Cuentos de Fantasmas

Another mixed weekend. Sunny behaved very badly this morning, but I think he learned a good lesson from his consequence. He was pretty good the rest of the day. He seems to be a little more agitated and jumpy than usual, and perhaps this is linked to his medicine stabilizing on half dosage. We're going to leave him on that until at least the end of this year and the start of school in spring.

We went to "A Tour of Southern Ghosts" at Stone Mountain the other night. It was a walking tour with different storytellers dressed in 19th century costumes telling ghost stories about haints and boo-hags on the old plantation grounds, linked by the really hokey refrain of BOO Y'ALL! I wished there was more than one African-American storyteller, but other than that it was pretty good. It was just Sunny's level; a real haunted house would have freaked him out. He was more scared than the other kids, and needed a lot of hugs during certain parts of the stories, but he really enjoyed the experience. I'm also impressed that he was able to focus on the storytelling so well.

He told me an encouraging story today. He either dreamed it last night or made it up in the morning. The story was that a boy named Sunny (himself) was walking in a haunted house. A skeleton came up behind him. But then Yoda, who was really Sunny, came by and fought off the skeleton with his lightsaber, and then warned Sunny to leave the house before he got hurt.

I told him I was proud of him for turning a nightmare around and taking control over the situation. I think the therapist is going to look on this as a positive development.

We received his progress report, although I really don't know how to read it. As far as I can tell, it confirms what we already know: he's not deficient in any area, but his lack of focus is keeping him from living up to his potential.

Spanish is a bright spot. He loves his Spanish class and is doing very well there. Vocabulary, either English or Spanish, is his great strength. Sometime he irritates me by saying that such and such is the right way to pronounce a word when I know it's not. I've taught him it's OK to have different opinions as long as he expresses it politely (he's now saying "I disagree with that statement!" which is really cute) but arguing about the right way to pronounce a Spanish word usually gets him a lecture that learning Spanish is not about opinions; there is a right way and a wrong way to pronounce a word, and I'm right and he's wrong. Anyway, my stubbornness is one of the reasons it's best that I leave the majority of his academic development to other people.

I did get a chance tonight to do some fun education about the history of Spanish, a topic I love. In the car, Sunny was asking me about different words for fruits. We did "banana/banana" (there is a very important pronunciation difference involved) "apple/manzana" and "pear/pera". Guy asked me how to say "carrot". Since my Spanish is so rusty, that took me a few seconds. "It's... umm... I remember it sounds absolutely nothing like carrot. A-ha: zanahoria!" Sunny claimed he was never going to be able to say that, but after breaking it down and practicing a little bit (sah-nah-oar-yah) he got it.

I told them that the word "zanahoria" sounds like nothing Latinate or even Indo-European because its origin is Arabic. Sunny thought I meant Aladdin when I said Latin, which gave me the chance to explain that like in the movie Aladdin, people who spoke Arabic live in the Middle East and Northern Africa, but many of them also used to live in Spain, which is how some words in their language got mixed together with Spanish.

Then I explained that so many people speak Spanish today because a long time ago some people from Spain came to the southern part of America and had a fight with the Native Americans and killed many of them and made them speak Spanish, even though the Native Americans fought back and some of them still speak their original languages.

Sunny said, "Thank you for that advice, Mom, especially because we're learning about Spain in music class!"

Ah... I love it when he appreciates me going off on a history whirl like that. And it's fun explaining things in a way a child can understand. Last month, he asked me what England was, and I told him "England is an island off the coast of France". My mother almost had a fit laughing. She said she wished she could have seen the face of an English person hearing me describe England that way. "But it's true!" I protested.

What can I say? I believe in literal geography. If it were up to me, I would delete Europe as a continent and rename it "Northwest Asia".