waldorf May Faire. Walter has a new book about Gnome Crafts, so we need some wool felt sheets to make our gnomes this coming week.

Today was a difficult day for Walter. I'm not sure what happened at the park this afternoon, but we left with him in the worst meltdown I have seen in probably three years. He was hysterically inconsolable, shrieking and crying for no clear reason, spewing out nonsense sentences and wailing that he was going to sell his bike. No, he was going to sell his bike for $25. No, for $1. Then for $.25. And finally he was giving it away. Something about how he didn't want us to bring his bike in the first place. I could figure out now precipitating event for his misery. I'm unsure what to make of this. His food today was pretty standard: Koala Krisp cereal, a ham sandwich, and water, so nothing unusual there. My first reaction was to think that he needs no gluten, no milk products, and a super clean diet. Then I realized that maybe it wasn't the type of food, but the lack of food that was the problem. Maybe his blood sugar was low. He ate Gorilla Munch from the box on the way home and his mood seemed to stabilize.

I continue to nearly torture the boys with enhanced schoolwork. And I am still trying to come to terms with Ollie's test scores. We have had some serious talks about how to take these tests, namely you don't quit just because you get to a question you can't answer. Even if you aren't getting a "grade" on the test there are people who might be looking at this test to see how much you know and how you are doing with your schoolwork, so it is a good idea to do your best. These are, believe it or not, concepts he needed to be explicitly told; he is a child who is punished by rewards. Today he took a subtest in math as part of our test prep, and he only missed one out of 16 problems, and as soon as I mentioned he had missed one, he knew exactly which one it was and what his answer should have been. This, the CAT, and his daily performance in his book tell me that something went pretty wrong with the test, probably the fact that he ended the section once he had a problem he wasn't sure about. I'm wondering if part of Walter's emotional control problems and behavioral regression are a result of the added stress of all of the extra work he has been doing this week. I've doubled the spelling words, doubled the Explode the Code pages (we're now done with book 6), added in two pages of handwriting practice, and am doing test prep on top of that. Despite my best efforts and dogged determination to keep him seated for an extended period of time, he hasn't quite been broken yet to the point where he can get through all of the work in a morning. We're dealing with a lot of tears and protests that there is too much work, but I keep my focus on how much he would be doing if he was in school, and this seems rather little to expect. I am already seeing greater facility with forming letters, so the liberal use of the eraser that I have been requiring so that letters are directly on the line and all lower case where needed has produced some fruit. Even Ollie is having an easier time with some lower case letters now, and it gives me hope that we will have progress and eventually it won't take him ten minutes to write something as short as, "I like candy."

Walter is my big question mark. What is he? Who is he? Will he ever really grow up and be like others his age, or will he always be young, eccentric, and quirky, with daily life seeming to be an unfamiliar chore to him. I wish that I could say that he will make it in the world on his own, but I go through phases where I have very serious doubts. Tonight he is curled up beside me in the bed and looking forward to tomorrow morning, when we'll go out together with Frances to the Waldorf School, the land of his beloved gnomes and craft supplies. The one thing you can say about him is that he is definitely special.