State swim champions! Fish is second from left.
Me & EagleWe had the state swim meet yesterday. Our son, Fish, was 3rd in the 500 yd freestyle and 4th in the 200 yd freestyle. Pretty good for a sophmore. We are excited about his hard working paying off. He is a great kid and we are even more excited about that. Taz actually did pretty well. We all stopped at Olive Garden for dinner and ate with the team. I obviously need to use cloth napkins at home once in awhile. Taz immediately spread his out and used it for a place mat. Bear asked if we were going to take them home or leave them there. Which takes me to the whole playing dumb line of thought. There was a lot of nonstop nonsense chatter on Bear's part. Statements while we are at the restaurant like "We're in luck. The swim team is eating here too." "There's a TV camera". "Look the swim meet is on TV" (out in the hall). All things obviously we can all see and know. Do they do these things on purpose? I think sometimes their brains are so on overload and they are so caught up in the danger of every place that they actually miss a lot of what is going on around them. So they don't think these things through but just blurt it out as they notice it. I often say that Bear says out loud the things we think. If you think about driving down the road and the thoughts you have, his are all verbalized. "Look at that sign." "A green car" "25 degrees". I point out to them sometimes that this is what is happening. We all have those thoughts but we learn the self control not to say them all out loud. They need practice. They need understanding. We also have to be careful not to read manipulation and control into every action. Parenting a child with RAD is such hard work. But then you know that. Have a healing day!
4 comments:
Woo hoo! Nice job, Fish!
Congrats to Fish. I do that "let 'em know that you know" thing with all the crazy nonstop chatter. I announce "Chatter" as soon as I pick up on it.
My Daughter does the same thing. I always say to my hubby that she sometimes "acts stuiped" on purpose. Like where's my book?? and it's right in front of her. I agree on parenting RAD kids are hard. She reels me in some days.
"If you think about driving down the road and the thoughts you have, his are all verbalized. "Look at that sign." "A green car" "25 degrees"."
Well, this kind of statements would seem quite natural over here, in a german-speaking country (we like stating the obvious).
But perhaps there is more to it:
- Perhaps Bear is a rather verbal kind of person, i.e. his thinking functions in a verbal way, rather than pictural or other...
- Perhaps this is a way of starting a conversation, of interacting with people.
Actually, my father always talks like this. He also likes to interrupt other people's conversations rather than starting his own, so that all this is the most natural thing in the world to me.
I agree with you that it might be easier, socially speaking, when you learn to control these things. However, one should not view them too negatively, since it might just be a personality trait of your son, his way of starting a positive interaction...
That's just my two cents for an article you wrote a long, long time ago...
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