BlogRodent: Pentecostal Rumination & Review

Wherein my wife and I describe a day without meds, without sleep, and concluding with a horse tranquilizer. For AJ, that is.,

Intro

So my son has a pretty severe case of ADHD. And lest you nay-sayers pooh-pooh that notion, let me say that even when merely undermedicated both his pediatrician and psychiatrist remark that his is one of the more extreme cases of hyperactivity they've ever seen. Yet when properly medicated with methamphetamine salts he's calm, collected, and controlled. (Mostly.) When completely off his meds? He's a a wildcat on crank. But once in a while, even under meds, AJ will space out for a few seconds and lose time, lose his thread of thought, and just stare off into space. When he resumes he carries on with whatever catches his attention first. The docs thought,

Last week saw a milestone pass in our house: AJ enjoyed his very first last day of his very first year of schooling. He has now officially "graduated" kindergarten.

We are very proud.

Never having parented before, and having no memories of Kindergarten myself (I never went, scofflaw that I am), I didn't realize there was actually liturgy for Kindergarten graduation. Maybe this is something we only do here in the Midwest. Or maybe it happens all over the world and I've been clueless for 39 years. Probably the latter.

I think milestones are important to celebrate — even if there's no real par-tay and spiked beverages involved. I mean, we really don't do these things well in

Today we sent our little boy to school for the first time. Nobody wept. There was no gnashing of teeth, wailing, or sack-cloth and ashes. On our part, anyhow. Instead, we were excited to see AJ off to a new adventure in his life, one that promises whole new rafts of friends, future sleepovers, new books to read, realms of knowledge to acquire, and numerous — I repeat ... numerous — parent-teacher conferences down the road.

He's not angry, just surprised and squinting into the Sun. Or maybe he's just part Ferengi.

Every parent believes their child to be the brightest bulb in the firmament — with the possible exception of overachieving, insecure parents who vicariously live through their childen, ever suspecting and fearing that their child will prove to be as colossal a failure as they imagine themselves to be.

Not us. AJ is not only bright, he is certifiably bright, even if nobody believes us the first time we warn them — err — inform them. My Bride and are enomously proud of our son (when we're not enormously vexed by his impulse-control), and I've already been justifiably corrected by my son on many observations I've made. The days are few until he truly knows more about things than I do and I become the student. Nevertheless, I hope to remain in service as his father, mentor, and guide — even through High School.

So, a couple weeks ago I decided I had enough of the receding hairline thing. I also woke up that Saturday and looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like to look like Crusty the Clown. When hair thins, it doesn’t have fellow hairs to hang on to and cling to. Lonely hairs stand out, stand up, and wave about. It’s not pretty.

And I got tired of the wind, having to carry a comb everywhere, and just generally tired of managing dying hair.

So, I shaved. Not all the way, just enough to feel like I was shaved. I left a wee little bit of hair behind. I wasn’t totally serious about baldness yet—besides, it’s still cold here in Chicago. I need a little bit of warmth left.

A week later, AJ followed

Last night I enjoyed one of those moments of fatherhood I never thought about before we had kids: pulling teeth. Twice now I've gotten some dental floss from the cabinet, tied a knot around a loose tooth, and pulled, to reveal a bloodless tiny kernel of dentition in a tangle of nylon twine. AJ has now lost his front two lower teeth, and he's already got the tips of the new one poking through the gum-line. (Those were the easy teeth. I worry about the others now.)

Before Jennifer and I married, we discussed what we would do about Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and other childhood stories. I was adamant: no myths. No lies. No Santa.

No. Tooth. Fairy.

I would not lie to my children for the sake of

Just before leaving Muskegon, Michigan, this Thanksgiving, AJ started asking us about Lake Michigan, and we realized we hadn’t taken him to see the lake for a couple years. He’s nearly five, now, so he has no memories of seeing it before. So, after driving around and trying a few frozen over access points—and one over-run by hunters—we took AJ to the pier/lighthouse where I proposed to Jennifer in 1997. There was a massive ice-shelf extending into the lake (beyond the lighthouse) when I proposed (I was literally standing on nothing but ice!), but it wasn’t that cold yet this weekend, so we thought it would be a great time to visit.

Boy, was it cold. Ice had already started forming on the lighthouse and the pier leading up to it. We couldn’t get any closer than what you see in this picture because the concrete was far too icy and

Friday night we went out to eat with the kids to AJ’s current favorite watering hole: Cracker Barrel. While my favorite foods are spicy Thai curries, the rest of my family prefer blander fare. Well, Jen likes Italian and TexMex quite a bit, but the kids? Oh, mac-and-cheese or boiled eggs is about as sophisticated as their palate gets. So, southern-style cooking is just fine for AJ and Elisabeth.

But it’s not the cooking that draws AJ there. It’s two simple things. No, make that three: First, an endlessly fascinating commercial enterprise with toys easily accessible to his grubby fingers. Second, a checker-board with rocking chairs right by the fireplace. (Our Cracker Barrel ritual requires a game while the drinks are coming.) Third, rocking chairs. After dinner, we tour the store, with a stop at the toy section. We pay our bill, and AJ gets to help with the transaction. We

When you’re four years old you can’t walk away from the chocolatey goodness that is an Oreo cookie. And there’s nothing better than a crisp Oreo dunked in cold glass of pristine milk--especially when you’re only four and a half years old. Well, perhaps reading while dunking Oreos might improve the experience. And you definitely should be relaxed, perhaps even seated.

So what happens when one is simultaneously relaxing his posterior, reading a good book in the best-lit room in the house, and dunking cream-filled discs of manna? Odds are, something will fall into the porcelain catch-all which supporting that tired derierre.

Hear why AJ was found brushing his teeth after experiencing an Oreo baptism I only shudder to imagine.

[audio:http://tatumweb.com/blog/wp-content/mp3/ajs-oreo-08-28-05.mp3]

(Or download the file, here.)

[tags]BlogRodent, podcast, kids, children, oreos, weird[/tags]

So, the other night, I get home, and before I know it, I'm in the middle of a whirling dervish of kids spinning, crawling, leaping, and rolling. AJ's been on this freerunning/parkour kick ever since we watched "Jump|Britain" on The Learning Channel a few weeks ago. At home he's leaping from couch to chair to stairs, to carpet, clumsily rolling and flailing all the while. It's unnerving, but we don't discourage it much, despite the damage to our furniture. We like active kids. God knows we aren't active enough ourselves. But in the middle of his demonstration, he stops to pull a magic trick on me. We had the camera out, so we caught it. As usual, our in-home pics aren't all that impressive, but, hey, we're proud parents.

Every night I come home to a family. After nearly a decade of marriage and nearly five years being a parent, I'm still not entirely used to it. When it was just AJ and Jennifer waiting for me at home, I'd be greeted with a joyful, “Daddy's home!” and a running jump from my ferret-on-crack son. Now, I still get that, but I also get the quieter (sometimes whinier!) love and greeting from my beautiful daughter, Elisabeth. (Jennifer took this picture, by the way. Click the thumbnail for a bigger shot.)

I don't know what I'm going to do when boys start taking an interest in her.

Relocate to Montana.

[tags]blogrodent, elisabeth, kids, photography, smiling, face[/tags]

I enjoyed a great afternoon with my kids this last Sunday. Since I’ve been in a new photo-sig at work, and since I started this blog a month ago, I thought I’d take my wife’s little 3-megapixel camera with me. Sure, it’s not an SLR, but why be a snob—especially when the images are free?  

We got a late start and didn’t head out for McDonald’s Playland until very late, and by the time we got down the road—I mean, all of about 15 minutes—Elisabeth had passed out. You can see here that she’s pretty groggy, and that was after she and AJ had slept in the van for about two hours.

Yes, you read that right. I’m a horrible parent. I made my kids sleep in an air-conditioned van. :: sigh :: Oh well. Once Elisabeth

AJ looking thoughtful/worried/constipated. Take your pick.

AJ is frequently “spacing out” with this blank look on his face, and about the only way for him to get out of his zone is for him to randomly slap his own forehead with his hand. It’s this weird zen-like form of autism, I’m convinced.

However, the doc says it’s fine, and Jennifer realized the other day that she does exactly the same thing.

And now she’s slapping herself on the forehead for no apparent reason. I guess I’m used to being around people with a thousand-yard stare. I’m not used to them smacking their foreheads!

Now, I don’t really know he’s “spacing out” here. This picture was taken by Jennifer. However, I suspect he is, because anytime there’s a camera within spitting distance, he can’t help but turn on the ham factor. So, in the absence of hammery,

This is a picture taken by Jennifer. AJ's sitting happy as a clam (Are they, really, all that happy? Or is it just a sham to throw us off our game?), or something. That's “Diesel #10” in his hands, and a Thomas the Train T-shirt.

Why do boys instinctively love trains? What's that about? Are we boys hardwired somehow to respond to the power, the deep bass rumble, the dangerous machinery, the oil? Maybe trains remind us of God?

Click on the thumbnail to get a bigger version.

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[tags]BlogRodent, kids, photography, trains, thomas-the-train, children, AJ[/tags]

My incomparable daughter, Elisabeth, taken about two months ago. She was about a year and three months old when this picture was taken by my wife.

Sadly, it's my wife's camera, and so I don't usually have it to take many pictures. Hopefully, that'll change, and I'll be able to post some new pix of my own here. Or I can convince Jen to use this site to upload frequent images of the kids here. That'd be fun!

I do love my kids.

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[tags]BlogRodent, kids, photography, funny-face, Elisabeth[/tags]