Kids get a case of the Mondays as well.
After a big weekend featuring a middle school dance and Busch Gardens, Beckett, 11, and Carson, 9, were both exhausted come Monday morning.
After dragging all morning, Carson had a better day than I expected in school, but then reverted back to his younger years during his speech session after school. For our special needs guy, even on a normal day, he’s wiped out after school. It’s tough for him. He often falls asleep on the way home from school, though it’s happening less and less this year.
On the way to his speech session in Salisbury, in hindsight, I should have seen the warning signs trouble was ahead. He’s an anxiety animal so when he gets uneasy or simply away from the center behaviors occur.
During this particular session, he just wanted nothing to do with working on his speech. Honestly, it’s amazing we don’t have more challenging behaviors during these sessions. It’s tough work for him to use his voice due to his diagnosis of Apraxia, which is a motor speech disorder involving the brain not being able to send the messages needed for the mouth to make the complex, although easy for so many of us, oral movements.
Though Carson is also shy and displays numerous examples daily of selective mutism, he does have about 50 to 70 words he can say through sounding out the words. He’s come incredibly far on this journey and recently received a gift card from his speech pathologist at his school for speaking at school to her, teachers and classmates. He had a jar he had to fill with coins, which were given when he spoke at school. The words might be simple “hi,” “bye,” “no” and “yes” in many instances, but that’s okay because it shows growth.
Back to Monday’s speech session, there was hitting, eloping, ignoring, throwing and crying. It was about as bad as Carson gets these days. These behaviors were expected years ago. It was better to prepare for the worst and hope for the best back then. As his behaviors have normalized in recent years, we forget how far he has come.
As we were driving home Monday night after speech, I was cooling down after getting frustrated trying to help his speech therapist get Carson on track. I admit to doing something I never do – feeling sorry for myself at how difficult life can be at times. I regret these unproductive emotions. I had a long day at work and myself was feeling tired from the weekend. Though Carson never truly got back in good shape for speech on this day, he did end up completing his session. When I looked back in the car to see Carson, pondering what sort of consequence to impose for his bad decisions, he was fast asleep. It was 5:05 p.m.
As Carson was having meltdowns in speech, I learned things were not much better for Pam with Beckett after school. Our “typical” child forgot to bring home any of the right books for his homework, of which he had a lot on this particular day. Pam said he was teary when he had to go back to school and get all his materials he needed for a poster to create and write an essay on the Mayflower.
In fairness, if it was a normal weekend, we would not have let all this work and projects pile up to the last minute. We reminded him Sunday night we will have a lot to do on Monday night. The problem was he, too, was exhausted from his first middle school dance and a long night at Busch Gardens over the weekend. He was mentally and physically spent. Nonetheless, he had work to do. He didn’t like it one bit.
To his credit, he did a nice job on his poster for earth science, though it took a long time because he was pouting a lot through it, according to Pam’s account.
By the time I got home with an exhausted Carson, he needed to write a 600- to 700-word creative essay on the Mayflower expedition to Plymouth in 1620. It seemed he had gotten all his emotions out of the way by the time I got home. He was focused on what he wanted to write based on a rough outline he had already sketched out. He sat down at the computer without any argument and got it done in about two hours.
Though he kept checking the word count option a bit too much for my liking, it was nice to watch my sixth grader have this free flow of ideas on the same computer I work on every day.
Later, when he was done and had taken a shower, I joked with him it was time to practice the trumpet. He’s supposed to commit to 15 minutes each day on his instrument for music class. I could see his reaction was trending toward the negative. I told him I was joking and that he could double down tomorrow. He said, “I will quadruple down if you let me skip tonight.”
One thing I have learned about parenting is sometimes things are simple. We tend to overthink. They were both exhausted from a busy weekend of physical activity and irregular bedtimes. Their mom and I were as well. Everyone was in bed before 9 Monday night.
