Puberty looms

Every child living in my home is now into the second decade of life. Each is now sporting a double-digit age. I guess that qualifies them as preteens. Thus the specter of puberty is looming large in my mind. It is time to start teaching them more about what to expect regarding physical development in the next few years: armpit hair and such, "the curse", curves and bumps. I want to get to them before some of their more worldly peers teach them in all the wrong ways. Either that or "Coach" will teach them in Health class and who knows what he'll say!

They know some of this "birds and bees" stuff already. All three kiddies know that babies come from their Mom's tummy and that the baby doesn't come out of her mouth or her belly-button, but they are not exactly sure of the precise location of exit. (At least I don't think they know.) I'm really more concerned about preparing them for the physical happenings of puberty rather than teaching them about sex and childbirth. It seems like sometimes parents get so warped and worried about having "the talk" that they forget to warn their children that they are about to start "growing up". I remember the start of the process being slightly traumatizing myself, because when you haven't been properly informed and you get in the tub one day and...
Any-hoo!

I'm sure that Sister is the one I should talk with first, even though she's youngest, just because she's a girl and getting rather tall rather quickly; but since Sister tends to have very little shame and little control over her mouth, once I fill her in on all the joys of puberty, she will almost certainly pass the information on to her brothers. I'm not sure Orangeboy will believe any of it though. He tends to need to see and experience things himself before he believes it. I think the fantastic details of what happens to girls and boys when they grow up will be too much for him to take at first. I'm also afraid that he may begin to believe that none of this is going to actually happen to him. He is rather slight and I have this nagging feeling that he'll turn out to be a late bloomer. I mean, that's okay but, it might start to bother him a bit when he is 13 years old and his younger sister is a good foot taller and has about 50 pounds on him. Hopefully he WILL be 13 and this won't be happening six months from now. It is possible though.

What I need is a good book to hand out.

eReaders!

The Grandparents bought Orangeboy's sister a Kindle for her birthday. Now I want all of us to have one!!! She loves it and so do I. Orangeboy could really find it useful also. If you don't know what a Kindle is - check it out:
Amazon.com Kindle

Orangeboy reads well and reads fast, but when he comes to a word he doesn't know, he just sounds it out and moves on. This used to work just fine when he was reading books with pictures and simple themes, but these days his comprehension is suffering a bit. He doesn't seem to be able to infer a new word's meaning by the context very easily. That sounds like an Asperger challenge doesn't it? - seeing the details but not putting them together as a whole? I encourage him to ask or look up word meanings in his student dictionary but that slows him down and...and the rushing through - ADHD. Ah well.

The Kindle comes with a dictionary already loaded. Not only could Orangeboy adjust the font to a size that is easy for him to see with his low vision, but he could simply click on a word and choose "look up" and the dictionary defintions would pop up right there. Then with a click of the "back" button, he could go right back to his reading. I'm convinced -technology is the way to go with Orangeboy.
Now that Barnes & Noble is coming out with Nook, Amazon's Kindle and
Sony's Reader have more competition and I'm hoping the prices will just get lower and lower - on both the readers and the ebooks.

Sister is loving her Kindle and the eaze with which she can read it. It isn't the perfect solution for the visually impaired because the buttons are very small and impossible for her to read, but it is much easier and more convenient than hunching over a book with a magnifier in hand or using braille or a clunky tape player for books on tape. Once I loaded some books for her and got her going, she was reading from the Kindle screen with speed and no neck ache. She will reach her Accelerated Reading goal for sure!

Orangeboy has been plugging away as his usual competitive self and has already reached his goal - over a month early. I just hope he learned something.

Post 101 at long last! Competition tantrum

I reached my 100th post last month and then just abandoned my blog. Really bad mommy blogger! My only excuse is that I got a little bored with Orangeboy. Yeah, I said it. Bored - with my son. No, actually it's not so much that I'm bored with him, it's just that his behavior hasn't been very entertaining lately. He's pretty much stuck in a rut. He continues to be soothed and entertained by numbers and math, he continues to take the same daily dose of medication for ADHD, he continues to do well in school and avoid being bullied (somehow), his IEP is the same, he hasn't learned any spectacular new skills, and he continues to have the periodic temper tantrums.
The temper tantrums are getting to me though. They frustrate me. His brother and sister find them both amusing and annoying because of the predictability of the circumstances and patterns of his tantrums. His father finds the tantrums excessively irritating. Orangeboy himself seemingly cannot see the pattern well enough to help himself avoid them, and I can see them coming but cannot stop them.
It typically begins with a competitive game or situation in which Orangeboy either starts off thinking he CAN win or he SHOULD win. This could be a Wii battle to reach a higher skill level or it could be a scholastic battle for top score or first to achieve something... it doesn't matter, Orangeboy has an odd way of turning almost every interaction with another person into a contest of some sort that he is more likely to lose than win. I refer to this as his tendency to "play the victim".
For example, he will spend a couple of hours playing a sword fighting game on the Wii, trying to improve his skills and move up the levels. Physical dexterity is not his strongest talent area. He is quite energetic and gets all sweaty jumping and flailing around with the Wii remote. He does memorize the characters and characteristics of each game and level very quickly and this helps him to advance when he's playing on his own. After he's made it pretty far in a game, he will then be extremely excited and will begin jabbering to the rest of the family all about the game, it's levels, characters, weapons, color schemes, bonuses, etc, etc.
It's here where he usually ends up talking himself into a challenge. Someone gets tired of hearing him chattering about the game and decides to play him. Almost inevitably, Orangeboy will not be as triumphant against another player as he would prefer. He becomes disappointed. But he's not a quitter, so he keeps playing even though he is complaining and blaming his remote or the game by now for his lack of astonishing success. He becomes more disappointed and frustrated if things don't start going in his direction. He starts to yell and flops and rolls on the floor between turns. His opponent (a sibling or paternal figure) tells him to stop it and be quiet. He growls in response. For some reason they keep playing and Orangeboy keeps yelling and keeps getting shushed and keeps growling, rolling, and even stomping in response. And then he loses again.
And HERE IT COMES! He starts with a high pitched keening wail that slowly builds in volume. Then the fluids start to pour from his eyes and nose and his face reddens and he opens his mouth wide and squalls. He then stomp-runs to his room and slams the door where he will wail, scream, sob and throw himself around for varying lengths of time that are always too long.
Now, when I see this happening, I often try to intervene by reminding Orangeboy that he must be a good sport whether he wins or loses, or by periodically telling him to calm down and try to have fun - "It's only a game!"
Stopping him in mid game while he's losing would only bring the tantrum on sooner, so that's not an option. Forbidding him to play these games is obviously not an option because he loves, loves, loves- almost to obsession - to play any type of video game and most board and card games.
Talking it over afterwards doesn't seem to go anywhere either.
He's ten years old. He should begin to be able to control himself a little better at some point, right? Or maybe not. I'm thinking about how grown men often act at sporting events and when they or their team lose. At least Orangeboy doesn't punch people or curse them out or throw a sofa out the front door as one of our former neighbors once did. But as he gets older, it might be better for his peer relationships to learn to express his frustration in a slightly more manly fashion. You don't often see men keening and weeping with snot and tears flowing down their faces at football or hockey games. My husband from Texas only pouts a little when the Cowboys lose.

Chick-A-go

So now I know that The Amber Spyglass is part of that trilogy which included The Golden Compass. I, myself, am not into fantasy literature. I really don't think Orangeboy is either. We went back to the school library and swapped The Amber Spyglass for two nonfiction books. He was happy with the choices and has been reading away every evening. He's been pondering over his reading, too. One day he asked his Dad, "Was Chick-A-go made of wood?"

Dad asked, "What? Chick-A-what?"

Orangeboy repeated, "Chick-A-go. Was it covered in wood?"

Dad still didn't understand, so he asked Orangeboy to spell Chick-A-go.

"C-H-I-C-A-G-O."

One of the books Orangeboy is now reading is about the great Chicago fire. So, after his Dad finished laughing his butt off (because Dad is just mean that way), he told Orangeboy that yes, at that time, most of Chicago was made of wood.

Sure, it's an easy mistake to make if you've never been to Chicago or read about it before, but this is the kind of mistake that Orangeboy often makes because of his habit of rarely seeking guidance or advice. He trusts his own opinion over all others as often as possible and he also tends to go with the most logical and simple reasoning. This is why he tends to just sound out words using the most common rules of English. Anyone who is literate in English knows that this technique fails fairly often with this language. The are too many exceptions to just go around reading unfamiliar words without a dictionary or the help of an experienced reader. But Orangeboy persists, and even though no one else may ever know what he's talking about, he does.

ARboreal Mammals?

I can't quite understand why my children get so excited about their Advanced Reading(AR) goal assignments. Every year their teachers assign a points goal for each student to reach based on their individual reading test scores. Every book in the school library is each worth a certain number of points if they read it and pass a short test on it.
Orangeboy and his sister are very competitive about their AR goals. They can't wait to get their goal assignments near the beginning of each school year. The day the goals are assigned they get to go to the school library and check out a book or two to get started. As soon as the kids are out of school they start comparing their goals and their books. It's pretty much guaranteed that if one of them happens to have a goal that's a couple of points less than the other the one with the lower goal is going to do everything to meet it first.

"I had to get thirty-TWO points, you only had to get thirty!"
"Yeah, but I got my goal first. You read slower."

Anything to beat the other. They just never stop. And today was the day. They received their goals. Sister's goal was higher. This year they are in the same class so they didn't even have to wait until after school to start competing. They started as soon as their class hit the library. Sister checked out a book in the Artemis Fowl series, a fantasy fiction book based around a twelve-year-old main character, that was over 300 pages. Orangeboy checked out "The Amber Spyglass" by Philip Pullman. It's a New York Times bestseller that is 465 pages long. Obviously somebody goofed. They go to a school that houses only fourth and fifth graders. Why would the library have this book? It is not youth lit. On the cover a reviewer credits the author with creating "a world filled with strange divinations and wordplays."
Wordplays? Right, Orangeboy is going to understand wordplays. The reviews also describe it as "powerfully emotional" with much "sensuous description" and with a conclusion that is "heartbreaking but fitting".

I read the first paragraph and asked Orangeboy if he knew the meaning of some of the words there.
"Do you know what rhododendrons are?"
"No."
"Do you know what linnets are?"
"No."
"I think they are a kind of bird. Do know what aboreal mammals are?"
"No."

Orangeboy claims that he did not choose the book on the basis of the number of pages and points, but because of the word "spyglass" in the title. That makes sense. He likes telescopes, binoculars, magnifying glasses and such, so he probably thought it was actually about a spyglass and didn't guess it was about a fantasy world of witches, angels and daemons (yes with an a) - whatever those are.

I think the book is a bit over the capabilities of a ten-year-old, to say the least. And I especially believe a numbers loving, literal-minded ten year old boy is going to have a hard time plowing through 465 pages of lofty fantasy literature - even if he did write that three page story about clouds last year. He'll have to take it back and check out something else, I'm afraid. He was pretty disappointed. The book is marked as being worth 26 points. That would cover most of his AR goal. He'd beat his sister for sure, if by chance he could understand it well enough to pass the comprehension test. Sister's Artemis Fowl book is only worth 12 points.
Maybe I should let him try it. He has certainly surprised me before.