Just Your Average Day

It may be one of those days. Gave the boy his medication this morning. He had a glass of water. He took the pill and was taking a drink of water as I was turning around to lock the medication back up. I heard water hit the floor. When I look there is a huge wet spot on the front of his shirt and water in the kitchen floor. "Did you just try to drink water and miss your entire mouth?" I asked. "Yes," he said seriously, "yes I did."


Not sure I have the hang of the parenting thing yet. The boy takes off on our nightly walk in flip flops. He starts running on the gravel road and I tell him to stop. Rather I said, "Don't run in flip flops, you'll trip and go sliding on your nose. I don't have my phone, so how am I supposed to post the video to youtube?"

Important Information to Know if You Are Thinking of Adding a Young Boy to Your Family

I have discovered, since becoming the (sometimes) proud foster dad of a (now)10-year-old boy that my education is severely lacking in several areas.  Apparently my high school and university science classes were severely limited and I was not informed of the existence of many life forms that are incredibly important to young boys.  To help others, I have listed the most important of these along with a short description, below.

This is a Bakugan.  If you think it is a cheap plastic ball, you are wrong.  It is a cheap plastic ball that can unfold into a cheap plastic monster.  It also has many friends, also call Bakugan, who are in different colors and some may form cubes rather than balls.  The ball form also makes an excellent toy for cats to bat under furniture.  I believe this species survives by having a Saturday morning cartoon and several video games.

This is a Redakai.  I have seen it only as pictures on 3 d game cards.  I believe there is also a Saturday morning cartoon.  There may be video games I am not sure as I have been guilty of confusing it with:

Ben Ten, which is several cartoons and several video games.

This is a Pokeman called Pickachu.  There are many Pokeman with many names.   They are everywhere, cartoons, video games, books, happy meals, trading cards, small plastic toys.  Don't try to remember them all, you will hurt yourself.

Yu-Gi-Oh.  It's a card game and cartoon.  There are also books and video games.  Don't heard quite as much about it as the others from my boy, but it does come up occasionally.

These are Bey Blades, there are several in my house.  There are many, many different kinds and none of them are inexpensive.  They have their own cartoon and seem to now be spreading to video games, still at least the kids need to get together to play the actual game, which involves pitting their top against the other players tops.  Also lots of fun for the family, because you get to look for the lost ones after the kid leaves them in the floor and the cat swats them under the furniture.  Not a lot of fun to step on barefoot in the dark though.

This is the big one for my boy.  It doesn't seem to have cards or toys, at least none I've seen, but there are videos, books, many video games and cartoons.  So far there are Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Z Kai, and Dragon Ball GT.  I can't tell them apart, but he can.  At first glance, you might mistake it for Nazi Propaganda based on all the blonde-haired Aryan super powered fighters, or a hair gel commercial, but it's a kid's show.

Daycare Lunches

Tales from the Monkey-Brained Boy part whatever...
The boy has been, mostly, behaving pretty well.  Apparently this was to lull me into a false sense of security so I would let down my guard.  Today he struck.  I have him in daycare, and my choices are to either send a lunch or give them money to buy a lunch for him.  We shopped and I let him pick out his lunches, he chose a specific selection of Lunchables, some fruit punches, ext.  I bought him a little insulated cooler with some refreezable cold packs to carry his lunch in and keep the food poisoning to a minimum.  Well, he was a bit excited the first day, because the center served pizza, but I explained it wasn't free, and he seemed fine with it.  But at some point, he decided one of the lunches he picked out wasn't to his liking.  He is funny about food, and will often through a fit over a particular food, declaring it his favor food ever, only to later reveal he doesn't like it and had never tried it before.  His truthfulness, or total lack thereof has been a major issue, and it recently came to the front.  The wonderful, sweet, kindhearted friend who picks him up when I work late, keeps him for me when I have to be out of town, and to whom I owe way to many favors to ever possibly pay back has even had trouble with him lying.  Up until recently he was on his super best behavior, but apparently he feels comfortable enough there he is starting to be himself.  After lying to her husband the previous day, he was given a talking to by her.  Then I confronted him about it this morning again and tried to explain why it was important to be truthful.  I have also refused to buy him anything new until he eats whatever food he had me buy him special.  I hope to stop the falsehoods and teach him to be truthful.  If I decide to try something new, I eat it whether I like it or not, perhaps this is a bit much to expect of a nine-year old, but I was not allowed to waste food as a child, so I don't think I should allow one to waste food either, especially if he lies to get the food.  It seems there should be multiple lessons in there, at least in theory.    Friday was swim day, so I was planning to give the daycare money to buy him lunch at the pool.  So I packed his last lunch, the one he had decided he didn't want.   I signed him into daycare.  When my friend picked him up, she was informed I owed the daycare $4.50 because I hadn't packed him a lunch and he ate 3 pieces of pizza.  Apparently he gave his lunch to another boy and told everyone I hadn't packed him a lunch.  Were there not a rule in place that says no physical punishment, and were I not the sort of person who believes in following rules and who's career is built around trying to insure people who don't want to follow the rules are following them, the boy would not be able to use the lower rear part of his anatomy to rest on for a month.  I haven't yet decided on the full extent of his punishment, but there will be consequences.  First he took a bath, ate supper and went straight to bed, this was mostly because my hand was twitching and my eye kept finding paddle-shaped objects.  I think I shall make sure daycare workers become much better acquainted with the boy and with me.  Next, I will see if he can be allowed to not participate in swimming and in the skating field trip next week.  If his being in daycare means he has to participate, then I'll have to come up with a daycare substitute for next Wednesday, he's been looking so forward to that field trip to the skating rink.

This morning

We are having new shingles put on the house. The crew doing it is hispanic. They started work this morning. The boy knew they were there but hadn't seen them. When we left the house he said, "Are those guys Italian?"

After we were in the car and heading to daycare I explained they were hispanic not Italian and he asked me what Italian was. I explained it referred to someone from the country of Italy. He asked me what Italy was.

Later we saw the truck in the picture. He is constantly telling me I need to get a new car so he can get a "hot girl". I'm not really sure a 9 or 10 year old girl is going to care what kind of car he rides in the back seat of, but he seems to feel a red mustang, camaro or charger is in order. So I pointed the truck out and told him I was stopping to ask if it was for sale. He asked why, I told him I thought we would look cool cruising town in it. "What? Are you nuts? You must be crazy?" he sputtered. "You've just noticed?" I asked.

Problems with Pencils

The only homework the boy had was to study 17 vocabulary words. It took an hour and 10 minutes. Part of the issue was supplies. He ran out of lead for his mechanical pencil. I refused to replace it based on the simple fact that be puts out too long a piece then uses too much pressure and it breaks. He informs me this is okay as he has some. I ask where, and he answers in his desk at school because they aren't allowed to use them. I ask why he is buying mechanical pencils at school if he can't use them in class, he says they can use them to draw at recess. I doubt the boy is sitting quietly drawing at recess if he can be running amok with other boys. He finely remembers he has a normal pencil in his book bag and asks me to sharpen it. I do, then as I'm returning the sharpener to the cup that holds the pens and pencils, I notice one of the ink pens looked odd. I examined it closely. "When did you do this?" I asked. "What?" he answered. "Run this ink pen through the pencil sharpener." I responded. "I don't remember doing that." he replied. "Well, I didn't do it." I said, "and I don't think any of the cats were well coordinated or inclined to do it, so who does that leave?" "I said I don't remember doing it!" he said. "I know I didn't do, and I can be sure the cats didn't do it. At what point did sharpening an ink pen seem a Good Idea?"

This Morning

It was 4:15 AM, and a quiet morning, perhaps too quiet.  I was sleeping, my favorite 4:15 AM activity.  I awoke to an alien presence in my bedroom door.  “I need you to come look at this.”  There was someone standing in the door.  I was instantly alert.  “What?”  I asked.  “I need you to come look at something.”  It was a male, approximately 4 and a half foot tall and about 75 pounds.  He was Caucasian, blond hair with blue eyes and wearing a grey t-shirt with red flannel pajama bottoms with blue dinosaurs on them.  I guessed his age about 9 years.  “Is the house on fire?”  I asked.  “No, I just need you to look at something.”  I got out of bed and followed him to his bedroom.  His bed had a large wet spot on it.  It was very suspicious.  I stripped the evidence and sent it to the laundry room for forensic processing.  I also had the suspect/victim strip and sent his clothing off for processing.  I hosed off the mattress with Lysol then made the second bed.  Then I went back to bed for the 50 minutes of sleep I had left.   

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

Took the boy to the park after church. It started off poorly, Burger King messed up our order. He wants a double hamburger with ketchup only. Noone sells that. They all sell double cheeseburgers. I have the local McDonald's partially trained. I order a double cheeseburger, no cheese, ketchup only and they get it right about 85% of the time, but he insisted on BK and they haven't dealt with him and we were at the park before he discovered his burger had been contaminated with cheese. He would not eat it. Since I have nothing against cheese, I'm actually quiet fond of it, my burger also had cheese on it. I don't really understand fussy eating, my mother wouldn't tolerate it, and if I had refused to eat something I would have done without until the next meal. If I was half as picky as this kid I would never have made it until I was his age, I would have starved to death. I gave him my fries and he ate those then played for an hour or so. On the way back home, he asked about a reward for being good. Apparently in his mind, my having to drag him away from the river twice, although he knows to stay away from it, qualified as good. But I knew he hadn't had much breakfast, he didn't want anything we had in the house, although he picked out his cereal himself, then little lunch, so I bought him a bag of his favorite chips and a drink. When we got home he bounced out and immediately asked permission to turn on the evil "game system." It was granted, but when I went back out to the car to retrieve something I saw the empty chip bag. I picked it up out of the backseat only to see most of the contents laying on the floorboard on his side. The explanation was long and involved hand positions and gusts of wind, he never could explain why he didn't tell me he had dumped the bag of Doritos in the floor though. Anyway my back floorboard carpet now smells like nacho cheese.





We've had a couple of power outages in the past week. The boy asked me if I could set his clock while he took a bath. I agreed, but as I went into his room I noticed a couple of things. First there was a sleeve peeking out from under the blanket on the second, unused, bed. I lifted the blanket to find a small pile of laundry, at least part of which I recognized as having been worn recently. "But how can this be?" I thought. "I had him bring me all of his dirty laundry Friday." So I proceeded to the bathroom to inquire. At this point, I noticed his karate bag on his bed. It was opened and contained his pants, which had been in the first load of laundry, but not not his top or tee shirt, both of which had been in the second, and yet he had assured me he had sorted and put away the laundry. I reversed course and opened the top drawer on his dresser. The drawer was crammed full of not only the gi top and tee shirt, but also pants, shirts, shorts, underwear and socks. Despite the fact that he was bragging to the case worker just last week about how he had arranged his clothing himself and always helped around the house and did all his chores. I quizzed my young housemate and apparently he forgot the dirty clothes when he gathered up his dirty laundry. He doesn't know how they came to be under the blanket. Apparently a burglar broke in and rather than steal anything, hid half the boy's dirty laundry under a convenient blanket as a prank. He did admit to not sorting his laundry and I made him put that right before he could watch tv. As far as the mysterious laundry, at least two of those things are his favorites and he will want to wear them to school this week. They will probably not make it into the laundry until next weekend.