Life at Chez Smiffy

Jack has had quite a week. Such a big week, as a matter of fact, that he just woke up for a 16 hour snooze,which follows a couple of days of being wound very tight and jittery.

It all started with reading Dar and the Spear Thrower by Marjorie Cowley. This was a fascinating coming of age story about, Dar, a young Cro Magnon on the verge of his manhood ceremony. (Age 13 or so). It was on our book stack because it takes place in the paleolithic and is of a good reading level for Jack, but it addresses a lot of questions a young boy might have about what it means to be a man. Jack loves the book, and it left us both sad as we closed the book on the last chapter -- that feeling you have at the end of a really good book that a dear friend has moved away. Jack is sure there have to be more Dar books or a movie--though I haven't been abel to find them, if they exist. But the book also brought some growing up issues to Jack's attention and he has wrestled with some of those. (We agree that we're both really glad that in our culture, men don't need "man-marks".)

I had planned on something significantly lighter after the challenges -- pleasant as they were -- that Dar posed, but the next night Jack absolutely insisted on pulling a biography of Helen Keller out from far down the stack and reading that for our bedtime story. Now, this biography was intended for very young children so it wasn't too overly emotionally demanding, focussing mainly on Helen's bravery and accomplishments, and her work on behalf of the similarly handicapped, but Jack seems to be at a sensitive moment when the challenge of growing up unable to see or hear really struck him much more deeply than I expected it to at five. He verified that he had had the measles vaccine (the actual diagnosis of the disease that caused the high fever that robbed Keller of her sight and hearing as an infacnt has never been established as far as I know, but measles was what I was told as a child and what I shared with Jack) and then he became very quiet and contemplative.

Then, yesterday, we went with Grandpa John to the Detroit Institute of Art, where we wandered through the medieval section on our way to the ancient Greek and Rome exhibit, and where Jack noticed for the first time the statues of Jesus on the cross. He had a lot of questions about who that was, who killed him in such a gruesome way, and why, which Rod and I did our best to answer. Then we went back to John's house for a light picnic of dried fruit, nuts, and chips, where jack's jitters reached fever pitch.

(By jitters, I mean a constant chant of"Look at me! See what I can do?" as he raced around and tumbled and chattered at a non-stop fever pitched pace. Normal for some of our childre, but very unusual for Jack.)

We hadn't reached the expressway yet when Jack was asleep in his boster seat at around 5:45 or 6pm. I put him on the rug in the parlour to wake up slowly, I thought, but he slept through dinner and cleanup and then I carried him upstairs and put him to bed. He asked me to take off his shoes, and then slept through my preparations for bed. He woke up when I got up for a moment in the middle of the night -- but only long enough to ask me how much longer it would be night. I told him that I would be happy if he could rest another hour or two -- but when I got up three hours later, he was still sound asleep. Rod says he finally woke up at about 9:15.

I think a pretty carefree week would be best, if we can arrnage it for him. He has quite a few "grownup concerns" to chew threw and make sense of and I don't want to overwhelm him, if we can help him. Between Mr. Mark being in the hospital and so many of our friends and relatives being sick, this wouldn't have been the time I would have chosen for him to notice all of this. Then again, he has a very solid foundation from which to handle it, and I believe that if he wasn't in some sense "ready" he would have continued to be oblivious to the challenging these experiences offered.

Probably not a bad idea to keep an eye on his health, too. He might be coming down with something. Jack usually does herald new developmental levels with a cold or a flu.