Refreshing Candor

Overheard while driving this afternoon:

Jojo:  "Christian, I'm talking to you, butt cheeks!"

Christian is the child who is forever daydreaming and who has vivid dreams during his sleep.  He also likes to express himself verbally and through the written word.

His class spends time writing daily.  Earlier in the year he wrote about topics that interested him, such as dinosaurs....

If I Had a Dinosaur

or dream houses (the kind that hold dreams).

If I Had a Dream House

Lately, he has been writing letters to me.  Last week he advised me on how to discipline Jojo when he screams.

What To Do If Jojo Screams

Jojo does not like Chuck E. Cheese, and I don't blame him. I don't have anything against Chuck E. Cheese, but such places induce such sensory overload that I want to stick a fork in my eye.

The letter I received today was about how refreshed he felt when he emptied his bladder.  The latest vocabulary word he puts to use, 'refreshed', has appeared many times in his recent communications. 

Full Bladder

Maybe he meant to say 'relieved' instead.  However, emptying the bladder is a good analogy for a confession. It really is.  Christian says he'll feel 'refreshed' when he makes his First Confession this month.   Instead of his full bladder causing him to feel tense thereby requiring relief, Christian instead felt invigorated once he released it all (probaby because he plays tetherball after lunch on the playground). And that's how our souls feel when we've made a good confession.

Speaking of confession, we had an incident with one of our neighbors last week.  It was very unfortunate that she made Christian and another boy apologize without getting the full story.  She took her daughter's word (her daughter is three years older than Christian) that he and the other child were making fun of her dead dog when they were actually singing silly rhyming songs about an annoying purple dinosaur and other ditties.  Christian and his friend were in the midst of helping other neighbors move things from their garage to their house, and after getting the story straight I realized that the boys were most likely ignoring this girl who wanted to play with them.

After my neighbor told me they were singing a song about "mustangs and dogs" or something, I asked Christian in front of her if he was singing about mustangs and dogs.  He asked, "What's a mustang?"

I have been pondering this all weekend because this is not the first time this neighbor has come to complain about Christian's apparent cruelty towards her daughter who obviously pines for her mom's attention. This neighbor has come over to complain about the other neighborhood boys even when she admits that our boys were not responsible for teasing her daughter.  Why she still came to tell me is beyond me, but I rounded up the kids and asked them to stop bothering her daughter that time.

What really concerned me about this latest incident was the way she forced the kids to go into her house and apologize to her daughter.  She did not tell me this when she came over, yet she knows that my kids are not allowed in her house.  Christian was scared, and secondly, a forced apology does not teach kids a thing, especially if you did not witness the episode. I am prepared for the next time and I will ask the neighbor to bring her accuser daughter to explain to me and the boys what happened.  It will be her word against theirs.  And if I feel that there was wrongdoing on their parts, I will ask them to apologize.  I am sure Christian didn't feel 'refreshed' when he apologized to the accuser.

Sometimes adults are more difficult than children.