We Go With Him

EEG Success!

 

I just wanted to note that Charlie, after pulling off the cap of electrodes and crying, sat for at least 20 more minutes to get an EEG yesterday.

While not wanting to go into Apple/iPad lovefest mush-mode, it is the case that the iPad the neurologist's office had was quite helpful and offered the chance to let others know that Charlie's musical preferences range from the Beatles to a touch of jazz to 'One Litle Coyote,' Wiggles version.

We also, after seeing Charlie point and intone 'this way' on an evening walk, went for a five-plus mile one.

Then everyone slept (well, for part of the night).

 

A Big Wind Clears the Sky

 

That's a view of the Meadowlands from the NJ Turnpike going south, around noon on a morning when the wind was so strong Jim and Charlie did a shortcut local ride.

The Meadowlands, despite their name, have the reputation of being industrial Jersey wasteland. That is the case but we (Charlie too by his serious looks out the window) like the vistas, of brown reeds, river waters, iron and steel structures, highways criscrossing each other, Manhattan glittering in Oz fashion to the east, Newark stolidly sitting westward, streams of smoke from a smokestack, always cars.

We've stayed local the whole long weekend. Charlie conked out and could not be woken Friday and Saturday afternoons and slept not at all in the nights. Sunday morning he lay down for a few hours on the blue couch, waking at 11 and immediately calling for his bike.

After a chilly post-dinner walk, Charlie had a disturbance, if I may call it that, reminding me of his distress on a previous night. He ended up back on the couch and as we've discovered, as of Saturday night, that he seems cheered to hear my parents' voices on the phone (after years of pushing it away, as if hearing voices without bodies was too much to deal with), I turned on FaceTime on the iPad and gave my arm a good ache holding the device at Charlie's eye level, so he could see my parents and they him.

Then he went to sleep on the couch, woke after two hours and went up to bed, turned on music from Wiggles to Pixies, fell back asleep before 11pm and the house creaked and settled in the wind.

Bit Of Beach Blast

It's kind of been Anxiety Central around here (a Monday holiday, winter weather and chilly bike rides, dad 'n' mom back to teaching and running around with more to do, grandparents' visit anticipation worries, familiar places closed or rather destroyed due to that hurricane, being 15 1/2) so fortunately Charlie had a neurologist appointment Tuesday afternoon (though have to add that to the list of possible causes of anxiety). So I rushed home after teaching and we picked him up at school to go to the doctor's office and I assumed that Jim had Charlie's iPad and Jim had listened to me say I would get it. 

Yes, the iPad was not in the back seat of the white car when we picked Charlie up.

After first turning down the iPad I used (it has 3 of the 4 books I'm using to teach this semester on it) Charlie tapped and swiped, once I had changed the background photo to the same one (of the Aegean Sea yes that Aegean Sea in Greece) and we heard several rounds of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' up and down the Garden State Parkway.

It was quite nice.

 

Malum Malum (the evil iPad; a sort of theological post)

Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, all the holidays have blurred together. Still working through Halloween candy (much shared with my students) and it rather feels like we're still on Arbor Day (in tribute to all the trees lost).

Still, we have been contemplating holiday gifts for Charlie. I had been thinking of an iPad Mini as there are ways it might be set up so he'd see it as something completely different from his iPad and try it for other things (reading). Then, my homemade sensibility asserted itself and I decided to spare myself being put in charge of another eDevice to care for and am going quite low, no tech, for Charlie.

I didn't name his iPad 'Malum' -- meaning 'apple' in Latin and also 'evil' (with shades of theodicy; calling on the Old Testament) - for nothing.

Not that you need to hear this but, head-banging is about as funny as 'retard' to us

We just got through one of those begins-with-whacking-the-corner-of-the-iPad on the bedroom wall storms, though several degrees less bad than the one Charlie had the night before he went back to school, almost exactly a month ago. He called and called for his iPad after things were over but (powdery with plaster dust from the wall), the iPad remains on the brown chair: As we told Charlie, he needs to sleep first then he can have it.

It is past 2am and I want to take one fast glance at some things pertaining to Herodotus but I just wanted to say something I've had on my mind for years.

I really get all-out annoyed when people make references to head-banging and head-bangers and head-smack-on-desk and that sort of thing, in a heavy metal sort of way, in a haha funny black humor! aren't I being so risqué way.

Charlie started banging his head / hitting it with his hand when he was a toddler for reasons that, with this late hour and Herodotus in mind, I will not delve further into at the moment. We've been through helmets, as well as helmet-caused impetigo on the head. I keep forehead-sized bandaids and neosporin in the car because you never know.

Charlie doesn't need those tonight, fortunately.

 

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Teaching is all about the spontaneity

 

As the above photo attests, it was a good day in my classroom even though we had no AV. I didn't realize the previously broken LED projector had been fixed but I'm glad I didn't. It's most likely not that apparent from the marker mess in the photo but I had one of those ήυρηκα! (eureka) moments when I came up, on the spot!, with an idea to graphically explain the archaeological strata (layers) at the site of Troy.

At 1.30am Tuesday night (i.e., Wednesday morning), I turned off Charlie's iPad after he had thrown a box (found in a closet) of videotapes and notebooks down the stairs. He had put it in his room a few days ago and the throw was one of those furious impulses on his second insomniac night in a row as he had gone to sleep after 3am on Monday night (i.e., Tuesday morning). He had a great day at school Tuesday and managed well with walks and no bike ride on a dripping, soggy gray day.

Technology can be perilous, or at least distracting. Colored markers rule.

 

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I Do Like the #FailWhale

 

Summer is not technically over but the start of school for Charlie on Wednesday means it is. He had managed his anxiety so well through camp and the weeks at home, on Saturday and Monday but the 'too much' got to him Tuesday night and he will be boarding the bus to start what would be his sophomore year with a bruised, banged up forehead.

Had Charlie's mind, before he took iPad to wall, been racing with a thousand present and past rages, for the Barney and Alphabert and Teletubbies videos I threw in the garbage, desperate to stop his head-banging when he was 7 or so? He was very mad at me on Tuesday after days of cheery companionship.

I still remember the night all the stuffed animals I had piled on my bed were taken away. I did find them in the high shelf of my parents' closet and they reappeared in my room gradually.

Sometimes I think Charlie takes the metal corner of his iPad to his wall because, while the device is the conduit to those lost childhood toys via YouTube videos, it isn't the same, and Charlie is one who always favors the original.

This is speculation of course. Charlie's storming was upped about 25 notches from the previous nights and one contemplates things while vacuuming plaster, taping walls, scrubbing carpets and laughing at oneself for enjoying the silly bird and fail whale of Twitter so much.

After Charlie, very grave, went to sleep with the ocean waves on -- it had been a day of two fabulous bike rides, at home while I taught and in Jersey City round the Tropicana plant as the lights of Manhattan blinked on in misty rain -- I sat, a bit stiffly, on the old blue couch and thought about free speech, why I'd study intellectual property and Internet and tech law if I went to law school now, and the significance of little blue birds (aha, I was once a Blue Bird never a Brownie) pulling up the big blue fail whale.

We still have to get Charlie onto the bus but while we didn't make it to the end without severe storminess, it has been #SummerWin -- sometimes (since im stuck on Twitter metaporss) the system just gets so overloaded and all the cheery bits you say don't just hang in the air.

Now, #BackToSchool.

Praises Be

Four nights before the first day of school, as signalled by talking more than usual about my parents and (Uncle) Rocco and Portia (the dog), Charlie had anxiety.

The thumping coming from his room on Saturday evening was hardly unfamiliar, though not heard much of late. He was banging his forehead on the window frame when we entered his room and the plaster on his bed and holes in the walls indicated that the iPad had taken a beating.

Charlie sat himself on the bed and obsessively readjusted the dusty silicon cover of his iPad. We praised him.

Yes, strong echoes of the need for non-contingent reinforcement reverberating in me, we praised him gently ('so proud of you') because he was sitting on the bed. Scenes of storms with thrashing, untold banging on every surface and biting surrounded us like ghosts.

Without saying 'bank,' I strove to let Charlie know, he'd been doing so much and holding it together, and school is on the horizon, and the moon is full, and the barometric pressure is rising, and the front of our street is blocked off for a block party (not our block).

Charlie sat on the bed. Jim got him Advil and something to drink and I clipped Charlie's fingernails and toenails, noting his toes were still tremoring.

Charlie sat on the bed and got off so I could change the sheet and shake out the pillows and vacuum and tape up the walls. I don't usually do the latter two after these spells but, aware of how his eyes kept looking at the holes he'd made, I wanted him to know we don't think he should sleep in a room with plaster crumble. I smiled.

It was as with his iPad whose icons he'd undone and I put things back in order.

Charlie may de-order the iPad order and more crumble will fall from the walls and it will be all right.

I went downstairs with crumbly sheets and a bag of larger plaster pieces. We heard Barney. Charlie called for something to drink and after I had gone down after bringing it for him (after a 22-mile day), he fell asleep with the cup in his hand.

iPad Experimentation (of a Safe Kind)

I looked at Charlie's iPad last night and realized that the icons for his music albums were all jumbled up. And, at least one-third were missing!

He had pointed to one of Jimi Hendrix and said 'I want.' It's not really clear what he means by that but, this time, by inspecting the iPad I was able to discover the disarray.

Since my Mac is mission control for Charlie's iPad, I restored all the missing icons and found that he had changed some of the controls.

Another instance of the iPad allowing Charlie a way to try things out on his own -- after which order can be restored.

Tiny Bubbles, Yeah Right

Every caper has its coda.

Due to the dousing of water Charlie gave his iPad, and my taking its case apart to dry it off, it wasn't quite the same when put back together. There is a clear sheet of plastic that goes over the iPad touchscreen and, after I had taken this off and dried it, it just would not be reapplied as smoothly as before. Specifically, there were tons of air bubbles that could not be smoothed out.

I tried to get those d**mn'd bubbles out while Jim and Charlie were biking 16 miles in Jersey horse country. I knew it wasn't good when, after Charlie got into the car, he sat with the iPad in his lap for 25 minutes, staring at it, running his finger here and there over the touchscreen and not saying anything.

At home, Charlie retreated to his room. At hearing hammering sounds, Jim and I hurried upstairs, where Charlie, face distraught, was banging a corner of the iPad in the wall and on the verge of exploding.

I took the iPad and pulled apart the case and tried to smooth out the plastic. Charlie watched, dolefully. Jim suggested a bike ride and, after inspecting the iPad and placing it resignedly on his bed, Charlie assented. As they got ready to ride, I felt a guilty gratefulness for that behemoth, Amazon, as I ordered a new iPad case with a new sheet of plastic, and a pack of plastic sheets.

I saw Jim and Charle off. After vacuuming the plaster up from the hole in the wall from where the iPad's hard corner had made contact, I decided to try one more time with that plastic sheet. As I was trying to smooth away the bubbles, the simplex elegans solution arose: Just get rid of the sticky, dented, bubbly plastic.

Charlie had trying to bang out on the bubbles, Jim noted later.

Without the plastic sheet, the iPad lacks a layer of protection. But was Charlie delighted to have a bubble-free iPad; I have a feeling, the bubbles induced something approaching nausea in him. He had a light dinner and then scooted up to his room to watch, over and over, an old favorite video of a boy and his father preparing to bike. When I went to check on him at 7pm, he was luxuriously stretched out on his blue blanket, smiling, and he slowly drifted to sleep after plugging in his bubble-freed iPad.