What is going on in your brain little man? You started the very first full day of school by missing your bus. Once you arrived, your folder with the dozen forms and signed papers as well as your lunch check was nowhere to be found. How did it disappear between the time I put it in your back pack Sunday night and Monday morning in the classroom? We’ve searched the house, yard and car and annoyed your teacher by suggesting that it is somewhere in the classroom. Hopefully you will bring home blank paperwork today so that I can do it all again. You missed three words on your spelling quiz even though you spelled them correctly over the weekend. Your teacher asked you to take the quiz home, so you crammed it in your desk. I only know this because your father found it when he was searching your desk for the missing lunch check and paperwork. He also found your math assignment that you decided not to do. I know you don’t like math, but you can’t draw cartoons whenever you don’t like the assignment. While I admit that I reacted poorly to the news of the lost paperwork, I don’t feel like you reacted at all. You get a glazed look in your eyes and mentally go somewhere else when we try talking to you. I know you’re ignoring us. Why? Is the whole school year going to be like this? Do you need ritalin? therapy? a year of homeschooling? I could really use a good crystal ball. There’s an old magic 8-ball in Sarah’s stuff. I wonder if she’d mind me borrowing it?
I watched Noah sit and totally focus on a book, at a table at Borders with babbling adults, a busy baby and an active toddler during a concert … and react appropriately when directly addressed by dad.
He don’t need Ritalin.
But, it does bear looking into. It could be “busy brain” syndrome … which I suffer from. People think I am a total ditz, but I am actually going 100 miles an hour in my head. I’ve a mind like a steel trap … all the little things filter right on through.
Or it could be something else. A good *non-school affiliated* Ed Psych could probably get a good handle on it.
But he is totally sweet, adorable, funny, loving and just a neat kid … a keeper for sure. 🙂
He’s a kid. He makes mistakes. He doesn’t know why and hasn’t developed the capacity for the snappy comeback or rationalization lie yet.
Think back. Can you think of something more stressful for a kid his age than “very first full day of school”?
It’ll happen again. But that doesn’t mean there is “something wrong.” He had a bad day. Bad days happen. We all have them.