These days K is a happy boy, but he is a crazy boy. It is as if his mind is racing way way ahead of him and his body as usual cannot keep up. They are two entirely different entities that have yet to learn to coexist.
He is also full of words. Scripts from starfall, toy story, other movies and people. He can be heard singing "My head is on my body I can move it like this" at 2 am. He wants to come up and touch my face ALL the time and tell me "Look its a Jaan, I love the Jaan" (thats what he calls me).
He routinely squishes the baby, almost folding her in half, proclaiming, "I like this baby". He wants to pick her up, have her hang on the monkey bars, slide down slides and spin on swings.
Baby, as if picking up on this high energy around the house, is already crawling and cruising along furniture. She is going to turn 8 months old in a couple of weeks. She loves him, and wants to do whatever he is doing, but she is also afraid for her safety.
Of course the rest of the world does not understand the states of Kand the other day at the park, when he cupped a little boy's face lovingly in his hand, he got yelled at by the boy's mom. "DO NOT TOUCH HIM!". I wonder what K thinks when strangers talk to him that way. As they left the park, the boy's elder sister (around 6 yrs old) commented to her mom, "He touched me too". To which her mom said. "Yes he is just aggressive". That is social conditioning. The little girl was curious, and mom was well, like most people in these parts of the city.
As a result of this however, we got the park to ourselves with some other friendly and less spoilt Chinese kids.
For a brief few moments, I imagined running away to another place. Maybe a remote village on the coast of West Africa. Where I would live among "savages" who did not mind being stroked on the face with affection by random strangers because they had somehow managed to preserve their humanity. Away from these artificial lands where beneath the thin superficial covering of human skin, reside angry savages. As if reading my mind, dishevelled Chinese mom decided to break the play ground ice by asking that classic mom ice breaker question of all time, "How old is he?". These days the conversation usually leads to explanations of why baby Poi is so much lighter than her brother, and eventually special needs schooling and so on.
I guess we will go back to that park again while we are still living here. The beaches of West Africa will have to wait.
Productivity in terms of his programming or any teaching has been pretty much zilch. There is no instructional control. K is as high as a kite and its been a few weeks. He is not coming down. He is up most nights and all day in a perpetual state of stim. I wonder during these phases, what it is he is going through. Growth spurt? Perhaps its the change in baby's behavior that has him this excited.
To teach you need a student, but what we have right now is a tornado with legs. I have been looking in to curriculum's (like I do every 4 months or so) only to give up and just continue with taking walks, watching videos for joint attention and some emotion sharing language and basically just holding the fort. Sometimes it seems such a waste to just always spend all energy and time holding pieces of K together and getting through one week to the next, and not be teaching and creating like other homeschoolers. K is brilliant. But 90% of the time we are stuck, together, in this storm of behavior, dysregulation and stim, wondering if we will ever be able to teach him anything.
There are so many things I want to post about. Such as my experience with government funding, the sate of our RDI intervention, learning Arabic, the sky, the developmental milestones of baby Poi (not the ones that are on the pediatricians list, but the RDI ones that matter), homeschooling and so on. Eventually.
