Hi! Tristan had a couple of weeks off from school, but school has resumed and all is well.
His behavior has been mostly la crapola. He’s apparently 4 going on 13, because his new thing is “let’s see if I can completely challenge my parents, not listen to shit they say, and still come away with all of my toys at the end.”
He has recently discovered our cats (you’d think he’d discover them slightly earlier, since we’ve had them longer than we’ve had him!) and that he likes petting them. Only he does not pet them the way an empathetic adult or older child might, releasing the cat once the cat appears upset. He tries to use cats as pillows, or he pets them hard enough to cure muscle pain a la The Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi rubs his hands together really fast. In any event, he has trained the cats to be kind of scared of him, which is a shame because when he gets it right, the cats love it. And we have shown him and shown him and even shown him how to pet a kitty so that the kitty will not run away. They put up with a lot of shit from me, since I sort of stim out over the cats as well. But once he has a cat locked in his sight, he tunes everything else out – especially requests to get the hell off of the cat. So, he loves the cats. But he won’t listen to us when we a) show him how to not piss them off and b) stop doing what he’s doing.
He has also discovered that rules are subjective and is calling bullshit on that. For instance, graffiti exists. It’s not covering everything where we are since we don’t live in Gang Central, but some of it exists. Tristan notices that there is writing on the wall. I explain that it was not ok to write on the wall and that whoever did it is in trouble. He takes that to mean that since someone once wrote on a wall, HE may write on a wall. Thankfully, he has not written on any of ours at home, but we take him to a drop-off day care place called KidsPark and he most certainly writes on their walls. (The supervision is lax enough that I WATCHED him writing on the wall, yelled back to him to stop it, watched other kids kind of ganging up on him telling him to stop it, and no adult intervened.) I can almost bet that he wrote “No write on walls” or similar on the wall.