The Angry Beaver
During Porter’s sit down work at O.T. yesterday, he completed an art project that involved several steps: cutting, coloring, gluing all in a sequence that eventually resulted in the groundhog pictured below.
Porter’s finished product, a beaver on a stick. Now you may be asking yourself, what’s with the red lips? It’s a fair question, and certainly the first one that I asked when I was first confronted with it and had to stifle a laugh.
Apparently the whole time they were making the beaver, Porter was convinced that it was an angry beaver. And he kept imitating what an angry groundhog sounds like with loud growling noises. “Roarrrrr.” He cried. And cried. Theresa told me she couldn’t get Porter to see the groundhog as anything but angry. Then it hit her. So she drew a big red smile on its face. That way it couldn’t possibly be angry, could it? I guess not, but frankly I think now it looks not a little creepy and much more maniacal. Every time I looked at I kept thinking “don’t drive angry, don’t drive angry” from the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day. When Sarah got home and stopped laughing, she agreed so we decided to stage a recreation of the seminal part of the movie.
“Don’t drive angry!” Notice a resemblance?
A Melancholy Walk
While Porter was doing his sit down work, Alice and went for a walk to the library and back. I thought she’d be happy to be out in the sunshine but she seemed to be quite melancholy for some reason. Not unhappy per se, just a little sad. I don’t know if she was missing her brother or if was something else.
Porter also played on a teeter-tooter to practice his balance, which was pretty good already. Of course, he practices this almost every day when walks on the curb up from the school bus each afternoon. But he manages to move back and forth too without much effort.
While Porter was busy swinging and balancing, Alice was collecting all the kooshes she could find and then tried to make a run for it.
Porter had another great session of occupational therapy yesterday and his therapist was telling me that his proprioceptive responses have dramatically improved over the past couple of weeks. We’ve noticed the same thing, as well. What this means is that he’s learning to better regulate his own body so that when he gets worked up, riled up, overexcited, wired — whatever you want to call it — that he can now come back to normal on his own without a tantrum or intervention. I’m sure there will be relapses from time to time, but this is still great news and will hopefully allow him to make even greater strides in other areas. Today, he went for a ride on the swing under his own power.
This morning the kids were up early again and we were in the kitchen most of the morning, doing nothing in particular.
Fly Daddy: Day 9
Day 9 brings emotional turmoil to the project. Today I’m to learn how to declutter. Those of you who know me personally already know how much stuff I have, those of you who have helped me move over the years are even more intimately familiar with this problem. I have an emotional attachment to most, if not all of my stuff. Maybe I’m a closet animist, who knows. But I imbue objects with the memories of the events and people that surround them. So to me a glass isn’t just half full or empty. The glass was given to me by “X” and I used it at that event when such and such happened. I can do that for virtually anything in my house you point at. Really. And that’s what makes it so hard for me to part with stuff. It’s not necessarilly the stuff itself but the emotions attached to it. Sarah considers it a disease of sorts. Of course, I’m not so sure. Maybe I am in denial as she often reminds me. So anyway, my