How a kid handles losing says a lot.
Although I don’t keep track, if I had to guess, I would estimate Beckett’s sports teams have lost more than triple the amount of games he has won in his young life. It’s to the point I think he expects to lose most of the time and therefore is thrilled when he wins. In fact, he’s consequently become a much better loser actually than a winner.
Call it simple bad luck, unfortunate team drafting or unfair player stacking (which happens all the time in youth sports these days), he seems to be on the losing end of most recreational sports contests. These aren’t nail biters either. They are lopsided contests that aren’t fun to watch. Most times I’m left wondering privately whether this is even worth the effort for him or us. Fortunately, he doesn’t feel that way.
The blessing in all this losing is that he has grown and matured as a result of being short end so much. It once really bothered him and got under his skin to the point of tears, extreme disappointment and really aggressive play. There are times when he reacts poorly to losing, especially if it’s really uneven and he’s embarrassed, but a majority of the time he’s a great sport and stays positive. No matter the score, he still plays hard and never gives up.
After his rec soccer game last week, he showed some disappointment but played great and scored some nice goals. His team got hammered so I didn’t even bother keeping score. He did, of course.
Afterwards, he was more distraught about the snow cone van not being present for an after-game treat than losing. A little bit later, he brought the game up and pointed out the obvious imbalance of the teams and the players. He asked why that always happens. As a parent, this drives me crazy as well, but I didn’t want him to know it. I just tried to explain to him that life is not always fair and that how we deal with it is important.
Since I don’t want him dwelling on this sort of political nonsense that’s beyond his control, I pointed out the positives of how he played, especially how he ran his butt off and never let the score affect him on the field.
It didn’t seem to help. We never talked about the game again that weekend and that’s probably best, but he still wants to question the snow cone man on his conspicuous absence.
On the Carson sleep front, things are much better (knocking on wood here).
A new development is Carson coming into our room in the middle of the night, coming to my side of the bed and pulling on my hand. It took me a couple nights to figure it out, but he’s been asking me in his non-verbal way to pull his blanket back on his makeshift cot and tuck him in.
It’s a sweet thing. I have it down now to the point it’s less than a minute. I hear him come down the hall, storm into our room in his heavy walking style and let him grab my hand. I then get out of bed and don’t say a word. I think not engaging him is key to quickly getting him back to sleep. I put the blanket on him, tuck him in and jump back in bed.
That’s been a pretty good routine. Obviously it would be best for him to sleep the whole night in his room. That’s still the priority but this beats having him in our bed kicking and disrupting us.
One night this week, I evidently made the process too long. After tucking him in, he quickly ordered me with clear hand gestures back to bed. He was fast asleep in no time. It was 2:15 a.m. At this point, this is a victory for us.
Now that Beckett needs an iPad for school every day, he is under the assumption there’s no screen time limits anymore.
The problem with that theory is the iPad is not exclusively for school use. He can still do other things on it that require monitoring.
For example, one night this week he was fixated on a particular app that was more like a game in reality. I first asked him what he was so focused on and he said it was something called “Geometry Dash.” It had been a few weeks since we downloaded his educational apps for school so I wrongly assumed it was for math.
Later, after some time had gone by, I began to question whether he had been reading and/or playing an education game all this time. I circled back to him and discovered there was nothing educational at all about this game with the name “Geometry Dash.”
Beckett, in his best defense attorney mode, tried to explain how it helped him with his hand-eye coordination. I feigned interest in that before telling him he owes me 15 minutes on Quizlet then.
“Quiz, who?,” he said.
I then showed him the app in his school folder on his iPad. He acted like he had never seen it before. I believed him on that one.
