Triumphs and Tragedies
I must report how proud I was of Cricket over Christmas break. He was calm, cheerful helpful, and in control almost the whole time. There were a few moments of angst due to the suspense leading up to Christmas morning, but for the most part he was wonderful! One of our relatives sent us a nifty new game called Cathedral. Cricket and I played it together a number of times. The first ten times or so I won and Cricket, who historically has struggled with maintaining control when he is not the winner, just smiled and said, “Good game, Mom. Can we play again?” After this had happened several times I complimented him and told him I was very impressed with his attitude. He said he’d discovered that sometimes it’s nice to have a real challenge instead of things just being easy all the time. And he surely was excited when he finally won a couple of games (with a little coaching at first, but now he’s gotten pretty good at it!).
Sadly, the resumption of school has been a bit rocky. I think he was awake quite late the night before we started up again doing some stealth reading of White Fang. As a result, he was really cranky and had an honest-to-goodness melt-down for the first time in a long while. As melt-downs go, however, it was really not too bad. A bit of yelling, a few entirely unreasonable accusations, a rather vehement demand that we get rid of his little sister (to which she responded, “Oh Cricket, you’re so funny when you’re mad!” in an affectionate tone of voice), and a retreat to his room “forever”, which lasted only about 15 minutes. When he came back down he apologized all around and we got to work. There were a few other touch-and-go moments too. I’ll be glad when we can all see school as “the routine” again. I’m sure it didn’t help that his mother has a cold, which she caught from his sister, who stayed home from school (”It’s not FAIR!!!”) to cough on us, and who wanted to ”help” Cricket with his work.