Simplex Elegans: Growing Boy, Growing Needs

by Kristina Chew

Published April 24, 2009 @ 12:14AM PT

Sometimes the best solutions are staring you right in the face.

Charlie's had a good time during this Spring Break. He's spent most of it with my parents (GongGong and PoPo---Cantonese for "maternal grandfather" and "maternal grandmother") doing "nothing special": Walks in the park (once it stopped raining), trips to the grocery store, hanging around home (bringing back memories of Spring Break when I was his age----my parents both worked and my sister and I spent the week reading or practicing piano or walking to the local stores, and there went the week). I guess one of the more "interesting" things that happened was Charlie getting his blood drawn for testing (and doing fabulous).

One "out of routine" that did happen was that, on Tuesday night, I took the train into Manhattan to have dinner with Jim at a small Italian restaurant; afterwards, we walked down the west side by the water till we got to the Winter Garden and then took the PATH train from the WTC site back to New Jersey. Yes, we had a date---actually, a date that was overdue by at least four months. We had planned to go out for dinner (which we rarely do) while visiting my family in California last December but Charlle had been so unmoored by being away from home, out of all of his familiarity, that Jim and I could not leave him, and (for the first time ever) not with my parents.

Gradually, things have been looking up, so dining on fish and ravioli in a pleasantly cramped restaurant redolent with the good smells of good food gave both Jim and me a bit of buzz. For the moment, and hopefully for a few more, things with Charlie are ok and we are not---as we've been since late December---in crisis mode. For Charlie and for us, education and teaching, a whole lot of patience, and a fine-tuning of our ability to listen to what he's telling us (with and without words) and to understand him as he is, have been the soundest means to help him. I put up an action yesterday about pro-active teaching methods because (in this time of IEPs); I've been thinking a lot about how we might teach Charlie to communicate and contend with his needs and anxieties, before he gets overly stimulated, frustrated, aggravated, overwhelmed. Some of this involves us learning to better understand him, and some of this involves Charlie learning to monitor himself and know that he's getting stressed, before he actually is. For example:

Yesterday, Thursday, was a sort of "hump day" to Charlie's week. He woke up later than usual, hung around in bed, had a late brunch/lunch of rice and paper-wrapped chicken (helping my mother put the little white bundles onto a baking pan). He had a vigorous walk of more than two miles in the park with my parents and then, on coming back home, did not want to get out of the car. Charlie pretty much stayed in it for the next hour and a half plus, with a brief venture out. He was in the car (the dinky one my dad had rented that shakes and quakes when it goes above 55 mph and I've been riding in the backseat with Charlie) when I came back from work. Charlie just seemed to want to sit so sit he did. My parents noted to me that Charlie had told them "Gong Gong Po Po airplane California": My parents leave in about five days, and Charlie's internal clock must have sensed that it's past the halfway point of their visit.

It being Spring Break, all aspects of Charlie's usual routine have been "off," and he's adapted well to this. But one thing that doesn't march to the beat of when the school district schedules Spring Break is Charlie's growing---I think I was saying he was 5' 5" about two weeks ago and now we've been saying 5' 6" because, well, he appears to have grown again. (I've been my current height since I was 13 years old or so, so this constant growing growing growing in Charlie is a novel phenomenon for me.) And growing boys need nourishment for all that growing and that means plenty of food. Generally Charlie is very proficient about asking for food but I've started to realize, he has no idea of how much his body is changing and his words just can't keep up.

I told my parents we needed to get Charlie dinner pronto and they did and Charlie ate with (how else to say it) gusto. He was quite amenable to a walk afterwards and he and I ran ahead of my parents and followed some rabbits over the grass and into the bushes. Afterwards, and after Charlie was in his PJs, he put on his shoes and asked to go meet Jim (who was teaching at night and would be home late). Charlie acceded to our explanations about it being "too late" and settled down to build with his Legos and then went to bed and clicked through all the songs on his iPod until he found a certain Jimi Hendrix album. He listened to it, eyes wide open, until he was just about falling asleep.

Note to self: Our food bill is just going to go up and up---it's that simple.