Up and Down Jack

I think sometimes we forget how much Jack has been through. Our move across the country was tough on us, but it was even tougher on him, and not because I made him drive (I thought about it) or handle setting up utilities and stuff. (The only thing he says into the phone is "Hi Ekan" and "Hi Grandpa.")

It was tough on Jack because we couldn't fully explain why suddenly he had a brand new room in a brand new house -- temporarily a basement at Aunt Cathy's, then our new rental house here. Why he was being taken out of day care in Colorado, and away from places he was used to going like Benny's and Hanson's. Okay, that might be stuff we miss more than he does, but the point is that there was a routine, it was everything he knew, and it was taken away, and we really couldn't explain it.

I mention this now because Jack had a very tough time at his new day care this past week. He cried when we dropped him off, he cried off and on in the morning, and we were told he cried at other times, and walked around saying "Daddy? Mommy?" Tough to think about, tough to write, and tough because we have to make day care work -- I can't really do my job otherwise -- so we'll be taking him again on Monday morning, and it will probably be hard all over again. So he didn't have a good time at day care, and (perhaps related) he wasn't his happy self most of the week, and he had one just awful night, Thursday, where we were all basically awake from midnight until 4 a.m., trying to soothe him, trying to let him cry it out, trying to sleep ... it was terrible.

The tough thing (among others) is you have to keep telling him how great it is, because it will be, once he gets accustomed to it. They do fun things, they run around, they go down slides in the indoor gym, he makes little friends, so on and so forth. And we need to tell him how great it is while knowing that right now he doesn't really want to be apart from any of us, and so he can't view it as a positive when his first thought is "Where Daddy go? Where Mommy go?" Yeah, it's brutal.

We forget how hard it is, because he is very resilient. As he has proved over the past two days, when he's been his happy self again. This morning we went swimming, and then he went to feed ducks with Grandpa, and apparently he played in leaves, and he came back and was happy, smiling, as happy as he's ever been. Doing all of his little cute things, sitting next to me on the couch and saying "Next to YOU!" And picking up the phone and saying "Hi Grandpa!" even though there's no one on the line, and when we DO have Grandpa on the phone, and put it next to his ear, he tends to say nothing at all, just listens and smiles. And he says "Thank you," in the cutest, sweetest little voice imaginable, and "Do puzzle, Daddy." And we go down in the driveway to play basketball, and he runs around with the happiest smile on his face, bubbling with laughter. It's the same after swimming, when we shower (we do this together, he enjoys it) -- he just laughs up a storm at the water pitter-pattering on his back.

I guess the point is that we forget sometimes that Jack's not always happy, and the hard part is that sometimes we need to do things that he's not going to be happy about. It's hard to do, and hard to live with. We just hope that some of them become things he is happy about, and we can make it work. Even if it's going to be really hard to get there.