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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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12:44 p.m. - 2003-07-27
I'm sleepy today. This is odd. I had the whole bed to myself last night and got a solid 7 hours' sleep. Mike and Alex went to Jersey to visit SIL overnight. Wolf and I stayed home. Wolf had a birthday party, and as gracious as my SIL is, I never sleep well at her place. It's Strange Bed Syndrome. I do okay in motels if I remember to bring my own pillow, but putting one of my nephews out of his bed and trying to get comfy in it is difficult. I'm too aware that the bed belongs to someone else and radical changes in the way it's made-up would be kind of mean. I HATE when my bed is all disarranged and believe most folks feel the same way. The birthday party was good. Another "family" birthday, this one for Laura's older son. The bash was held at a bowling alley I'd never been to before. I was a bit nervous about getting there. Farther a field than I’m used to driving, there’s always the worry I’ll have a spaz attack and be stranded. Got there just fine and on time, that in itself a minor miracle- I’m always late. Wolf had never been bowling before. The lanes are set up with bumpers in the gutters so the kiddies do well. No matter how crookedly the ball is rolled, it will carom off the bumpers and make it to the pins. The lanes were obviously the dedicated bumper bowling lanes. The usually smooth alleys were as dimpled as golf balls from the thudding release by little kids doing the between the legs underhand pitch. Whump! Thud! Slam! Clunk! The kids heave the balls toward the pins and stand there cheering as the ball wobbles its way down the lane. Wolf loved it! Imagine! A hugely noisy game where the object is to knock things over! Hog Heaven, Baby. I enjoyed watching my kid. Wolf is all about the action, scores are meaningless to him. He was just as happy knocking down one pin as he was when he bowled a strike. (Which he did a couple times.) It’s wonderful to me how free my son is. We put so much pressure on ourselves to ‘succeed’ all the time. Even a dumb game of bowling has an onus on it to do it well. And Wolf has yet to succumb to that pressure. He just DOES stuff, you know? I envy him that. He draws and plays music and sets up his train tracks with nary a care whether he gets it ‘right’. He’s not constantly trying to better himself or produce something ‘worthy’ of the time he’s spent on it. It’s truly a glorious way to go about things and one I hope he never loses. He’s free in another enviable way as well. We went back to Laura’s after the bowling and the kids charged off to play in the wading pool and use K’s new Slip-n-Slide. I hadn’t thought to bring Wolf’s bathing suit and he cheerfully shucked down to his skin. Wolf the Amazing Naked Boy romped and splashed and ran around in all his glory and didn’t care in the least. Shame and modesty haven’t entered his consciousness. Wolf lives in a pre-apple Eden. Naked is no biggie in Wolf’s world. HIS being naked doesn’t fosh me much either. He’s a little kid and I’ll impose no soul shuttering restrictions on him. Sure, there’s places where being nakie isn’t a good idea, but an afternoon swim in a private backyard among friends isn’t one of them. However, my own naked state would an entirely different gig and even if everyone else was naked too, I’d be miserable going around in only my birthday suit. Never mind that the others would have their own lumps and stretch marks, it’d be my own I’d be worried about. Again, that judging, the weighing of how well I stacked up against the others and my paranoia over my ‘flaws’ would about kill me. Wolf’s ease in his own skin is a marvel. You know, the schools and the docs and society at large are all bent about Wolf’s ‘problems’. He goes to Special Ed and rides the short bus and all that, but watching my happily unselfconscious boy yesterday, I really had to wonder who the truly handicapped people are. Makes you think, eh? Happy Sunday, ~LA
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