On Saturday, we all did our usual late morning routine. Erin had some clients, and I took the kids grocery shopping. Everything went pretty smoothly, save one moment at the end. While we were checking out, Henry suddenly expressed a pretty rare urge to take off his mask. I told him he needed to keep it on for just a few minutes, and Amelia came over to reinforce that. Once the situation was stabilized, I went back to bagging groceries and the cashier said that it must be so hard for kids, wearing the mask.
I told her that actually, this was one of maybe only 2 or 3 times I could think of where Henry bucked the mask wearing, and he’s on the autism spectrum. She was really impressed by how well collected he was and we both agreed that if a five year old boy with autism can wear a mask with little difficulty, it shouldn’t be that rough for most anyone.
During the conversation, I looked over and saw the two kids sitting on the floor, Amelia with her arm around Henry. She helped him settle down, and the next time I looked, they were having a pretend sword fight with the suckers the cashier had given them.
After our trip to the store, we headed home, and the kids had asked for an indoor picnic, so I obliged. We made sandwiches and put out the whole picnic spread in the dining room.
After that, the kids wanted to play superheroes, so upstairs we went. The kids each fielded the calls for help…first, the trouble was ghosts, and next, the trouble was monsters. In both cases, Henry held up his arm and said, “Superheroes, to the rescue!”
Then we’d run around the halls, chasing the various ghosts and monsters, meeting up afterward to tally how many we’d captured.
I lasted maybe a half hour, and had to take a break. The kids did their own thing for a while and later wanted to play outside in the snow.
They asked if I wanted to join them, and while some, much younger part of me would have been all about that, this much, much older version was just feeling beat by the end of the day.
Turned out taking a little rest after the superhero ghost/monster chase just destroyed any inertia I had and I was pretty dead to the world after that. I did pull it together to make a nice dinner of baramundi and roasted veggies, but after that, it was taking the kids to bed, doing a little writing and off to sleep. At least I could drift off knowing the place was free of monsters and ghosts.
