My darling Teddy - let's try again

I just reread (is that how you spell that?) my NaBloPoMo posts and see I've been mostly ignoring my darling eldest son and well we can't have that now can we.

He's in shall we say a difficult stage. He's 11 going on 48, smart as a whip (and he knows it too which is not necessarily a good thing - can you say EGO), in 6th grade, he has my looks only done just perfectly but he is Brad. If ever on this planet there were two people who were the same exact individual it's these two.

Brad has conned the poor unsuspecting Teddy into liking the original Star Trek, which is extremely upsetting to me. But it's so true that Teddy and Brad will randomly have conversations in the middle of the mall about which episode this or that reminds them of. Unfortunately more and more it's Ted who brings this up. "Wow Dad that's just like Trouble with Tribbles" (that's the only actual title I know). Jack and I slink to the other side of the aisle when this happens.


Brad's an engineer and I'm a CPA; we're both very good at math and so far it looks like both boys are also going to be very good in this area as well... but when first learning math it was very difficult for Teddy and I to have meaningful conversations about it. Brad and Teddy process things in exactly the same way which is starkly foreign to my very logical brain. Brad could explain things to him in what I consider this odd, random, a$$ backwards way - really using only 1/2 sentences because immediately Teddy would totally and completely follow what he was saying. Whereas I'd try to go over things in a logical step by step method and Teddy would run screaming from the room beyond frustrated. For quite a while he didn't believe I knew a damn thing about math until he finally literally tested me; absolutely sure I would get all his problems wrong. When I got them all immediately correct he accepted that we get to the answer differently but if he'd be patient I could in fact help him completely understand something - and now we do just fine. The funny thing about this math thing is that Jackson and I process things the same way and the opposite thing is proving true with Jackson - he can more easily follow what I'm telling him than Brad.

As for the difficult stage thing - here's a bit of our interaction last night (of course Brad’s out of town)

We moved a small love seat that had been in our room into Jackson ’s room a while back and he’s taken to sleeping in it every night. Last night I put Jackson to bed on the couch and was waiting while Ted got out of the shower. I went down and put out the recycling only to find them fighting and Jackson near tears when I came back upstairs. Teddy had decided that the memory card in the Sansa Shaker that Jackson had been listening to all day long belonged to him and that it was imperative he retrieve it right that moment complete with threats of memory card and Sansa destruction. I got Jackson calmed down and back in bed and went in to talk to Teddy.

M: what were you thinking, he was already in bed

T: he was not in bed

M: yes he was

T: no he wasn’t

M: Jeez Teddy, I put him there, of course he was… lights out, door closed, past bedtime, these are clues.

T: he was not in bed! He was on the couch.

(oh for the love of God – please give me strength)

M: That’s where he sleeps, it’s where he has been sleeping and it’s not the point. It’s past his bedtime, you knew I was putting him to bed, his lights were out, his door was closed. If you have an issue to discuss with him it can wait until the morning, you cannot disturb him after he’s gone to bed!

T: he wasn’t in bed!

(I get up and leave the room so as not to rain all my icky parts all over him while I explode)

Camela