The lie low day

"Can I have a 'lie low' day?" L. asked me on Wednesday morning when we had finally gotten him up out of bed and downstairs. A 'lie low' day is what we call a mental health day around here--a day to just regroup and recover, to have some mental breathing space. But Wednesday was a packed, busy work day for all involved, and a 'lie low' day just wasn't a possibility. So off to school L. went, and the day was pretty disastrous, and numerous times I caught myself wondering if it might have been better to have given him the 'lie low' day in the end. Everybody has bad days, but most people can recover and forge ahead; they process the setbacks, or shove them away for later. Setbacks for L. set off a domino effect chain reaction--seldom is one setback an isolated event; rather, it leads to many, many more, and they can be BAD.

Anyway, on Thursday Scott and I were planning on going to two middle school open house visits in the afternoon. But, given how disastrous Wednesday had been, we decided to give L. a 'lie low' day of sorts and to keep him with us and bring him along to the school tours. Not only did we want to give him a mental break from the setbacks from the day before, but we wanted to help make the middle school business more concrete for him. It's hard enough to contemplate a big transition like moving from elementary school to middle school but not having any actual frame of reference can make thinking about it all very confusing and scary. Up until yesterday we've avoided including L. in on middle school tours and open houses because we worried that he'd find it even more stressful to like a place and then find out he didn't get in (all but one school we're considering has admission based on a lottery). 

Bringing him along, and giving him a much-needed 'lie low' day was a good judgment call in the end. He was overwhelmed by the size of the middle schools, and a little quiet and contemplative. I watched him walk through the halls, and I sized up the kids who poured out of the classrooms around us. They didn't look all that different from L., actually. In between visits we took L. to lunch at a downtown Chinese restaurant, and after the second school visit we stopped off at the Lego store, to ogle ridiculously expensive Star Wars Lego sets. L wandered around the store, put together a few figures, and talked me into buying him a small $12 Star Wars battle pack set. When we got home I opened up my laptop to check e-mail, and L. disappeared upstairs to put together his Lego creation. It was quiet for awhile and then, from L.'s room, I heard spaceship vroom, vroom noises and battle cries and simulated crash sounds. The sounds made me smile, all at once. It's so hard to believe sometimes that my boy can be getting so big, so much older, so middle school; yet he's still a boy--our boy.

 

Happy weekend to all!

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