Thinking back, it seems like every fall I decide to stop doing extra writing for awhile. Instead of making proclamations each year I should just remember that fall/early winter is really busy (homeschool activities start up, high holidays, then the other holidays, then birthdays for me and Noah). Sometime after all of that is over, I usually make another proclamation about how now I’m going to get serious about my career. So besides remembering that fall is busy, I should also remember that late winter/early spring gets me inspired.

A couple people asked me why Noah says the park is taunting him and it’s because he can’t use it during school hours (it’s the school yard). Yesterday he went over there after dinner and had a run-in (minor) with another kid — an older kid. She rode her skateboard in front of his scooter and said, “Hey, you trying to run me over?” And then laughed. It ruined Noah’s whole night and he came home crying.

“She wouldn’t even listen to me!” he said. “I wasn’t trying to run anyone over!”

It took about an hour to get the story out of him. It started as, “These teenagers were making fun of me!” “I was terrified!” “I’m never going there again!” to the rather small event I have relayed here. I told him that this girl (who started out as a vicious, marauding teenager with a mohawk but it sounds like she was someone just a bit older than himself although impressively skateboard proficient) was teasing him the way he teases Madison, not in a mean way but in a playing-your-own-game way. Like when he rushes by Madison pretending he’s a super hero and for five seconds she’s part of the game as some obstacle or other.

I also told him that getting teased happens to everyone and that this is why Spiderman is such a popular superhero. You know, Peter Parker. We can all identify with Peter Parker.

After he was calmed down, pajama-ed and tucked in bed with a book, Brett and I talked about it. Always one to overreact, I started worrying that we were raising an emotional and social cripple and thinking that we moved here so late — perhaps too late — and that he would be stunted forever. And is it a mistake to homeschool him or does he need more practice dealing with sarcastic skateboarders? But Brett said he was exactly like that as an 8-year old despite living in a densely kid-populated neighborhood and going to school.

(It helps having a sort of control Noah in the boy that Brett once was.)

Noah is normally pretty good in social situations but he is very intense about getting things right and not being a bother thus his horror at being unjustly accused of trying to run people down. And while I was saying, “Is it homeschooling??? Should we have sent him so he would know how to do this???” Brett was saying, “I went to school and it just made me so tense that I cried every single night and had migraines at 8-years old because not only were things like this happening but there was also the teacher, the lessons and the rules.” Brett’s feeling, basically, is that Noah would be like this regardless and that homeschooling is more humane.

I hope he’s right. It’s so easy to think, “I’ve created this!” When Noah was little and very very clingy, people would say that perhaps maybe I was creating a clingy child by being there for him all of the time. Now logically that didn’t make sense to me. Here was my baby who seemed to panic if I went too far away so I should go far away a lot and wear him down? No, I figured that he needed me to stick around so he could see I was a person he could count on and let him make the first move away.

With the homeschool thing it’s harder. We chose to homeschool for a lot of reasons but the most obvious reason is that we felt that it was a better fit with Noah’s personality and would give him a greater shot at confidence and self-sufficiency. That may seem counter-intuitive, I know. But sarcastic skateboarders or not, Noah is generally a very happy, self-confident little boy. I don’t know — can’t know — if this would be true if he were at school. I believe that the daily demands would be an awful lot for him though. As much as I worry about his social skills when it comes to more “rough” kids, I do think (hope) we made the right decision.

I have a friend whose son has a similar emotional make-up to Noah and he’s in his first year of school and really hating it — crying every night and begging not to go every morning. He’s very very worried about breaking any rules and of course the ironic thing is that children who are like him and like Noah and like the Brett boy-child generally don’t break rules, not even by accident. They are so careful and quiet that they are more apt to drop under the radar completely. Once stern look from a teacher and they are basketcases.

Still, this new social neighborhood is going to be a challenge for me, too.

By the way, Madison’s current favorite books are Big Red Barn and Freight Train, both of which I am getting very tired of reading.

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