Jacob

In all the educational parenting materials, one topic is glaringly missing - no one warns you about how often your child will get sick. I was complaining about this to a coworker and they just laughed at me. "My son had six surgeries on his ear in 10 months!" Okay, so Jacob hasn't been as sick as that. But, still! Every time Jacob gets sick (I mean barf sick, not runny nose sick) I feel shocked. Not sure why it's such a surprise since I tend to be sick a lot, but somehow I expect him to be healthy all the time.

Last week he put his tooth through his lip. This week he had a temp of 101.6 and threw up twice.

How exciting!

This morning started out like most Monday mornings. I got Jacob ready while John got himself ready, and they headed out the door on time. Then I got myself ready, worried about what I should wear, realized I forgot to do something that would "just take a minute", and put my coat on about 20 minutes later than I should have. Then the cell phone rings.

I call people all the time on my cell, but I rarely receive calls. Especially before 8:30 on a Monday morning.

"Is this Jacob's mom? Um, this is daycare. He fell and I thought you should know about it." My first thought was to wonder why they were calling me. Jacob falls all the time. He's a toddler, after all. Usually they just fill out an incident report and tell us about it when he gets picked up.

"When he fell, his face hit a chair and his tooth went through his lip. I don't think he needs stitches, but he might. There's just a hole in his lip right now." Ah. Good that they called. How is Jacob faring?

"His lip looks pretty bad, but he's eating breakfast without any problem right now." That's our boy! Jacob certainly isn't one to let a little hole in his face interfere with food!

So, instead of heading for work, I left for daycare. Jacob got a full 20 minutes with the pediatrician. We decided against stitches because it was a "clean" puncture, there appeared to be no nerve or muscle damage, and trying to hold Jacob still enough to get stitches made all our heads spin. It was bad enough restraining Jacob so that the doctor could look inside his mouth.

Turns out that Jacob also has puss in both of his ears. Nice. I was pleased that Jacob finally wheezed in the doctor's presence; the type of wheezing that you can feel if you put your hand on his back. Usually I just have to describe the symptoms after the fact.

We left with scripts for augmentin and albuterol, smarties, and a sticker. Jacob happily went back to daycare and I finally headed for work.

Only three hours late!

"Jacob, Stop! We do not bang cars into the wall. That hurts the wall."

Jacob stops banging the car into the wall. He walks away from the wall and ...

"Jacob, Stop! We do not bang cars into the fridge. That hurts the refrigerator."

Jacob considers a full-blown temper tantrum, makes a few weak cries, then is happily redirected to some blocks. Mom takes a deep breath and enjoys a sarcastic laugh because Jacob did follow directions, just not in the way that Mom intended for them to be followed.

My major was in Child Development and Family Studies. I took so many Development classes: Child Development, Adolescent Development, Adult Development, Life Span Development, etc, etc. (I didn't take Infant Development which was fine with me until I had my own infant!)

There are so many ways that we develop: emotional, social, spiritual, physical, linguistic. And we often break physical development down into things like large/gross motor skills and small motor skills. Then there are tasks like eye-hand coordination that take skills from several areas. So, as in the rest of life, understanding development can be a very complex task.

It is so easy to encourage physical development and language skills. Just go to a toy store and you can find quickly find all kinds of educational toys. It's also easy to conceptualize how to develop these skills. Want your child's language skills to develop? Expose them to language! How? Talking, reading, singing. Most people can grasp the connection without any explanation.

Encouraging emotional, social, and spiritual development is much more difficult to conceptualize, let alone actually figuring out how to do it. Do you know anyone who feels that their spiritual development is complete? Probably not. How do you encourage your child's development in an area where your skills aren't even fully developed?

When Jacob was born, I knew he had a high potential for academic success. Over and over again Jacob has confirmed this high potential. He's a bright and alert kid, so it doesn't take a lot of effort to teach him new skills. And, it's easy to find educational toys that basically allow him to teach himself some skills.

While academic success is great and exciting, I wondered if Jacob's brain also have the capacity for appropriate social-emotional development (unlike an autism spectrum kid). It has been somewhat of a relief that Jacob is able to develop social and emotional skills. I have spent a lot of time trying to teach these skills to Jacob. I'm not always sure how to provide a social skills education. It's more difficult because you can't just walk into a toy isle and find a resource. We talk about and practice manners, sharing, feelings, self-awareness, self-esteem, and how to care for/about others. Of course, these skills are rather limited in a preschooler!

If you are unable to achieve academic success, you can still have success in life. If you are unable to achieve success in life, then it really doesn't matter if you're the Valedictorian or National Merit Scholar. . (To put that another way: The Unibomber was smart, but we don't remember him for his academic skills.) Every time Jacob is praised for being smart, I cringe. Being smart isn't something he has any control over and praise for something so general as "smart" just isn't useful. I challenge people to praise him for his tenacity, his love of details, his demonstration of cause and affect, his showing others that he cares about them.

Yesterday Jacob played with PlayDoh for the first time. At first he completely ignored the PlayDoh. Instead he focused on taking the lid on and off the container. Eventually he moved on to the PlayDoh. He pinched off small bits and placed them into the container, one at a time. This is a perfect example of Jacob's personality. He is very much concerned about having things the way they're supposed to be (lids should be on containers).

I have a vision of a future phone call going like this:
Teacher: "I'd like to talk to you about Jacob's performance on the math test today."
Me, envisioning all As and entrance into the gifted program: "Yes?"
Teacher: "He didn't even start the test because he was too concerned about the confetti on the floor from yesterday's class party. He spent the whole test time cleaning up the floor. He said it was more important to be happy in life than to have academic success."
Me: "Oh."

This whole post was inspired by an excellent and interesting story I heard on NPR about how Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills. This story should be required listening for anyone who has interactions with children! Please listen to it now! They talk about how play has evolved over the past 60 years, and how that change has impacted children's emotional development. I especially like the story link because it has a sidebar with examples of "better" ways for children to play. Examples are always good.