Fox update
Jun. 29th, 2020 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksFox is three and eight months.
Appearance-wise, things remain about the same as ever: a whirlwind cloud of blond hair with occasional hazel eyes peering through it. He continually surprises me by looking exactly as Ruth's cousin Sophie did when I first met her; she was six or so then. This surprises me because Fox has always borne a very strong family resemblance to Ruth (they can be picked out of a crowd as parent and child easily), and I have never seen much resemblance between Ruth and Sophie at all, but here we are.
Stuff he can do: He's gotten very good on his balance bike (a bike without pedals, which you push with your feet and then pull your feet up, and the eventual transition to a real bike is supposed to be easier than it would be with training wheels). He and the one babysitter we still have during the pandemic have biked, no exaggeration, five miles round-trip. They also skateboard, though I don't really know how that's going. He's physically pretty fearless and I do have to spend a fair amount of time explaining what I think might hurt him and why.
Fox can easily do twenty-five-piece jigsaw puzzles now, both on the computer and in hardcopy, and has done fifty-piece on the computer. He spends some time using the Duolingo learn-to-read-English app, and we all go over numbers and alphabet with him. He no longer gets tangled up in numbers until well after twenty, and can recite the alphabet with about ninety percent accuracy. I saw him acquire the first piece of info I know he's gotten through reading, in that he looked at the weather app on Ruth's phone and said "Eight, one. It's eighty-one out." Sadly, he was correct. He has not to my knowledge as of yet read anything successfully using letters.
His grasp of narrative has leveled up in a way that makes it much easier to play with him-- for a while there his sense of story and character was choppy and discontinuous and repetitive, which I know to be a necessary stage of development but found very hard to follow. I never knew quite what would work to say when I joined in his story games. Now he can manage an entire plot with continuous characters, if it's fairly short. I should try reading him a short chapter book soon and see how well he can handle a single non-visual narrative dispersed over multiple sessions. I know he can handle visual narrative that way, as he has watched multi-part episodes of things. Right now he is heavily into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which is a real relief to watch after so many of the other kids' shows. I mean, many of them are perfectly fine, but we watched MLP of our own volition for years, and there's a real difference. His favorite pony is Fluttershy, which interests me because there is not much shy about Fox at all, ever.
Fox's best friends around the house include a pair of tongs named Pelican Gulper, not because it is a pelican but because it eats fish-eating birds, a purple stuffed bunny named Bunny, a non-binary doll who came in a bunny suit called Mx. Bunny (no relation), an anxious-looking stuffed cat called Kitten, and Mrs. Koala, who is a puppet. Ruth established the characters of the plushies and Fox has gone with it, though there was no adult influence over Pelican Gulper. Bunny is very happy and perky, Mx. Bunny is sensible and down-to-earth, Kitten is game but a little worried and shy, and Mrs. Koala will always be my favorite because she is perpetually sweetly stoned. (Like, have you ever really looked at your eucalyptus leaves, man?)
We went through a brief but subjectively endless phase in which Fox was hitting and kicking everyone else in the house whenever annoyed, but he seems to be coming out of that; he recognizes that it is unacceptable and mostly stops himself from doing it. And none too soon, because his babysitter teaches mixed martial arts and taught Fox some time ago how to hold his hand correctly for a punch so as not to hurt himself-- which is great, but means that when Fox hits, it actually hurts the person on the other end. Fox and the sitter spar and wrestle a fair bit, which I hope is helping him learn polite rules about consensual hitting. Fox also went through a period of Only Mama, No One Else May Speak To Me Or Exist In My Presence, which I am told is also typical and which he is also thankfully coming out of.
Fox's sense of humor continues to delight me. Several weeks ago, for example, I told him he could jump off a chair onto a pillow one more time and then it would be time for dinner. He was upset. "Show me a really good jump," I said encouragingly. "No," he said grouchily, "I will not." He climbed up on the chair as if to jump off, and then said "I will show you a really bad jump," turned around, and climbed veeeeery sloooooowly back down. I applauded his truth in advertising, and then we both cracked up.
The other day he said he saw a flying dinosaur out the window, and gave several details about its color, wings, shape, etcetera. "Wow," I said, "Do you think it's a Foxodactyl?" "No," he said without missing a beat, "it looked more like a Dadasaurus."
Since he's been going to protests since he was strapped to my front at the Womens' March in 2016, we've been explaining to him on a hopefully age-appropriate level about the current protests and that we support the Black Lives Matter movement and are strongly against white supremacy and racism. This led to a fascinating incident in which for some reason the U.S. Civil War came up, and Ruth explained that it happened, and which sides were which, and that although people said it was about a whole bunch of things, the major one was slavery and racism. And then Fox flat-out refused to believe that the North won, because if the North won, why do we still have to do all these protests? Which is honestly extremely sensible. Ever since, I have been trying to get across the concept of 'won the military bit but fucked up on a massive level afterwards', and I think he understands now that winning the army part of a war does not mean everything gets fixed, which will be a useful lesson in later life. He feels (correctly) that we should therefore protest even harder, which makes it genuinely distressing to me that for multiple reasons I consider it too dangerous to take him, specifically, out protesting at this time.
It looks as though he will be going back to school in the fall, if the pandemic doesn't worsen, and in our area there's a chance that it may not. His school plans for ten pupils, teachers in masks, no parents/relatives in the actual school building ever (pickup and drop-off outside in the yard), and Clean All The Things All The Time, which, given how irritable and aggravated lack of socialization with other children and lack of change in his physical environment make Fox, is a level of risk we can live with, if things are at their current place or better. Zoom is just not that helpful for socializing with other kids at his age. It works okay for his close adults, especially if they're doing an activity in parallel on both ends of the call, but with other kids both sides wind up wandering off too much for it to be useful. Fox has had a few bike-riding mask-wearing not-within-six-feet-of-each-other playdates, but that only helps a little. I am sure we will cope if we need to keep going as we are now, but I hope for his sake that that isn't the case.
Appearance-wise, things remain about the same as ever: a whirlwind cloud of blond hair with occasional hazel eyes peering through it. He continually surprises me by looking exactly as Ruth's cousin Sophie did when I first met her; she was six or so then. This surprises me because Fox has always borne a very strong family resemblance to Ruth (they can be picked out of a crowd as parent and child easily), and I have never seen much resemblance between Ruth and Sophie at all, but here we are.
Stuff he can do: He's gotten very good on his balance bike (a bike without pedals, which you push with your feet and then pull your feet up, and the eventual transition to a real bike is supposed to be easier than it would be with training wheels). He and the one babysitter we still have during the pandemic have biked, no exaggeration, five miles round-trip. They also skateboard, though I don't really know how that's going. He's physically pretty fearless and I do have to spend a fair amount of time explaining what I think might hurt him and why.
Fox can easily do twenty-five-piece jigsaw puzzles now, both on the computer and in hardcopy, and has done fifty-piece on the computer. He spends some time using the Duolingo learn-to-read-English app, and we all go over numbers and alphabet with him. He no longer gets tangled up in numbers until well after twenty, and can recite the alphabet with about ninety percent accuracy. I saw him acquire the first piece of info I know he's gotten through reading, in that he looked at the weather app on Ruth's phone and said "Eight, one. It's eighty-one out." Sadly, he was correct. He has not to my knowledge as of yet read anything successfully using letters.
His grasp of narrative has leveled up in a way that makes it much easier to play with him-- for a while there his sense of story and character was choppy and discontinuous and repetitive, which I know to be a necessary stage of development but found very hard to follow. I never knew quite what would work to say when I joined in his story games. Now he can manage an entire plot with continuous characters, if it's fairly short. I should try reading him a short chapter book soon and see how well he can handle a single non-visual narrative dispersed over multiple sessions. I know he can handle visual narrative that way, as he has watched multi-part episodes of things. Right now he is heavily into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which is a real relief to watch after so many of the other kids' shows. I mean, many of them are perfectly fine, but we watched MLP of our own volition for years, and there's a real difference. His favorite pony is Fluttershy, which interests me because there is not much shy about Fox at all, ever.
Fox's best friends around the house include a pair of tongs named Pelican Gulper, not because it is a pelican but because it eats fish-eating birds, a purple stuffed bunny named Bunny, a non-binary doll who came in a bunny suit called Mx. Bunny (no relation), an anxious-looking stuffed cat called Kitten, and Mrs. Koala, who is a puppet. Ruth established the characters of the plushies and Fox has gone with it, though there was no adult influence over Pelican Gulper. Bunny is very happy and perky, Mx. Bunny is sensible and down-to-earth, Kitten is game but a little worried and shy, and Mrs. Koala will always be my favorite because she is perpetually sweetly stoned. (Like, have you ever really looked at your eucalyptus leaves, man?)
We went through a brief but subjectively endless phase in which Fox was hitting and kicking everyone else in the house whenever annoyed, but he seems to be coming out of that; he recognizes that it is unacceptable and mostly stops himself from doing it. And none too soon, because his babysitter teaches mixed martial arts and taught Fox some time ago how to hold his hand correctly for a punch so as not to hurt himself-- which is great, but means that when Fox hits, it actually hurts the person on the other end. Fox and the sitter spar and wrestle a fair bit, which I hope is helping him learn polite rules about consensual hitting. Fox also went through a period of Only Mama, No One Else May Speak To Me Or Exist In My Presence, which I am told is also typical and which he is also thankfully coming out of.
Fox's sense of humor continues to delight me. Several weeks ago, for example, I told him he could jump off a chair onto a pillow one more time and then it would be time for dinner. He was upset. "Show me a really good jump," I said encouragingly. "No," he said grouchily, "I will not." He climbed up on the chair as if to jump off, and then said "I will show you a really bad jump," turned around, and climbed veeeeery sloooooowly back down. I applauded his truth in advertising, and then we both cracked up.
The other day he said he saw a flying dinosaur out the window, and gave several details about its color, wings, shape, etcetera. "Wow," I said, "Do you think it's a Foxodactyl?" "No," he said without missing a beat, "it looked more like a Dadasaurus."
Since he's been going to protests since he was strapped to my front at the Womens' March in 2016, we've been explaining to him on a hopefully age-appropriate level about the current protests and that we support the Black Lives Matter movement and are strongly against white supremacy and racism. This led to a fascinating incident in which for some reason the U.S. Civil War came up, and Ruth explained that it happened, and which sides were which, and that although people said it was about a whole bunch of things, the major one was slavery and racism. And then Fox flat-out refused to believe that the North won, because if the North won, why do we still have to do all these protests? Which is honestly extremely sensible. Ever since, I have been trying to get across the concept of 'won the military bit but fucked up on a massive level afterwards', and I think he understands now that winning the army part of a war does not mean everything gets fixed, which will be a useful lesson in later life. He feels (correctly) that we should therefore protest even harder, which makes it genuinely distressing to me that for multiple reasons I consider it too dangerous to take him, specifically, out protesting at this time.
It looks as though he will be going back to school in the fall, if the pandemic doesn't worsen, and in our area there's a chance that it may not. His school plans for ten pupils, teachers in masks, no parents/relatives in the actual school building ever (pickup and drop-off outside in the yard), and Clean All The Things All The Time, which, given how irritable and aggravated lack of socialization with other children and lack of change in his physical environment make Fox, is a level of risk we can live with, if things are at their current place or better. Zoom is just not that helpful for socializing with other kids at his age. It works okay for his close adults, especially if they're doing an activity in parallel on both ends of the call, but with other kids both sides wind up wandering off too much for it to be useful. Fox has had a few bike-riding mask-wearing not-within-six-feet-of-each-other playdates, but that only helps a little. I am sure we will cope if we need to keep going as we are now, but I hope for his sake that that isn't the case.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 03:15 am (UTC)That is really good.
Love.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-30 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-02 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-02 03:25 am (UTC)On seeing magnificent footage of lava pouring into the ocean, which quenched it, he said, "Water is invincible!"
Nine