Stress

I walk into my office and shut the door. I am mad and angry and there is no where to go with it. Mad at amateurs who tried to give me the equivalent of “throw strikes” advice and angry that I could not just brush them off. I want to sit under my desk and hide but instead I scan my office for something…looking…and then my cell phone rings. It is Aidan. He tells me he just got home from school and he sounds like he is in his normal cheerful mood. At once I am a bit more relaxed.

 
Elisa doing what I wanted to do.

Oh, Aidan has a cell phone. Yang got it for him after his first two weeks in his new school – Fangcaodi – so that he could call her when his school bus got close to home. Aidan likes quite a bit and is quite proud of it. He’s showed it off at his old school where Lydia continues to go. The phone itself was not much of an expense – we have four or five old cell phones lying around and the pre-paid card of 100 kuai will last him a while.

After Aidan’s first day at the new school he had a bad dream, talking in his sleep, and with a slight fever. The fever was gone the next morning, but we kept him home and he was relieved not to go to school. He went back the next day and came home tired. He started having these incidents at home where he was really angry and unreasonable. His whole face and demeanor would change and it would take him a long time to calm down. I felt it was either some developmental thing he was working through or it was related to the stress of the new school. His day now starts earlier – he boards a small school bus every morning at 6:45am and it takes a good hour before he reaches school. School is out at 3:30 but we had signed him up for after school activities three of the days. So, he would end up making it home around 7pm on these days. After his bouts of anger or frustration or whatever it was lasted more than a couple of days, we decided to pull him out of the after school programs at least until things smooth out. A week into it, his stress level seems to be lowering and he seems to be adjusting.

We signed up Lydia and Aidan for weekly soccer practice. Two weeks in, a couple of things are apparent. First, they both have their unique talents, Aidan as a dribbler and Lydia taking good angles to get to the ball. Second, Lydia is the only girl playing. This caused her to mope a bit.

Lydia told Yang a joke. A teacher is drawing an apple on the blackboard when all the students laugh. The teacher asks the students why they are laughing and they say because she drew a butt on the board. This causes the students to laugh even more and the teacher starts to cry. Just then the principal walks and sees the students laughing and teaching crying. “What’s going on here?”, he wants to know. The teacher starts to explain when he looks at the blackboard and says “now, which of you students drew the butt on the board?”.