Cat's Parenting Journal

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Forks, balls and my child's elephant memory

Apologies for the blogging gap. The last week started out a little crazy, with me having jury duty (with a frustrating end result of a hung jury) and then moving into family Thanksgiving festivities. By the weekend, G and Otter and I were tired and excited to have some quiet time.

At least, G and I were happy to have some quiet time. Otter spent much of Friday afternoon grabbing my hand and pulling me over to the gate out of the living room, and didn't fully relax until we gave in and went off to the bookstore to buy some Christmas presents for people. Otter definitely gets that from his maternal grandmother (as G and I are both homebodies); if he stays home more than five or six hours awake, he gets antsy to go go go somewhere.

Once we got to the bookstore, Otter was fascinated not by the books but by the horse and stable set he found on the shelf in the children's section. This was because the set included stable gear--one element of which was a small pitchfork about two inches long. Otter has been learning how to eat with a fork, and so he was mesmerized. No matter how many times I told him the package was sealed and must remain sealed, that there was no way to get to the fork he could see through the plastic window front of the box, Otter would pull it off the shlf, sit down next to it, and say and sign HELP, pointing to the fork.

I would sit with him and watch hm gaze longingly at the fork, then explain again, put it back on the shelf, and carry him to another part of the children's section and work to distract him with board books on trains, counting (he recognizes the number 9 and sometimes 7), the alphabet (he knows O, sometimes P, and sometimes C), and bedtime. As soon as we finished the book and he coudl squirm off my lap, off he'd go, making a beeline back to the table set (which, while he coudln't see it across the store, he never forget was there).

This is a typical Otter interaction, much like the obsession he developed on Thanksgiving day. He saw a blue glass paperweight on a high shelf--well over six feet up--and decided it was a ball and he MUST have it. No matter what else we gave him, no matter how many games of "trot trot" he played or how many times he "flew" on his grandmother's hands, he would return to the spot in front of the shelf, looking up and saying "ball!" He would not accept his own larger ball as a substitute, no no no. Finally his grandmother brought down the paperweight to show him and let him touch. He was briefly satisfied, but then wanted to kick it ("kick kick!"). When we took it back to put back on the shelf, he fussed again. Eventually his great-uncle took the paperweight back down and we let him kick it, hoping he would hurt neither it nor himself. This appeared a bit more satisfactory. Nonetheless, after we returned it to the shelf, periodically he would go over, look up, point, and say "ball!"

It's reassuring to know he's unlikely to be diagnosed with any attention deficits.


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