I made a mistake with my son today. I didn’t realize it until it was too late at which point I was doing damage control and apologizing to my husband for the error in judgement. In hindsight, knowing my son’s temperament it should have been obvious, but that’s what hindsight is all about, isn’t it?
My son has been in need of new shoes for a while. We weren’t really paying attention to them mostly because he wasn’t complaining and also because children wear out shoes so quickly it seemed like we’d just bought him his last pair only a few months before. He has two pair of shoes, one pair was older and had a velcro detachment problem in which the velcro was separating from the backing, causing the shoe not to remain closed—on both feet.
The other, newer pair was having a sole problem. Sections of the sole kept coming off, which wasn’t a real problem because he wasn’t going to wear out the shoes to the point he couldn’t wear them before he grew out of them, but it was getting a bit extreme and my husband decided to bring out the gorilla glue and duct tape yesterday to try and fix them temporarily until we could get him to the store to be measured and new shoes bought.
Today after camp while I was with my daughter at her Orientation and Mobility session with Jane, my husband took my son to the shoe store. When we got home my son smiled and asked if I could tell what was different about him. I pretended it was his hair, maybe his shirt, wait a minute—did he have on new blue and grey shoes?
He was happy running around in his shoes for the next few hours and that’s when I made the mistake. I asked him if he wanted to throw away the shoes that were frustrating him because they wouldn’t velcro closed? He wasn’t sure but decided the best thing to do was put them in the very large trash bin in the garage.
Great, shoes in the trash, my son participated and that’s when it all went wrong. My son realized something he loved was now gone. GONE. He was upset. He wanted them back. He was in the garage trying to climb into the dirty trash bin with the lid over his head to get them back. He was crying; he was angry; he was bereft. And we told him in the kindest of terms (and then in more firm terms) he wasn’t going to be pulling them out of the trash can and neither were we.
He might be over it now, but that’s only because he’s asleep. He was so mad at one point he was throwing his new shoes around, saying he hated them. I hope he’s okay in the morning and has forgotten about his old, beat up, non-functional shoes.
The Big Boy Tiny Girl Boat Conversation: This morning in the car my son asked his sister, “do all boats go on water?” She thought for a second and replied, “I think so, unless they’re parked on land.” He refined his question to see if he could trick her by asking, “but do all boats move on water?” She thought about this and told him, “said sailboats need wind to move.” This was apparently the right answer because he told her, “you’re correct.”
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