Surprise!
My wife told off our two youngest children for flushing Play-Doh down the toilet.
They were sent to bed.
The youngest – and most mischievous – liberated herself after a few minutes and walked down the stairs and onto the patio where Mum was painting the wood doors under the barbeque. There, the four-year-old proceeded to jump and land with her arms spread wide and a broad smile and said gleefully, “Surprise!”
I must say that I think she has learned the art of easing her way out of punishment. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that her schoolteachers and principals see how adorable she is and not just how mischievous.
Hey, who you calling a slowcoach?
I write in small notebooks that fit in my pocket.
I am careful not to lose them in case what I write is a gem. Ernest Hemingway once lost a bunch of short stories he’d written before becoming famous, and he never saw them again. I once lost half a notebook to my dog’s belly. It was probably what came out as compared with Hemingway’s stories.
The second notebook I lost went missing mysteriously, and with it my solution to Buenos Aires’ traffic problems – not the nerve-wracking jams but the dangers pedestrians face in crossing the road.
The solution, written from personal experience, went something like this, if my memory doesn’t fail me:
One day a few weeks ago I set out in the car knowing full well that hell awaited. The subway was down so most people had to commute on the streets or brave the railway after a spree of derailed trains.
I set off with time on my hands and the resolve to drive my Hyundai Elantra station wagon as I’d learned growing up in Los Angeles, the city of the car: I gave cyclists and pedestrians the right of way.
And do you know what? [continue reading…]
Fi-fish.
My seven-year-old son has a speech disability as well as mild autism. This means that he has to work doubly hard to acquire sounds that come easily to most children, a task made harder still because the sounds are different in the two languages he is learning and living: English and Spanish.
This means many things.
First, he’s not too verbally outgoing in groups. It takes him longer to properly pronounce a sound let alone a word, a phrase, a sentence. He hangs out with the other kids at school, smiles and laughs. But he doesn’t do much of the talking.
We were told this would happen. He’d have fits of advance and then plateau.
The tools to help are many, and this means that he spends a lot of time in therapy and doing exercises to help, so that he can catch up and keep up with his peers.
He gets a 10 for effort and summa cum laude if only people could understand. [continue reading…]
