Heredity - a powerful thing

Teddy's teacher is about to have back surgery and will be out of school for several months. She wanted to touch base with all the parents before she left since she will miss the parent - teacher conferences. She called one evening and the wildly paraphrased version of what she said was that he's doing great academically, though it would be nice if he remembered to follow through and turn his stuff in more often. But socially... well... if he doesn't learn to tone down his strong personality and start using better basic social skills he's going to get picked on by bullies in middle school next year.

Okay, I might be exaggerating, but really -- not by too much. And I can't say I disagree with her. Teddy comes across as an extremely confident kid. He is very assertive. If we're in a store, for example, and he has a question, he doesn't have the slightest issue finding an employee and asking whatever series of questions he needs to figure out what he wants to know - up to and including asking who else would know if the one he asked doesn't know enough. Adults absolutely love him - they think he's so mature and that it's so cute coming out of his little body. But the reality is Teddy is very sensitive and unsure of himself. He masks this by coming across so confidently - which works better with adults than with kids. With kids; sometimes it works, but sometimes not as much. (This is yet another example of how Teddy got all of Brad's good qualities and all of my bad ones. I continue to hope that the good will outweigh the bad in his case).

He sort of walks in with the assumption that people want to talk to him and want to hear what he has to say and he doesn't do a good job of laying some of the groundwork needed to make friends and connect with people - he's just magically already there. When that doesn't work out and the kids don't want to play with him or aren't just exactly on the same page as him - he not only has his feelings hurt, but he's just plain confused. Brad and I are working on basic social cues with him.

Anyway - this post took an odd turn along the way... Now back to the heredity thing...
So his teacher was trying to give me an example of how he is unbending and so sure of himself, but unknowingly for her the example she used is Teddy's poor (or wonderful depending on the day) genes and nothing more.

She told me that the class was broken into groups and were to be pantomiming different ways people react when they are stressed. So it gets to be Teddy's turn and he just sits in his chair and doesn't do a thing. He's not moving in any way, just sitting there doing absolutely nothing. The kids in his group were guessing things like 'you don't care about things' and 'you are tired and don't want to do anything'. Teddy just sat there saying 'no, that's not it', 'nope', 'no', 'uh un' - but he never did another thing, just kept sitting there in that chair, not giving the other kids a single thing to help them out. Finally she called him over and found out from him that he was trying to show "losing your appetite". They discussed things he could have done and ultimately he picked something else more demonstrative and went back and did it and they guessed it with no problem.

The problem with this story being an example of his overall social cluelessness is that he gets that particular trait so darn honestly..... A story from my past.

One Christmas many, many moons ago, we were at my paternal grandparents house and after dinner we were all downstairs playing pictionary. My grandparents had pulled out all the stops with this game. There were easels and colored markers and we broke into two teams and off we went. So at some point it was my Grandma's turn and she looked at her word and her face showed pure confidence - whew this would be easy, if she looked so confident. She got up and grabbed a yellow marker as she commented conspiriatorily that having the colors would make this one really easy and drew a very small yellow rectangle in the middle of the huge piece of paper stuck to the easel. She took a few steps back so we could all be awed by her masterpiece while she waited for us to all shout the answer out in unison.... uh. hmmmm. "rectangle?"

She looked at us like we were morons. She pointed to it, "it's so clear." Ok, what could that be. uh. yeah. I got nothing. There were 4 or 5 of us guessing, but it was pretty consistent across the board. "Grandma, we're obviously not getting it. I understand we're the stupid ones, but we need something else, anything else." "But Cammy, that's it. There's nothing else I can draw. That's what it is." And she sat there mutely for long minutes as we struggled with what on earth this little yellow rectangle was possibley the exact replica of. Luckily the other team was also struggling, though don't think we weren't hopeing to gleen clues from their guesses. Finally my dad looks up at his mom with confidence and says "Gold Brick", and my grandma looked at the rest of us - her moronic opinion of us all proven correct as her beloved son proved her point that her masterpiece was all that was needed.

So poor Teddy never had a chance with 'loss of appitite'.

Camela