Lil Joe was my do-over baby, but maybe I was closer to having it right the first two times. Joe was the child for whom I could go back and do things the way they 'should have been' (like nursing, or keeping the baby in our room for the first few months) with the knowlege that I wasn't a failure if I fell back on the way I'd done things in the past. His self-contained nature was a blessing when he was a toddler, since the knowledge that he could so effectively occupy himself while I tended to his sister's school work or fixed dinner or whatever, made life easier.
But now I am seeing that maybe I should have provided more interaction with children his own age earlier, maybe it would have been more apparent that he was building his own little world that he sometimes allows the rest of us to inhabit. He always had a stubborn streak, and the quirks seemed harmless at first. If he had a specific routine for the order of clothing when getting dressed or undressed, it was no big deal. The transition to preschool seemed to work nicely, especially in light of the structure involved with that big schedule on the wall, and the way everything was labeled so nicely for reference. Who doesn't like starting the day with a song to greet everyone, followed by a predictable review of what activities are coming up?
But sometimes the routines, the 'way it should be' changes. And, since we don't live in Lil Joe's head, we don't always know what 'the right way' is. Today he wants his jacket zipped as soon as he puts in on. Yesterday, he wanted to be part of the assembly line of zipping before the class went onto the playground. That's easy to compensate for. Tearing open the granola bar wrapper too far, thus making it not how 'is supposed-a be!' is not as easy to fix. And he won't let me have a do-over, I can eat the offending bar and open a new one just-so.
That incredible memory, the one that could belt out song lyrics to music he only heard one or two times in the car, was very cute. But the insistence that the songs on every CD be played in a specific order could get tiresome. But some of that incredible memory is now manifesting iteself in Ray Babbitt-like conversations. The countdown to bedtime is a prime example, complete with the knowledge that the digital clock on the cable box is supposed to be one minute ahead of the one in the bedroom, and two ahead of the clock on the stove (I tried to synchronize the clocks when we 'sprang forward' this weekend- Joe was not amused).
The counselor at the school called yesterday, asking if Hubby and I could extend our scheduled conference this week slightly, once we've finished discussing Hoss' recent ADHD diagnosis, so that the kindergarten teachers could approach some 'oberservations' they had during admission testing last month. And suddenly we are voicing terms like "autism spectrum" and "compulsive behavior" instead of leaving them festering silently in the back of our minds.
And I am, once again, wondering what I was supposed to have done differently to provide a smooth, uneventful, sane life to my child.
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