If only there was a Gol Market in Toronto

I have been wanting to write a meaningful post explaining some parenting related subject, but I am consumed by the mundane.

Driving K around from one thing to the next is eating up our gas budget and I have had to hang out at the local library, when I take him to clinic a few mornings a week, to save on trips back and forth. Lots of time to think, head full of ideas. I pick him up, we go out and do something crazy, like picnic out in -8C and before I know it, I am exhausted, there are piles of dishes to be washed, meals to be cooked, groceries to be done and really whatever I meant to write about gets replaced with a to-do list.

When I am home all I can think about is, when will K's therapies throw us in the red? When will he start preschool? How will I school him, how does home schooling work? What will he do when he is a teenager or older, when playgrounds, swimming and toys are no longer engaging will he just wander round the house aimlessly? When am I going to have another child? If I do, then how will I manage with all the stuff K and I do together? I won't be able to take him swimming or climb hills. Crying baby will get in the way of our "activities". I want a preschool aged child, I don't want to have anything to do with a baby. These and many other soul wrenching questions crowd out any original thought I may have had during the day.

In the end I just cannot bring myself to write about what I do with K and how it works for him, because when I sit down to type, the constant undercurrent of worry becomes a swelling wave of hopelessness screaming "What is the point?"

So I choose to just DO. I will wake up, I will do. Then I will come home and do some more because when I am doing, I can ignore the undercurrent of worry. I will close my eyes and just keep doing because if I open them, if I try to explain processes, my mind's eye will see more than I want it to and I start to drown.

Although most of us think about our futures, if you look at your daily activities over the years you will realize that most of your life has been spent solving the problems of the moment you were in. So that is exactly what I will do.

The problem of Wednesday afternoon was that we were too late for swimming, staying in seemed too boring and repetitive, there was no food in the house and I was famished. So the natural solution was to grab some McDonalds, go outside and walk away the afternoon. The fact that it was butt freezing cold was a possible barrier, but as long as its not painful and we are not walking in to our death, it is usually OK.

There is a small patch of wooded area near the ski chalet in Centennial Park (very small patch, but for a 4 year old it may as well be a jungle). I discovered it a few weeks ago while running. So here we are navigating the sticks and fallen branches of our little patch.



K was clearly facing a challenge slightly above his competence (evident by the frequent falling). This is how you eat take out in bone chilling winds. You shelter under some pines.



This is how you hold your juice box when your hands are so cold you can just make fists.



Activities like picnics and walking and falling on tree branches may not at first appear to have any significance to planning for the future. How many times will K have to navigate difficult terrain? We live in one of the biggest cities of the world.

NT children seek and shape the assistance of those around them to solve problems constantly. I baby sit these two kids and they drive me crazy. Constantly drawing me in to their activities, and as an adult naturally I eventually bring some element of challenge that is slightly above their level of competence. I am more skilled and verbally more competent than the average 7 year old at least! They seek learning, they make me their guide whether it is in pretend play when barbie is sick and can't leave her tent, or in a "Easter egg hunt" in the basement. Learning happens and we don't even realize it.

It is the activities that we participate in with children, that are not instruction based (schooling today is instruction based for example), that primarily shape development.

I remember many such activities from my childhood. Navigating a Karachi meat market (Gol Market) with my uncle. I remember the smell of the meat, heads of animals with tongues hanging out, waiting in line, people arguing, I was an observer. I remember his sense of humor.

I remember grocery shopping with my grandmother, walking a long distance, across the main road to get to the market. Haggling with fruit sellers, rotten vegetables lying on the ground would get stuck to my flip flops. I remember the heat, I remember my grandmother's smell (she was a big fan of talcum powder) and the cold perspiration on her unusually pale skin (we are all a lot darker than her).

I remember my aunt's wedding, political unrest during the time, ladies cooking in a small kitchen for hundreds. In later years, I remember making tea for a lot of guests during my uncle's wedding, in a giant cooking pot. I have been told in stories that my grandfather used to walk me as a child to see some neighbour's chickens. I don't know how these social interactions shaped my development, but I know they somehow taught me how to think about things.

Sure school taught me how to read and write and do math, but my social and cultural experiences constructed my higher psychological thinking processes and no one was actually teaching when this was going on. It was inherent. I use these processes to navigate through my life without thinking about it.

Pediatricians like to use these milestones, which usually serve to make us even more outcome oriented than we already are with children. By age 18 months this many words and so on. People have dedicated years of research trying to quantify cognitive development as if it was a separate thing from your social, cultural environment and interactions. As if it was a unidirectional process that the individual did on their own.

My development has taken many routes, and the process requires external action by other people. Your community, your guides. These guides will pass on tools through co-operative work and social interaction; tools that are defined by your local culture, religion and history, and you will use these tools in your activities throughout your life. As you do this, you will create new tools and in effect change your culture or the way you do the same or similar things with every generation.

All this is very articulately described in Barbara Rogoff's book (Apprenticeship in Thinking). Get it, read it.

So in light of all this, I will choose to walk over sticks and branches with my son on cold January days and try to give him as many tools as I can to solve problems, because I really don't know what problems we will be solving 1, 2, or 10 years from now and how the problems of today will help shape his thinking for tomorrow. Now if only we would get some snow already.

Running in Goose Poop

No it is not a euphemism for some life lesson I may have learned. I mean it quite literally. Running in goose poop, while chasing geese is exactly how K and I spent our afternoon this mild gorgeous Friday.

I have been meaning to tape or photograph our out door trips more, but usually we forget the camera or can't be bothered to video tape.

We took off to beautiful Centennial Park with a small picnic. I love picnics. They offer a great opportunity to enjoy something routine like eating food, and of course drinking tea, outdoors in quietude. K and I have been picnicking out doors since he was just 7 months old. From the playground near Cooksville creek in Mississauga, to gorgeous Nonsuch park in Sutton and the Epsom Downs in Surrey, since this summer, we have taken our outdoor excursions to nearby Centennial park.



Where Mississauga was artificial and urban, Nonsuch park was mostly flat, muddy and luscious, Centennial park is sort of a mixture. It has a varying terrain of hills and big football fields, there is a green house, ravine, ponds of various sizes, a ski hill, tobogganing hill, playgrounds, picnic areas, go karts, giant tree branches to swing from. Really the possibilities are endless.

The greenhouse is gorgeous and there is an enclosed area with sweet smelling flowers, a crazy parrot that head bangs and screams when you stand in front of his cage (very popular with my kid) and lots of orange fish swimming in a little pond.

We spent a considerable amount of time collecting and throwing sticks in a creek. I got to practice some prosody and patterns. Its hard to film yourself with a tiny canon camera while moving around though, so I didn't get everything on tape. Just the beginning part. K got better and better at taking responsibility for collecting the sticks off the ground, instead of walking off with just one stick. In subsequent iterations he learned to pick up a bunch of them. After we had repeated this pattern a few times, when sticks ran ran out he got up to get more instead of sitting there not knowing what to do next.

Here is a video of us just starting the pattern.



There are lots of opportunities for creativity, patterns, shared enjoyment, declarative language and building competence in such activities. Whether its throwing sticks in water, using snow and puddles to get goose poop off your shoes, touching cactus or copying a screaming parrot, the point is to enjoy yourself and build a positive memory. An added bonus is that my son will collapse in to a deep sleep from exhaustion leaving me to enjoy blogging and obviously, more tea.

You can later go over the trips in pictures and video saved on the computer. I am considering making picture books when/if I ever get around to it. You don't have to speak, just sitting together visually reliving the experiences is something we both enjoy I think.

Oh and here is the goose chase!

My offering to the Gods of the tobogganing hill

Today K chose to be really whiny. More whiny than he has been in months. He cried for 2.5 hours in his morning therapy session. After that was over, I decided there was no point in staying home. Our colds had almost subsided, the sun was (sort of) shining, and the snow was calling us. I thought, if he is going to be like this all day, the least I can do is procure some satisfaction out of throwing him down a hill.

So out we went around noon, in -9C, windchill -19C, Wind gusts up to 25km/hr.

Here he is, freezing his eye balls.

One of the few (maybe 2?) smiles of today.

He is not happy because the slide wasn't fast enough.



Here are some videos of us. Nothing was tantrum free today, but: 1)We had a blast tobogganing, 2) I got a good workout (dragging the toboggan uphill with him in it), 3) The day ended with K walking to the toilet by himself and making a poo in the pottee.

Thank you Allah. We are not complaining.

Biscuits

We have a number of Pakistani families who live in my building. If someone has a baby, eid celebration, tea party or other excuse to get together, I am often extended an invitation.

I know at least a couple of them think Khaled’s disorder is one I have made up and he just needs some company and exposure. I don’t argue. Plus I have a peculiar affinity for tea and biscuits, and I derive a certain comfort in being the strange almost invisible woman stuffing her mouth with their culinary wares. Occasionally I will acknowledge my presence by some remark such as “Oh I am not even sure if I would send my kid to school, autistic or not”. To which I get looks of disdain (or is it pity?), followed by an awkward silence and then someone will graciously start a lecture on the dismal state of education in Pakistan, money, illness or religion, and I go back to my biscuits.

Besides most conversations revolve around sharing of trivial information that we could all easily do without. Such and such place sells the best Indian food. This exercise will help you lose your bingo wings and so on. Information is then repeated, like scripts, at almost every sitting, often by the same people. Scripts are safe and they provide some order in the chaos of social exchange I suppose. Their chatter has the calming effect of taking all the pressure of making conversation off me.

Most of the dialogue is not aimed at getting to know one and other, but rather telling others about yourself. We eat out this many times a week at these places, my grandmother made the best beef curry, in my family we do that this way, thank you I bought this dress at blah blah shop and so on. Questions addressed to others are merely tools to confirm a hypothesis about someone based on your assumptions about them. Any elaborations in your response that may contradict these assumptions are cheerfully ignored or argued. There is no real interest in what you think or feel about what is being said. “How old is your son?” 3. “Oh he still has so much time to learn to talk. My so and so’s son did not speak till he was 5. They say if you feed them water from a bird bath, they will start talking.” “No. You should get a speech therapist.”

Biscuits.

K is becoming comfortable in these settings too. The apartments are identical. The first few times he was rather shocked at being in a place that looked like home but was occupied with novel objects and people. He likes to wander around their rooms and most of them don’t mind. He will find a mirror, car, exercise machine, microwave or some object to occupy himself. I will sometimes feign concern, telling him to not touch this or that, but largely leave it to the occupants to protect their property. Not that I don’t care, I just know he does not damage things.
He is so different from the other children who seem to be permanently attached to their mothers’ knee/arm/face by some invisible cord. Sometimes he will notice a child, caress their hair, hug them, or cup their face in his hands and kiss them, then go back to his object of interest. Where other kids will stare at him with curiosity, if not try to initiate some interaction (even if it is grabbing a toy away from him), he will only sometimes give them a surreptitious sideways glance. Where other children will use their invisible cord to find their way back to their respective knee/arm/face when unsuccessful in their interaction, K will merely walk away, or for the loss of a really preferred item, whine.

It is as if K is sure that someone will know what he is thinking. I am stuck, obviously the other person knows this, and should come and help me. It does not occur to him, that we do not know what he is thinking and feeling and that we must be told. Other children are inherently aware of this and will always declare their feelings or predicament, if not in words, then just by tugging at their invisible cord.

I think besides the perk of tea and biscuits, I also like to observe my son in these different settings.

Once however, when I was comfortably drowning in the aroma of a freshly brewed cup of tea, assuming I had successfully blended myself in to the sofa, something shocking happened. I heard a question apparently directed at me from another lady I had failed to notice. “You don’t talk much?” Actually I cannot seem to shut up sometimes, but your question has shocked me in to a 10 second delay in responding. All I could muster however, was “I like listening.” Which is of course a lie. I just have nothing to say to this particular group of people. Haven’t you read my blog?
Needless to say, it was love at first sight.

I often visit my new friend, although we have nothing in common, she always seems to have questions for me that require me to think before giving an answer. They do not concern the cosmos, or philosophy, or psychology as such. Just simple things that I take for granted and never question until someone actually asks me about them. Things like, how far is England from here? Can you drive there? You know I never actually thought about it, but you probably could drive to a port, and then take a ship with your car on it, and then drive off when you get in to land? I must find out more about this. She accepts this answer. There are no biscuits but K has found a loaf of bread in her fridge and is eating it straight out of the bag.