Rubik's Cube of tears and pain

The boy child bought a Rubik's Cube the other day. He'd been talking about getting one for a while, and finally saved up enough money. As he was playing with it in the car on the way home, he told me excitedly, "Now I just have to do the reverse of everything I just did and it'll be back the way it was!"

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Shortly after we returned home, I looked over to find the boy child sobbing quietly. I asked him what was wrong, and he explained that the cube was all mixed up and he couldn't fix it. I told him that was what was supposed to happen -- you mix it all up and then it might take you quite a while to solve it, but that's the challenge. And while he was relieved, he was still sad. So I told him that I bet if we Googled "rubik's cube solution" we would find all sorts of web pages telling how to solve it. And he asked me if we could do that, and so we did.

Most of the instructions were pretty complicated to my eye, but the boy child read some of them over, and with a little verbal reinforcement from me he began to realize that (a) the instructions work regardless of the current state of one's Rubik's Cube, (b) no matter how mixed up it gets, it is absolutely solvable, and (c) there are umpteen bajillion different methods for solving it.

Then he started playing with it some more and noticing the patterns and the "rules" for how it worked. He very excitedly pointed out to me that the center cubes don't move, so whatever color the center cube is is the color that side will have to be. And the corner pieces have three colors on them, so you have to line those up so they match with the center cubes.

He hasn't solved it yet, but I'm not entirely sure he's trying to anymore. He's having too much fun figuring out his own patterns and configurations. He told me yesterday that if he ever does solve it, he'll likely mix it all up right away and start trying again.

Boy meets beach

We are back from our Corpus Christi vacation and had a fabulous time! The boy child absolutely astounded me this week. I had assumed the beach would be an iffy proposition, what with the sand and shells to walk on and the murky, salty seawater to swim in, but the boy took to it like ... well, a fish to water. He refused to wear his swim shoes and went barefoot the whole time, running all over the beach and splashing in the waves and generally behaving like swimming in the ocean was the most natural thing in the world for him! The girl child loved it as well, which was no surprise, and so the entire vacation was just lovely.

We saw the sights in the morning and early afternoon, then spent every late afternoon and evening on the private beach owned by the hotel. They kept it relatively clean with no big seaweed clumps and very little trash, so the sand was very nice for walking and digging and sandcastle-building. It was windy all week and the water was quite choppy, which might have kept the jellyfish away because we never saw any in our part of the beach (there were tons of them further up the coast, though). The beach was shaded by the hotel in the afternoons, so we were able to frolic without overheating or fear of sunburn. The bay itself is quite shallow, so the kids were able to wander far from shore and still only be in water up to their waists. It was altogether a fabulous beach vacation!

On the way home we stopped at Schlitterbahn, and that was probably a mistake. The boy child hated it. He liked the various pools and hot tubs and some of the more timid slides in the children's section, but got really mad at himself for bowing out at the last minute on one of the larger slides (twice). They use a burst of water to propel people down the larger slides, and he didn't like that. I think he would have done okay if the water had been at a constant rate. Anyway, that kind of killed the experience for him. Also, we had a bit of an episode while trying to get him onto an innertube for floating down a very slow, lazy "river" (no rapids or anything). Once he was on it he did fine, but again, I think his freakout over it put a damper on everything for him. The girl child, naturally, LOVED Schlitterbahn and went on some fairly fast/large slides. She scares me to death, that one! She is absolutely fearless.

So in conclusion, boy + beach = awesome! Boy + Schlitterbahn = not so much.

We are glad to be home, where the boy child is re-bonding with his ginormous Lego collection.

"Gnats are cute!"

So sayeth the boy child. However, the bug phobia is still in full force thanks to all the huge nasty flies buzzing around this summer. They seem much larger, louder and more brazen this year for some reason, but at least they don't bite. We're still seeing Dr. H once a week, and the boy child is still able to be outdoors without screaming and crying the entire time, but there is a lot of flinching and some yelling going on. He has good days and bad, with no discernible pattern whatsoever, so we're just hanging in there with it.

The boy was able to have a graduation of sorts this week, though. Several factors converged at once to bring at least a temporary end to his occupational therapy. He's progressed tremendously since he started with it two years ago, our coverage for it ran out this month, and his therapist is about to take a few months off to have a baby. So we had her do an evaluation to see where he's at, and she feels confident that he can take a fairly long break or perhaps a permanent one! He's really doing wonderfully with the motor stuff and the dyspraxia, thanks in large part to taekwondo, so we feel okay about stopping OT at least for a while. There's a slight chance the boy will qualify for occupational therapy through the school after they've officially evaluated him for AS, so we may be able to go that route if it turns out we've stopped it prematurely. It's a wait-and-see thing, but right now we're looking forward to having one less thing on our schedule this summer.

We're about to go on vacation for a week -- to the beach! So that should be interesting. I've bought water shoes for us all that will allow us to go into the water or walk along the beach without stepping on anything sharp, and I've told the boy child it's perfectly okay if he doesn't want to go into the water (I'm not crazy about ocean swimming, myself). We've bought pails and shovels and other sand toys for fun on the beach, and the kids have been "practicing" in the sandbox at the neighborhood park all week. They are very excited! We're also going to an aquarium (we LOVE aquariums. aquaria? aquariae?) and a science museum and will be touring an aircraft carrier while there, so we won't spend every single day at the beach, but it still promises to be great fun. I'll report back when we return!