MARCHing Forward

While the last blog posting was about Elijah getting ready to tackle the piano, I can tell you that after just a few lessons, he has shown not only an interest, but some ability in tickling the ivories. Of course, like any child, he may soon get bored and decide that watching "Toy Story 3" for the hundredth time is more enjoyable, but with the efforts of Miss Tiffany (pictured with Elijah) and Sarah to keep him on track, I don't think that's likely.

Speaking of "Toy Story 3," we all enjoyed the Disney on Ice production of TS3 in which the first act retold the story of the first and second movies, with the last act dedicated to what happens to the toys once Andy grows up. Needless to say, the little guy enjoyed the show (though not as much as Mom did) and I'm sure all the fathers in the audience became much more engaged when "Barbie" (in tight blue spandex) became a lead character in the third act. We got away cheap at the souvenir stand (only a $15 program, which came with the requisite Mickey Mouse ears). Requests for every toy in the movie came only after we got home.

Though piano and Disney on Ice have been the recent highlights, a carnival for St. Pat's Day (with numerous SOLO trips on a scrambler ride, although Mom did join him initially) also contributed to our own March Madness. If we can get through April and May with just the normal craziness, a scheduled birthday trip that includes both a cavern ride and a water park visit should make the month of June a fun one for the little guy.

Doing the Elijah Cha Cha

Living with Elijah is like a day at the dance studio. Two steps forward, one step back. As long as the movement is always forward we can do the shuffle, but while it can be exhausting, it is never dull.

On Super Bowl Sunday, a friend of Sarah's came by with her two children. Elijah eagerly awaited their arrival (this was the same family who visited us for fun in the snow -- see the previous blog), and he happily played with the boy, Quinn, for quite a while (step forward). When Quinn and Elijah started to play a video game that Elijah hadn't played before, Elijah got frustrated and announced that he was going to his room (a step forward and also a step back -- the retreat to the room was bad, but the fact that he felt embarrassed by his inability to play the game was an emotion we had never seen and was actually a good sign). A few moments later, Elijah emerged from his room and continued to play until our visitors went home.

That same week, a parent-teacher conference yielded both good and not so good results. Again, all the people working with Elijah at school told us how much they loved him and what a incredible little guy he is. (I'm not naive enough to think that ALL the parents aren't told that, but with his joyful personality and his love for school, I think there is a lot of truth in their feelings.) In terms of his work and where he stands with his peers, Elijah appears to be all over the place. Sometimes his assignments and journal entries are correct and proper, while other times what was asked of him and how he responded have absolutely nothing in common. Yet, unlike many autistic children, he constantly seeks to interact with peers and teachers (on his terms, of course), so it appears that his socialization skills are at least moving in the right direction. Also, his memory for detail is another source of wonder, as his teacher and specialists marveled at his abilities to remember every announcement, incident and object placement in the classroom. The cha cha continues!

Last week at a classmate's birthday party, Elijah happily greeted and interacted with classmates and climbed the rock wall at the facility. Since we have never seen him even attempt do this at our fitness center, both Sarah and I were very happy and looking forward to the fact that he would have the opportunity to show off that skill the next night as we would be taking advantage of our club's "Parents Night Out" to see a movie while leaving Elijah at the club to play, swim and climb. After dinner and the show, we returned to pick up Elijah and were told that the swim time had ended a little sooner than expected because someone had decided to use the pool as a toilet -- and our little guy had happily volunteered that he had been the culprit.

Needless to say, the ride back home was a bit tense until Elijah realized what he had done was wrong and wasn't something to laugh about. But then, the next day, after we had gotten a written apology from Elijah for the club, the story changed. Elijah told us it wasn't him, that he had just said that because .... well, just because.

You may think he was just trying to shift the blame, but a similar incident occurred a few weeks back. An employee from the club's child center came to get me from the workout floor because Elijah had insisted that he had soiled his pants. When I got there and checked him out, it was obvious that wasn't the case. When I asked him why he had said that .... well, I still haven't gotten an answer. My guess is that he wanted more attention from the girls working there and knew this was a way to get it.

It's been years since he's had a verified "accident," and he always announces to everyone and anyone that he needs to use the restroom, so I really don't think he was the culprit. A step back, at least in terms of his ability to communicate accurately.

A more positive moment occurred just last week. Elijah has been working with a graduate student at the University of Kansas as she, for her advanced degree, is teaching him math as part of a research project into how best to teach children with autism. (In a prelude to this, the teacher, "Miss Nikki," taught Elijah about vegetables, so he now can point out artichokes at the grocery store with great excitement.) The sessions were held here at the house, and Elijah always looked forward to Nikki's visits, asking, "Is Miss Nikki coming today?" and always smiling broadly when the answer was yes.

Then we found out that the music therapist who runs Elijah's summer camp had an opening for piano lessons -- on one of the days each week that Miss Nikki visited. We've been trying to get him into piano lessons for a long time, and we couldn't pass up the opportunity. This led to a farewell to Miss Nikki, and it was sad to say goodbye. Piano lessons, step forward .... losing Miss Nikki, a step back.

Then the challenge became finding a piano or keyboard that the little guy could practice on.

The music therapist advised against using the small electric keyboard we have, because it doesn't have "weighted" keys -- no matter how hard or soft you hit the keys, the tone is the same. For someone on the spectrum (and maybe for everyone) the need to hear the difference in sound by the force of the key being struck is very important.

Incredibly, Sarah found someone willing to give us a piano, which was moved to our house today. And we received an e-mail from Miss Nikki telling us that after speaking with her advisers, she had received approval to continue working with Elijah on a different schedule, so piano lessons could be accommodated. At the first lesson after Miss Nikki returned, Elijah got, for the first time, 100 percent correct on the teaching portion of the session. BIG steps forward!

Another first came last week, as Elijah put on roller skates for the first time at an after-school skating party -- an event that in the past might have caused some anxiety for the little guy. But as I have mentioned earlier, his class seems like a pretty special group and once he saw his classmate Sofia, all was well. (Although Sarah realized that ice-skating expertise does not transfer into roller-skating skills, even if you were a great roller-skater in your youth. Her time on the rink was very limited.)

The little guy is very excited about his upcoming lessons -- he wouldn't even wait for Sarah to clean off the piano before he sat down and tried it out. And who knows? Eventually, maybe he'll be able to produce his own soundtrack for his ever-changing dance steps. Hopefully, they'll all be forward!

Is there any room left on the Susan Boyle bandwagon?

If so, I'd like to squeeze on.

Usually, I'm skeptical of YouTube crazes, Internet celebrities and social networking fads (OK, yes, I did the "25 Things" meme on Facebook, but that's it. Honest). I haven't even signed on to Twitter yet, so I'm obviously not a jump-on-the-bandwagon person. (If you don't know what Twitter is, you will soon. Trust me on this.)

So when coworkers began buzzing about the Susan Boyle performance more than a week ago, I tuned it out. Exaggeration, I thought.

I was wrong. So please forgive me for being the 1 millionth (or is it 10 millionth?) blogger to post a link to this. You may well have already seen this, or at the very least, read about it. But I suspect there are maybe three or four regular readers of this blog who have not (I won't name names here, to protect the pop-culture innocent). Even Elijah was absolutely captivated, and I think it's safe to say that performances of music from "Les Miserables" by middle-aged women don't typically captivate 5-year-old boys.

So please, if you haven't yet seen Susan Boyle's performance on the April 11 broadcast of "Britain's Got Talent," click here. Read the article first, then watch the video.

It is one of the most uplifting things I have ever seen, and it will change your day. I promise.

Not afraid to badmouth the Boss

So, last night I attended my first indoor rock concert in 13 years -- the final night of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's Magic tour.

According to my newspaper's rock critic, whose review you can read here, the Boss "played nearly 30 songs and delivered many moments of joy and transcendence, including an encore for the ages."

This is why I am not a rock critic.

I like Springsteen, I really do. His music was a big part of the soundtrack for my high school and college years, although I must admit I sort of lost track of his career for several years until I married Jeff, who, like about half of the male baby boomer population of America, is a walking Springsteen encyclopedia. Over the 12 years of our marriage, I have become (not always voluntarily) re-acquainted with the Boss, so I was actually kind of looking forward to this concert.

Let me apologize right here to the three co-workers whose schedules were upended -- including one who came in on his day off -- so that I could attend this concert on a night I was supposed to be at work.

I hated it. Hated, hated HATED IT.

For starters, it got under way nearly an hour and a half late, on a Sunday night at that. Note to Bruce's manager and Kansas City's Sprint Center: Many people actually have real jobs that require them to be somewhere fairly early on Monday mornings. The acoustics at the less-than-year-old, supposedly state-of-the-art venue were atrocious. Second note to Bruce's manager and the Sprint Center: Many people actually have relatively acute hearing and don't particularly care for the eardrum-splitting pain that accompanied last night's "moments of joy and transcendence."

To save my ears and my sanity, I was reduced to roaming the concourses for much of the three-hour show, while Jeff and his baby-boomer cohorts (all of whose hearing was destroyed somewhere between Woodstock and We are the World) screamed and stomped and sang their hearts out.

You may not be aware of this, but a lot of drama takes place in the concourses of arenas during concerts. I witnessed at least one tearful breakup, one medical emergency and countless pitched disputes involving couples who apparently disagreed on the merits of attending a Springsteen show. Plus, I ran into a co-worker and spent 45 minutes or so getting caught up on industry-related gossip, so it was not a total loss (although, as an aside, I'm afraid my industry IS a total loss).

I even took a stroll outside the building for a while -- an excursion that was apparently so unprecedented that it took three arena security staffers to OK my exit with a promise that I show my ticket at the exact same door, to the exact same person, when I wanted to return. They simply couldn't understand why I wanted to leave, unless it was to smoke, so they tried to point me toward the gated-in area where the puffing pariahs were corralled. (I was reminded of an old Far Side cartoon in which a family is visiting the zoo and looking at an exhibit of shirtless, tattooed, overweight people puffing away on cigarettes in their cage. The sign on the cage: "Riff-raff.")

My little stroll brings me to another note to the Springsteen road crew and managers: Do you really need to have all seven of your motorcoach buses idling outside the concert venues for hour after hour while the show goes on, spewing greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere? Didn't I read somewhere that Bruce, who is rumored to be the opening act for Barack Obama at this week's Democratic convention, is concerned about environmental issues? Perhaps I was just hallucinating.

Lest you think I am a square, sheltered, overly sensitive middle-aged suburban mom who just can't handle a fun night out (well, OK, that's exactly what I am, but that's not the point here), please read some of the comments posted on the review I linked to above. I am far from the only one upset about last night's experience. And Jeff reported to me at 7 a.m. this morning (when my ears will still ringing), that one of our local Web sites for moms also was abuzz with some pretty unpleasant comments about the whole situation. (And no, I have no idea why Jeff reads our local mom site, at 7 a.m., no less.)

In looking back on it, I'm really not sure what annoyed me more: The late start, the horrible sound, or the money we ended up shelling out for the experience. You may recall from an earlier post that Jeff won the tickets, but once you calculate the nearly $100 we spent on baby-sitting ($12 an hour is what our sitter charges) and the money I will be docked on my paycheck for taking a vacation day that I haven't technically earned yet (my shift to part-time hours is the culprit here), it was a very expensive evening at a time when our financial situation is not the greatest.

I have to admit, though, that the one thing that bothers me most is simply this: Why did I wake up this morning feeling like I'd been run over by a truck, while Bruce Springsteen -- who, let's face it, is almost old enough to be my father -- apparently feels ecstatically good up there on stage night after night, city after city, all over the world, expending more energy in one concert that I do in any given six-month span??! How is this possible?

Maybe I just answered my own question -- I need to expend more energy. I'll never have what Bruce has in that department, but it probably wouldn't hurt me to hit the gym more than twice a week and walk Elijah to school more often.

Because if an aging rock-n-roller can leave me flat-out exhausted after a concert that I only halfway attended, something's wrong.

So thanks, Bruce. My eardrums may still be quiviring, but the rest of me is going to be better for this experience. It'll be Magic.

The plot thickens

Once again, my job situation is precarious.

Those of you keeping score at home may recall that my company, which has been hemorrhaging red ink in much the same way all other companies in my industry are (when's the last time YOU sat down to savor a newspaper in print form?), had a round of layoffs a mere eight weeks ago.

Round Two (or is it Round 3? I've lost track.) is upon us, and my job category is widely suspected to be squarely in the middle of the chopping block -- just as I had finally arranged for hours that would keep me sane, give me sleep and keep at least a small paycheck coming in.

We received notice this morning that we are to meet with our executive editor at 5 p.m. Monday. Needless to say, this will make it somewhat challenging to devote our usual diligence to our jobs throughout the weekend. So I'm damn glad I'm going to the Springsteen concert Sunday night, rather than doing my usual Sunday night gig of presiding over the production of a newspaper whose staff morale is sinking fast and could hit bottom on Monday at about, oh, 5:03 p.m.

So, Bruce, I'm counting on you. Bring out all those angsty songs that you churned out with such fervor in the 1970s, before you made your first gazillion dollars, when your audience could still believe you knew what it was like to be in that darkness on the edge of town.

Whatever happened to the Zombies, anyway?

"It's the time of the season for loving," Elijah informed me the other day at breakfast.

Most mothers of 5-year-olds might be shocked, but I dismissed it as yet another sign that the poor little guy has been subjected to too much of his baby-boomer father's 1960s-era music. Belting out lyrics that were popular nearly 40 years before your birth is just one of the hazards of being born to "late-in-life" parents.

Several hours later, as I was trying to deal with a tedious matter at our local bank branch, one of the tellers walked by the chairs where Elijah and I were sitting.

Teller: "Hi there, cutie! What beautiful red hair! How old are you?"

Elijah: (Silence)

Teller (leaning down to look directly into Elijah's eyes): "Well! Let's try another question. What's your name?"

Elijah (with a big smile and direct eye contact): "WHO'S YOUR DADDY?!"

Lucky town

Jeff is naturally excitable. This is charming in its own way, though it's not a trait I share. I do tend to remember his most enthusiastic moments, though, the way most women remember a first date or the date of the marriage proposal.

I also mentally rank these moments, and we recently had a biggie. In fact, it's second only to the night he unwrapped a box I presented to him for our anniversary in October 2002 and discovered its contents: A positive pregnancy test strip. (Cliche, I know).

Our current Big Thing occurred last night, when my phone rang at work and I picked it up to hear one of the most high-pitched squeals of joy imaginable. At first, I honestly thought Elijah had grabbed Jeff's phone and managed to push a button that dialed Mommy's office number. But as all the grandparents know, Elijah isn't one to talk on the phone, and this little voice was talking a mile a minute. Several rapid-fire phrases had passed by before I was able to decipher the words "Springsteen" and "tickets."

Finally, Jeff's penchant for entering radio station contests has paid off. (We won't count the free-weekend-houseboat-on-the-lake contest in the summer of 1995, which ended up with us paying a couple of hundred dollars for repair of said houseboat after we hit a submerged tree trunk).

So, come Aug. 24, look for us in the rafters, Bruce. The arena seats 16,000, but I guarantee none of them will be more excited than the one with me.