Spirit Week

It’s been Spirit Week at my son’s school. The student council picked a theme for each day.

Monday was ‘Dress Backwards’ day. For the longest time, Kai put his shirts on backward more often than not. I never really understood how he could memorize the Hebrew alphabet but could never remember which side of his shirt needs to be in front.

Anyway, he doesn’t seem to do that so often anymore, and we forgot that Monday was supposed to be this special day, so he went to school dressed normally. Ha, I think ‘Mr. Backwards’ ended up being backward as he probably was the only kid who wore his shirt right side forward.

Tuesday was ‘Pirate or Cowboy’ day. Back in the day when I was a boy, if we had a day like this, everyone would have been a cowboy. But pirates seem all the rage these days.

When Kai was three years old, we all dressed as pirates for Halloween.



He doesn’t fit into his old costume, of course. But he looked pretty good in my old costume, don’t you think?



My wife told me that she asked Kai to put on his glasses before he left for school but he did not want to.

“Mom, pirates don’t wear glasses.”

Ha, good point.

Unfortunately, his good nature did not last long. At one point during the day, he got angry and snapped off the necklace. And when the beads spilled all over the floor, it only made him more upset. It did not quite escalate into a major incident, though.

That happened the next day.

Yesterday was ‘Dress Wild’ day. My wife repurposed another Halloween costume, this one from back when Kai was five years old.



He still fit into this costume, though we have no photos from this time.

While Kai was dressed somewhat wildly, his behavior apparent was even wilder.

We still don’t know the precisely what happened, but it sounds like Kai angrily threw a ball at a staff member, and it wasn’t in a nice way.

When I spoke to my wife on the phone on my way to the train station, she was worn out from dealing with Kai when he came home from school. He refused to go to his speech therapy session.

One nice consequence about working downtown is that I can prepare to deal with things on my train ride home instead of having to deal with eruptions on the spot. When I arrived home, Kai was still in his room, lying on his bed. I went up to his room to talk to him.

I calmly tried to get him to talk about what happened. He said he did not want to talk about school, and only said that he did not want to go to that school anymore. I did not push him to say much more, but did say that sometimes it helps to talk about unpleasant things.

As I often do when he has bad days, I told him that he should learn from this one and make the next day a better one.

After awhile he said he wanted to read a book together. And several minutes later, he was ready to come down to the kitchen to have dinner.

I’m sure that he is better able to control his emotions than he used to. His recovery periods are shorter than they used to be.

I have learned a little bit along the way, too. At least on this occasion, I didn’t let my own frustration and anger exacerbate the situation as I too often did before.

Today’s Spirit Week theme is ‘Blast from the Past.’ I only hope that it doesn’t bring with it a blast of anger from Kai.