Misadventure

Yesterday my younger son got angry with his older brother and pushed him off a wall onto the back lawn. It hurt. Elder son retired inside and waited for the pain to go away. It didn't. Gentle inspection convinced me that it was probably a cracked collarbone. Off to the after hours surgery went we, and I was surprised to find how little the pain was affecting him, so long as he had somebody to talk to. A lovely lady in the waiting room listened as he regaled her with stories about his baby sister, and our cats, and his grandparents, and the paint we just bought from the paint shop to paint a big rock in our yard.... it seems that a busy mind is a happy mind for our 5-year-old. The doctor was quite surprised at how chipper and chatty he was, considering the severity of the break.

Today was a very quiet day. We have not had a very quiet day since A. was taken away for the day to a family bach up the coast at Waikawa. He spent most of the day today on the couch watching cartoons and on the computer playing games (although he did help me with some gardening).

Most recently he has been using a site online called Busy Things to which we have access through our Christchurch City Library membership. It's something that both the boys enjoy and one is generally happy to observe while the other plays. It has a lot of literacy, numeracy, problem solving and so forth and one of the better activities for our elder son is an art sandbox, which allows him to putter and play in a fairly unrestricted way. He has a tendency to avoid artistic pass-times if they are too complex, difficult to get the results he wants, or just too fiddly.

Our younger boy has been enjoying singing along with alphabet songs while his brother plays. He doesn't know all his letters yet, but he recites the last part of the alphabet fairly well, and knows that "zed" comes after "wye". He can find an A for his brother, and S for himself, an M for his sister, and "K for Mummy!"
He seems to think that both 6 and 9 are called "six!" and that counting goes: "1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 6, 4, 2, 3, 6..." He also likes "eleven", "fourteen", "sixteen" and occasionally "one hundred!"

I've spoken to my younger boy about what happened to A. I asked him if it was scary and he said it was, and that he had gotten angry and pushed him. In such situations he normally says "I not going to do that ANY more!" but this time he told me that he might push his brother again on a different day. We'll have further dialogue on this subject, I am sure, but I'm not going to try and make him feel sorry for something he doesn't regret. The more he sees his brother in pain the more he will get an understanding of what happened and I'm sure empathy will come in time. Whether this translates into actual remorse remains to be seen. Sounds like he was pretty ticked off at the time and may well feel justified.

With one son walking wounded we may have a lot more screen time that we had planned for.. but we also have a huge pile of library books too - some stories, some interesting non-fiction stuff, and some in other languages... so that should be fun, if it's distracting enough.