#expatkid

It’s been a hard eight or so days with Asher. I’m not sure if it’s the beginning of the dreaded “Fall regression” or just an off-week. We don’t know exactly what triggers these annual regressions, but because Asher is no longer in a traditional school setting, I was hoping we might skip it this year. And since we’re nearly at the end of November, things were looking good.

Asher’s regressions always look different, because he’s always at a different point in his life when they hit. But typically, they involve a return of less-than-desirable behavior we thought he’d outgrown, a lot of yelling and general disagreeableness, inflexibility, and him having an incredibly short fuse.

So, they pretty much suck. For all of us. Our home becomes a place of angry energy instead of peace, and Derin and I find ourselves scrambling to brainstorm new approaches and strategies to get things under control before things get really bad. We also find ourselves getting angry ourselves – it’s hard to be constantly yelled at and treated disrespectfully by someone you share a house with...someone you love so much. I breathe deeply and do what I can to stay calm, connect with Asher, show empathy for what he’s going through, and problem solve, but after a long, hard day, sometimes I want nothing more than to walk out the door and not come back for a week or so.

Starting last weekend, something about Asher’s energy was different. He began to escalate over little things. Tantrums resurfaced. And all of our “systems” (we have many systems and strategies in place to track and support his learning positive behavior and life skills) stopped working.

For me, Asher’s homeschool teacher, this has translated into a very difficult week.  He was fine doing the things he wanted to do – math, watching NOVA, working on the story he’s writing – but everything else was, in his mind, just me placing demands on him. Therefore, he pushed back, in every way he knew how, to try and control the situation and get what he wanted.

It’s been exhausting.

This past Friday was the worst day of the week. And then it became the best. And I’m not sure exactly how or why.  But here’s what our day looked like. I’m sure the answer is in here somewhere:

8:00am – Asher gets up, reads Pearls Before Swine on his Kindle, eats breakfast.

9:00am – Asher gets on Minecraft and continues working on the videos he’s creating for his YouTube channel.

9:40am – I give him a 15-minute warning (on a Post-It, in case he’s recording a video) that his time is almost up.

9:50am – I give him a “5-minute wrap up” warning (again, on a Post-It).

9:55am – I tell him it’s time to get off the computer and get dressed, brush teeth, and come downstairs to start school.

10:00am – I call upstairs and tell him it’s time for school.

10:05am – I go upstairs to see what’s going on and find Asher sitting on his bed reading his Kindle. I remind him of the deal, give him some positive reinforcement cues (earning points for sticking to the schedule), and go downstairs.

10:15am – I call up and then go upstairs to see what the holdup is to find Asher sitting on the floor, half-dressed, reading. I tell him he’s lost the points and he’s moving towards a consequence.

10:29am – Asher comes down for school (dressed and with teeth brushed), and instead of meeting me on the carpet for our movement exercises, he crashes on the couch and announces “I’m tiiirrreeedddd.” I remind him of the deal and let him know that we are already so behind schedule that he will only be able to watch half a NOVA, and even that is in jeopardy. (NOVA is his favorite part of school and something he negotiated to have added to his daily schedule.)

10:30am – Asher angrily says, “Fine!” and then proceeds to flail his body around during movement, falling over, being silly, doing the opposite of what I ask him. Operation Push Mama’s Buttons has officially begun.

10:40am – After managing to get Asher to do a few of our movement exercises, we have our morning meeting, where I reiterate that because of our very late start, there is no time for a full NOVA today, as we’re going on a field trip in the afternoon, and we have a lot of things to do in the morning before we leave. Asher, in every way he knows how, let’s me know this development is completely unacceptable. He also announces that he doesn’t like any of my ideas for a field trip (I’d suggested the zoo, the Amsterdam Museum, or the Rembrandt House) and that he doesn’t want to go.

I am at a crossroads.

I can either a) give in and let him watch the full episode in an attempt to thwart off a full tantrum / rage / meltdown (TRM), b) lose my patience and temper, threaten to yank privileges away, like saying no Minecraft for the rest of the day if he doesn’t start cooperating, or c) calmly tell him his earlier choices had consequences, let him know his current behavior is completely unacceptable, tell I’ll be available to talk when he is calm and ready to have a respectful conversation, and leave the room. Though b) is my default when I’m feeling especially tapped out, for some reason, on Friday I had it in me to do c).

10:42am – 11:10am – Asher ups the ante. Throws some pillows, deconstructs my couch, runs upstairs to try and grab his computer (I’d already hidden it), stomps around, and generally tries to push my buttons. I barely look up from my work, and when I do, it’s to calmly say, “Gosh, I’m so bored by this behavior. It couldn’t be less interesting to me. But I would like to remind you that there will be zero computer time today until all your school work is done. So it’s totally your choice.” I continue frankly, calmly, and without even the hint of annoyance, “And unfortunately the option to watch even half the NOVA episode is off the table now…it’s just too late at this point.” Then I looked back down at my work and proceed.

11:15am – 11:55am – Asher intermittently tries to get me upset while also reading on his Kindle. I have to dig deep in my toolbox to get through the antagonizing without losing it. I mean, the kid knows all my buttons. But I just kept breathing and remembering what my parenting coach Margaret Webb told me to say to myself in moments like this: This isn’t about me. 

11:56am: Asher comes into the dining room where I’m working and announces he’s ready to do math. “Great!” I say. “Pull up a chair.” And he did. And we did math. And his energy shifts a bit.

12:20pm: I pull out a new kind of logic puzzled I’d printed out and suggest he give it a go while I make his lunch. He starts but then gets stuck, so I pull up a chair and we solve it together. And his energy shifts a little bit more.

12:35pm: I give Asher lunch (baguette, ham, cashews, apple, peanut butter) and let him know that he has a choice to make – choose one of the options for an afternoon field trip or we stay in and he has to do all the school we weren’t planning to do originally because of said field trip. I let him know he should think about it and tell me his decision after lunch. I nonchalantly walk upstairs to my office to eat my own lunch and catch up on emails, hoping he’ll choose field trip because he does so much better when I can get him out of the house.

1:15pm: I come downstairs and Asher announces that he’d like to go to the Rembrandt House. And I say, “Great! Take your plate in and put on your shoes… let’s go!” He does and we leave and we have what is simply an amazing field trip. (I’ll write about this in another post.)

5:00pm: We get home several hours later, he’s a different kid – happy, agreeable, excited to build his new 3D architectural model of Rembrandt’s House we got at the gift shop, regulated. I feel calm and happy and grateful.

I don’t know exactly what shifted things, what happened in his brain chemistry to help him regulate, whether it was the math or the problem solving or my managing my own energy or the bike ride to the museum or being outdoors...or all of them combined, but somehow we had shifted things. The two of us.  That morning, we were going down the wrong road. I mean, things could have gotten ugly. But they didn’t.

Asher has never been super athletic.

Don't get me wrong...the boy likes to move. He is fast and wild and flexible and gets bursts of energy that could fuel a small car. But traditional "athletics" have never really appealed to him. We've tried gymnastics, soccer, rock climbing, and swimming, all of which he has shown mediocre interest in at one point or another. But nothing has stuck.

As a runner, I was excited when I found out Asher's first elementary school had a cross country team. I mean, he was getting in trouble all the time for running through the hallways, and fast, so I figured it would be a natural fit. 

But it wasn't. In the two seasons he ran cross country (kindergarten and first grade), he never actually ran the full distance of the 1/2 mile course. He would make it about 200 meters and then get tired and walk the rest. As a runner who knows the benefits of pushing oneself beyond the comfort zone and doing something you didn't think possible, I found myself wanting him to dig deep, to push through the pain, and show some grit. I saw his classmates, their tiny arms pumping, skinned knees peaking out through shorts, grim faces of determination as they struggled to make it across the finish line, and I wished Asher would do the same. But he didn't. It's not who he is. As he does everything else in life, he runs on his own terms.

But now that I'm homeschooling Asher, it's important that he moves his body every day. There's no recess with games of tag and chase to get him breathing hard. Hence, our daily outing.

Every day we have to go outside and move our bodies. We might go for a long walk while running errands, go to a park, or go for a bike ride.

And then two weeks ago I introduced the idea of running. He knows I run every morning and he laughs each day as I pop my head in his cozy bedroom before I head out and ask, "Are you SURE you don't want to go with me?"

But two weeks ago, I proposed that for our outing we do a timed run in the park. A 1/4 mile total, in which we work on him discovering this little thing called pace and try to find a way to sustain the movement.

I told him we could do some real math around it too, as we could talk about fractions and decimals (if we're running out and back and doing a total of a quarter mile, at what point do we need to turn around? etc.).

So we tried it. We ran a quarter mile, we did the math, and we finished. And as soon as we stopped, Asher said, "Let's do it again." So we did. 

Now, running has become our nearly daily practice together. We're up to a half-mile, comfortably running at an 11-minute mile pace, and this morning at our morning "circle time," he said he'd like to try and run 3/4 miles this afternoon. Um, yes please!

Our runs are magical. We bundle up, dodge the tram and bikers as we jaywalk across Koninginneweg to reach the park, and I pull up MapMyRun on my iPhone so we can track exactly how far we've gone. 

Then I hit Start and we're off. For the next five or six minutes, we run side by side, Asher talking nonstop about Minecraft and me popping in with the occasional "Oh...that's cool!" and "Really?"

Truth be told, I don't know what he's talking about, but I know it includes words like spawning, dimension, redstone, cryogenics, mod pack, and TNT dispenser. But that's okay. I'm just so happy we get to do this together. And he likes that I'm there, listening, spending time with him.

And yes...I'm pretty sure he even likes to run.

Today was all about Gaudi. Asher and I had watched a documentary about architect Antoni Gaudi and La Sagrada Familia, so we were excited to see the real thing. It was, of course, incredible. 

We took our time exploring every nook and cranny, and then took an elevator up to the top of the Nativity Tower. The views were utterly breathtaking, and the walk down, through a seemingly endless stone spiral staircase, was slow and adventuresome. 

We spent a while in the gift shop looking for the perfect book that would give Asher floor plans, structural blueprints, and insights into the architectural wonder, and as soon as we got back to our apartment, Asher got to work designing his own version for a Minecraft adventure map he and Derin are making.