No, I'm referring to the seven-year-old, the one with autism. Mom decided to get him a car of his own. And I'm not talking Hot Wheels. This is a swank, battery-powered red Jeep. He's almost outgrown it, but he loves it.
He goes out with it almost every day and rides around the front lawn, pushing the pedal down to make it go and grinning like a geek at his first Star Trek convention. And today, he finally mastered the art of using the steering wheel. So, now he can control where he's going. Instead of accidentally driving the jeep into the hole where the tree stump used to be, now he can do it deliberately. This is an important milestone in a boy's growth, when he learns how to direct his destructive tendencies instead of just lashing out at everything. I'm so proud of him.
In other news, as far as we're concerned, the COVID lockdown has ended. Our middle son has spent the last couple of days playing with a friend, who is visiting his grandmother across the street. Screw social distancing; they're kids, let them play. It's not like they're setting cars on fire. They're just playing basketball, air hockey, and street hockey in the driveway, just because they can. They're kids; let them be kids.
Of course, just because we've ended the lockdown doesn't mean the rest of the community has. The dog park is open, which is great for the dogs, but the kid parks aren't. Well, they technically are, but only to walk around; you still can't go on the play equipment. No swings, slides, monkey bars, none of it. But you can look at the pretty colors. Take a kid to a park they can't play in? Anyone with a kid under the age of eight knows that's a recipe for a complete meltdown. The rage, the frustration, and the tears...not to mention what the kid is going to do, too.
Baby steps, I suppose. I suspect it won't be much longer before parents all over the place just say 'Enough of this.' They'll take their kids to the park, and they'll put the strollers right next to the sign that says 'stay off the play equipment' while their kids are laughing and having a grand time sliding and swinging. Because kids are kids, and they're only going to be kids for a short time. Why deprive them of that time because of fear? Why teach them to be afraid of the world instead of embracing it?
Anyway, now that the youngest has got the hang of driving, we're going to start him on reading soon. He's ready for it; he knows his alphabet and his numbers, so it's just a matter of getting him started. One of the things that is really exciting his mother and I is that he asks me to read him stories at bedtime now. So, we're reading Peter Rabbit and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, not to mention Aesop's Fables, because it's never too early to teach them morals. He doesn't always pay attention, because autism, but he's getting better. It's going to be a wild ride once we finally get him going on this, but it's going to be totally worth it.
Eventually, I'll even get him to read my own stories, like the ones you can read right now in A Universe of Possibilities, my short-story cross-genre anthology. Go ahead, check it out on Amazon; you'll find something in there that you like.
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