I talked a little with Rob last night about romantic presents.

Oh! And I want to interrupt myself to mention something that is working really well for us: the concept of Dinner Helper. Each week, one of the two big kids is in charge of emptying the dishwasher (the weekly system was developed when we got tired of trying to figure out whose turn it was)

Oh! I want to interrupt my interruption! We have a useful way to remember whose turn it is with anything that involves (1) two kids and (2) taking day-based turns (for example, when two kids are taking turns setting the dinner table, or taking turns getting the first bath/shower, or taking turns choosing bedtime books). Here is the system: one kid is odd, and the other is even. Then as long as you know the date (iffy, I realize, but it can be discovered through research), and as long as everyone goes into it knowing the Odd Kid occasionally gets two days in a row (the 31st of a month followed by the 1st of the next month) and that this is a Good Example of How in Life Things Are Not Always Perfectly Fair, then you get to STOP ARGUING about whose turn it was yesterday! Instead you get to argue about which child is odd and which is even!—no, what we did was figure out a way to remember it. For example, if one child’s name has an odd number of letters and the other child’s name has an even number of letters, or if one child’s birth day/month is odd and the other child’s is even.

Back to the original interruption. Okay, so we do the dishwasher-emptying chore by weeks instead of by days, so each week one kid is Dishwasher Child. The OTHER kid is the Dinner Helper and has to help whichever adult is making dinner IF the adult wants help. Many nights, I’d rather be by myself in the kitchen. But some meals are more work, or some evenings we need to move faster, so then I have a Dinner Helper available.

At first, as with ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT PARENTING, having a dinner helper was more work than it was worth: I had to tell the kid EVERYthing, while ALSO doing my own work. Times two, because I trained both big kids. (The littler ones are seriously too much trouble to be worth it for me right now. I work on the philosophy of “Wait until it’s PAST the time they’re trainable for a particular task, and then it’s way easier to train them.”)

But at this point, now that we’ve been doing it awhile, it’s so worth it: I have my tasks and the Dinner Helper has his tasks, and the unexpected benefit is that it’s also Talking Time. The Dinner Helper does not always want to talk, and that works just fine too: we listen to the radio either way. But I’ve noticed all the kids seem to hover below their Preferred Attention-Getting Level, so generally there is talking.

Back to the original topic: this is Rob’s week to be Dinner Helper, and he asked if I had anything to talk about (we sometimes save issues just for Dinner Helper time), so I took the opportunity and I asked about The Girl and whether he was interested in dating her. He said that he HAD been: that the two of them had circled around the topic a bit, with her initiating the conversations about whether they should date—but then she started dating someone else, so he figures that’s a pretty clear indication that she came down on the side of no. He asked why I’d asked, and I said that a couple of his gifts to her recently had been of a sort that could SEEM romantic. He pointed out the girl is one of his two best friends, and that he had given similar gifts to his other best friend (also a girl). He said he likes to think of himself as a good gift-giver and so has been working on that.

So there we have it. I take anything a teenager tells me as The Official Press Release. That is, I’m not assuming this is the entire, complete, accurate story; I’m assuming this is the version I get with my Parent-Level Security Clearance.

Rob wrote a girl a fugue for Valentine’s Day. This is a girl who is a good friend of his, a girl who is dating someone else right now. I was uncertain how much I should Explain Things, and how much I should let teenaged life take its course. I went with completely the latter. I remember grown-ups explaining dating/romance/social stuff when I was a teenager, and how silly they sounded—and, frankly, how silly they STILL sound to me now that I’M a grown-up.

Anyway, I caught myself thinking, “He wrote her a FUGUE? How can she resist that?” Then I realized I was absolutely feeding into that mentality I HATE AND FEAR about how someone can be awesome enough to deserve someone else’s love (or friendship, if that’s what’s being sought). Like, if someone is REALLY NICE and REALLY GREAT and does REALLY NICE THINGS for you, you OWE them your romantic love (or, again, friendship, but I’m going to drop that part of the theme here and concentrate only on the romance one). I totally see how that point of view gets started (“But the guy she’s dating isn’t as great as Rob! Look how great he is!”) AND simultaneously totally see it as ridiculous and potentially very dangerous.

When I was in high school, a boy drew a portrait of me (using my yearbook photo as the model), and gave it to me all wrapped up. He’d worked on it for AGES. It was a very romantic and special thing to do. But I didn’t have any romantic feelings for him, so his offering, his gift, his effort—they didn’t elicit the reaction in me that they would have elicited if I’d had a crush on him. Looking back on it now that I’m the mother in that set-up, I can see how someone from the outside (the boy’s parents, or the boy’s friends, or someone who had a crush on the boy) would think “He drew her PORTRAIT? How can she resist that? The guy she’s dating isn’t as great as this guy! Look how great this guy is!”—and potentially going from there to “She must be cold, she must be heartless, she must be awful, she must be…” etc. But that doesn’t WORK. That’s not how ROMANCE works. That portrait could have turned my heart if the potential feelings were already there, but it couldn’t MANUFACTURE those feelings.

That same boy once argued with me at length on the phone, because I was interested in his best friend but not in him. He considered himself and his friend to be enough alike that if I wanted to go on a date with one of them (I’d said yes to his friend), I should want to go on a date with the other of them (I’d said no to him). He thought this only made logical sense. (This argument would now set off HUGE red lights for me. At age 16ish I found it only exasperating and also somewhat flattering.) I think this is one of those situations where VAST BENEFITS can be achieved by flipping the situation around to make sure it still works: if he thought it only made sense that I should like his friend AND him, he should have thought to himself, “And does that work for me? Do I have a crush on HER similar-to-her friend? And would it work for someone to argue with me that I OUGHT to have a crush on someone I DON’T have a crush on? Do I think she is going to say, ‘Oh! You’re right! I guess I DO have feelings for you, then’?”

So. I have shifted from thinking things like “I would have LOVED a boy to write me a song in high school!” to thinking things like “I would have LOVED a boy I LIKE-liked to write me a song in high school!” Because actually I would not have loved it from a boy I DIDN’T feel romantic about. I want to make sure that that’s the mindset I’m passing on to Rob, too, in case his gift is not received as he may hope.

I can hardly believe it, but I bought the Dove Cream Oil lotion AGAIN. The last time I bought it, I found it smells like a combination of half a dozen magazine perfume samples. It’s not an unpleasant smell per se, but it smells to me like Someone Else’s Perfume, so that I kept catching whiffs and wondering what/whom I was smelling. I finally donated it. And then yesterday, I saw some on clearance and went through the exact same thing again: “Ooo, the expensive lotion at a good price, and I love Dove!” followed by “Oh yes: the magazine perfume samples” followed by donation bin.

It’s just so surprisingly perfumed! I wouldn’t even call it “scented,” I’d call it PERFUMED. Like, if that were my perfume, this would be an incredible deal on expensive perfumed lotion.

How is this for an abrupt subject-change: I have a question about composting.

Long, long ago, when Rob was a preschooler obsessed with the Magic School Bus episode/book about water treatment, we took him on a tour of our local water treatment facility. There, they told us that after all the stuff is removed from the water, it is put into giant composting thingies, and later sold.

So this is my question: Does this mean that if we put stuff down our garbage disposals, we are composting it? It sounds to me as if that’s what it means.

Well! We have finished Rob’s 50 hours of required driving-with-a-parent! We finished the last hours with an overnight road trip, which was fun and weird and we only went off the road twice.

That whole driving-hours thing was just not as bad as I’d thought it would be when we were doing the first few horrible boring hours in a parking lot. We ended up exploring our area quite a bit, which was fun.

Now he can test for his license, which I hope will ALSO not be as bad as expected. I really don’t think children should drive. It really seems like a terrible idea. They could be HURT OR KILLED, WHY DO WE LET THEM DO IT.

So that is one source of anxiety these days. A second is that I am so much jumpier about illness this winter. Normally I take it in stride: the kids are going to get sick, and everything is going to get passed around to all of us, and there it is. I focus on what good exercise it is for their immune systems.

This year, though, Edward is on medication for Crohn’s Disease, and what his medication does is suppress his immune system. Crohn’s Disease is, essentially, his immune system attacking his digestive system. They don’t yet know why the immune system does that in some people, and right now one of the only ways to stop it is to knock it semi-conscious. Dazed and sleepy, the immune system feels like it’s really too much work to attack the digestive system, and instead it goes away and takes a little nap.

Edward is doing extremely well on this treatment plan. His anemia has disappeared. He has color in his face; he’s still skinny, but he’s not so tired. He’s eating more. He doesn’t gag as much; he doesn’t throw up as much; he doesn’t have as many stomachaches and cramps; he doesn’t have to lie down after he eats. He’s growing.

So I don’t want to stop this medicine, obviously. But I do want to put a big shield around him, because his immune system is dazed and sleepy for ALL tasks: it’s not like we can say to it “Be chill about the digestive system—but be VIGILANT AND FIERCE about germs and viruses!” When actual germs and viruses come along, fully in need of being attacked, his immune system continues napping. A regular kid might get the flu and be pretty sick for awhile and then get better; with Edward, it wouldn’t be weird for it to end up with a hospital stay (or Worse, but let’s not turn our minds toward that; let’s pretend that “a hospital stay” is the farthest end of that particular spectrum)—which we desperately want to avoid because of all the scary germs and viruses THERE.

I get the flu shot most years, and I’ve gotten it for the kids, too, but I’ve never had a feeling of Intense Importance before this year. Normally Paul doesn’t get one (HATES needles, would FAR rather be sick for 6 weeks, isn’t sure he Believes In the flu shot), but this year he got one to help keep Edward safe: if someone in our household got sick, I don’t know how we could protect him. Normally I don’t care much if the flu shot turns out to be a good match for the strains of flu that show up; this year I CARE VERY MUCH. And unfortunately this year it’s NOT a good match.

It also emerged that Edward is not immune to varicella—that’s the virus that causes chicken pox and shingles. He got the two recommended vaccinations for it but, for whatever reason, they didn’t take. This is a highly unfortunate coincidence: that the child who Really Must Not Get chicken pox is the one who’s not immune to it. And he can’t redo the vaccinations (even if we were sure they would work this time, which we couldn’t be), because now that his immune system is suppressed, he can’t get any live vaccines, and the varicella vaccine is a live vaccine.

Luckily, most kids in our area get the varicella vaccination. The pediatrician said chicken pox used to be very common, and I remember that: EVERYONE had chicken pox. The only novelty was if you DIDN’T get it, or if you were one of those people who got it TWICE. Otherwise it was a big yawn. With the vaccine, it’s now quite uncommon; I don’t remember the last time I heard of it going around at school.

But of course not everyone is vaccinated. And, like Edward, some people get vaccinated but the vaccine doesn’t work. And, also like Edward, some people can’t get that vaccine.

And so herd immunity matters tremendously to me, and to Edward. We have to rely on our community to help keep him safe, and that can be a comforting, bonding, all-in-this-together feeling, as when I picture us all joining hands and making a circle to protect the weak and vulnerable members of our group: the little ones, the old ones, the sick ones. Or it can be a frustrating, helpless feeling: I can’t make anyone join hands. I can’t expect other people to get their children vaccinated to protect my child’s health. Why should they care about Edward? They don’t know him: he’s a theoretical child to them, just as their children are theoretical children to me. If their decision not to vaccinate their children is what ends up damaging (or Worse-ing) a theoretical child, how does that affect them? Not at all.

Most children can get chicken pox and be fine: I even remember reading an article about “chicken pox parties” where families would infect their kids on purpose to get it over with. Edward can’t get chicken pox and expect to be fine. He can’t get flu and expect to be fine. Even a cold might not be fine. I have to rely on other people to help keep him fine, and that’s a powerless feeling when I see how many people say no. I can’t make the decision to do what’s best for my kid; I have to hope other people will.

Theoretical child

After we watched The Sound of Music on New Year’s Eve, I got interested in Julie Andrews and have read a couple of books. The first was Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, written by Julie Andrews.

(image from Amazon.com)

I almost didn’t get past the first few pages, which are along the lines of “My great-great grandmother was born in…” It was hard to keep track of who was who (“Let’s see, so now we are talking about your mother’s father’s mother’s sister”), and seemed like the sort of information that would work better as a little picture of the family tree at the beginning, or distributed throughout the rest of the book only as needed for a particular story. But I was glad I persevered past the basic genealogy, because it got better after that.

As the title warns, this is only about her early years. It stops before The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, and before her divorce and remarriage. It covers more about her childhood and family, and her training, and her successes before the Big Success started happening, and generally how she got started.

I felt like she was trying to be fair, and also trying to be warm and personal and give some revealing details (I hadn’t realized it, but she has a reputation for being private, and hard to get to know). I do think she partially succeeds. But the book overall still had a feeling of “Everyone was just wonderful” plus “This is the material I use for interviews, plus some new personal stuff to balance my reputation for being withholding.”

Next I read Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography, written by Richard Stirling.

(image from Amazon.com)

My overall impression of this book is that even though it is packed full of numbers and names and quotes from articles, it was written from almost nothing. Julie Andrews does not appear to have cooperated, despite the author saying “Julie Andrews told me” at every single point he possibly could: it seems as if he’s trying to imply she told him for the purposes of the book, but that she didn’t. My guess is that if I bothered to look into it (can’t…quite…reach…Wikipedia…), I’d find that he was a journalist who did an interview or two with her for a magazine, or got a comment from her at a press conference, and used those few occasions to make it seem as if he is her official, chosen confidante/biographer. The rest of it seems written from articles and interviews and official records and things other people said about other things; there is very little about Julie Andrews HERSELF. Lots of “Rehearsals began on such-and-such a date, and here are several pages mentioning every single person involved with the project, and here are quotes about how a bunch of other people felt about the project, and here are a bunch of reviews, and a bunch of back story on people we don’t really care about, because otherwise this is not enough material for a book.” I did a fair amount of skimming.

This book does mention Julie Andrews’s divorce, but seeing the author try to tell the story is what shows how very private Julie Andrews must be: the author tries to write about it, but doesn’t have enough material to go on. There is a lot of fluffing up of the very few details known, and then suddenly we’re past that part and you think, “Wait…did I miss it?” I felt some sympathy for the author: I think he was stuck trying to write an account of a marriage/divorce based on nothing more than what was available from public court records. Lots of “It must have been,” very little “This is how it was.” Like if you imagine one of those celebrity couples saying “It was amicable, we remain the best of friends,” and now someone wants you to write a chapter from that about what the marriage was truly like and what happened to it and who was at fault and how each person felt about it.

This continues in the descriptions of her second marriage (to Blake Edwards), her step-parenting of her second husband’s two children, and her adoption of two children. The author is TRYING to give us the scoop, but he doesn’t know it either. He’s got the publicly-available information, and that’s it. Miss Grace and I were talking about it afterward, and agreed that both of us REALLY ADMIRE celebrities who manage to keep their private lives separate—while simultaneously wishing WE PERSONALLY had access to the details.

I ended the book feeling quite low. If you’d asked me beforehand, “Do you think Julie Andrews has had a nice life and good career?,” I would have said yes. But it felt as if the book highlighted every disappointment, every poor review, every not-quite-a-roaring-success project. And her marriage to Blake Edwards could have been a spectacular marriage in nearly every way, but I ended up with the impression that he was a very difficult person who ruined her life trying to further his own career.

But of course it’s all SPIN. When I looked up one of the projects the book describes as an unmitigated disaster, I see that many people considered it a huge creative success even though it wasn’t a huge financial success. When there were a bunch of negative reviews quoted, I wondered what percentage those were of the total number of reviews: were we getting a representative sampling, or was the author choosing the quotes that further the plot as he’s decided to tell it? When the author uses the verb “confessed” instead of the word “said,” is he accurately representing the situation or is he making us feel something that isn’t true? (This is the problem with all biographies, not just THIS biography.) It also made celebrity/fame very unappealing, but that’s a nice thing to be reminded of from time to time.

All of it was a reminder that there is something that makes some of us want to know more about celebrities—but that we can’t actually have that information. All we can have is what is produced when other people (including the celebrity) see a want and try to fill it.

I am assorted cranky this morning. There was a long series of events starting with Rob texting me that the bake sale was TODAY instead of tomorrow (luckily for him, this was not his error), and me being thankful I’d done the baking already but worried because I’d put everything in the freezer because I made it ahead of time, but fine, no big deal, I will just drive it all over to the school, everything will thaw. Except…where is my key? It is not on my keyring. Paul borrowed my keys yesterday, so probably my key is in his pocket. But the keyring is all bent, so perhaps my key is more lost than that. And then the genius realization that we made Rob a copy of our car keys, to give him when he gets his license! Whew! Saved! Except…the copy does not work. HOW CAN THIS BE? WHY DID WE NOT TEST IT?? ARE WE NEW HERE??? Anyway, my parents have a spare so my dad drove over and gave it to me and I took the stuff over to the school.

Really, when I type it out it doesn’t sound nearly as exasperating and thwarted-at-every-turn as it FELT. Partly is that I am trying to be brief because this is not the INTERESTING kind of dramatic event, so I left out things like “And then I realized I couldn’t go yet because it was almost time to bring the littler ones to the bus stop” and, like, the part where I emailed my dad, then emailed him to say never mind because I’d remembered the spare key, then had to email him again to say the key didn’t work; and partly it is that it all ended well with the baked goods at the bake sale, so I’ve lost the urge to communicate the FRANTIC PANIC.

Another issue is that my baby names blog is down. Just…down, since at least yesterday. I can’t even get to the dashboard. And I just recently gave access to that blog to a place that does one of the plug-ins, so they could fix their polls that stopped working when I updated to the new version as requested, so I’m wondering if that is connected to this problem and, if so, how serious the fall-out is going to be. I have copies of all the posts, but dear heaven that would be a chore. Well, maybe the blog will pop right back open today, with all the polls working again too! Wouldn’t that be nice! La la la!

Also, I bought a new chair to replace the one that had duct tape holding it together, and it’s a nice chair but I didn’t give any thought to the upholstery, which is a cool grey-blue or blue-grey, and I don’t think it’s going to go with anything else I will ever like. And I am JUST ABOUT to replace our two stuffing-bursting-out recliners, so perhaps it would have been nice to consider the upholstery. Also, I ALWAYS choose bad upholstery. ALWAYS. When we bought our couch, I thought we were choosing a daring fiery multicolored orange and red, but it turns out it’s the standard wine-color, which I dislike even though it’s convenient for spilling wine. Well. Let’s just not think about that. Let’s certainly not turn this into a series of thoughts about ALL past furniture errors and all future likely ones. La la la.

Also, my blog is doing this annoying thing where it asks me to log in while I’m in the middle of typing a post. Then it goes back to the post as if everything is fine, but EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE, and when I try to publish/save the post, it says “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again,” and when I try again, it brings me to a BLANK POST. Luckily I am now in the habit of copying the whole post when this happens, but isn’t that annoying? Isn’t that something that SHOULDN’T HAPPEN? Well, it just DID happen. AGAIN.

Oh, and one more thing is that I heard that song about “with every broken bone, I swear I lived,” and I am very tired of the concept that “living life” has to be measured in units of DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES.

It is time to do an update on parenting a teenager, because I think the last update I gave was when Rob was in the worst part of the transition and I, as my brother remembered it recently, was wishing that either I or the children had never been born. I felt it had been a giant mistake to have children. I felt tricked by biology into doing something completely against my lifetime best interests in exchange for the very brief and pleasant and IRRELEVANT TO THE REST OF LIFE cute stage. It felt like the worst bait-and-switch of all: this PERSON didn’t seem anything like my BABY. I could feel the other four wolves in sheep’s clothing children coming right up behind this awful one, and I didn’t know how we were going to make it through without ruining our lives.

My plan was to find all those posts and link to them, but once again I regret my apparent inability to grasp the use of helpfully descriptive post titles. Here are a few samples I found by searching for the word “teenager” in the year Rob was 13: This is a Stage That Will End; Biological Set-Up; Wan. (I would have SWORN a post called I Didn’t Sign Up For This would be another, but that one turns out to be a PTA complaint.)

The update is that things feel better now. MUCH better. I remember MomQueenBee saying something about each child having One Terrible Teenage Year, and me trying not to hope too hard that it was true. I’m not sure how long it DID last, and it’s not as if everything is lovely lovely all the time lovely NOW, but feelings of regret and questions about our survival have passed off, and it DOES seem like it lasted about a year. And in fact, things are so much better, I now think of the teenager years as one of my Preferred Stages. Like, some people love toddlers but dislike the Newborn Slug stage, while others are the opposite; it turns out that, at least with THIS teenager, teenager is another stage I like better than others.

What I didn’t like was the TRANSITION from Older Child to Teenager. We need a word for that, because I was thinking of that as “teenager,” and it kind of IS teenager, but it also ISN’T. Oh, I guess the word is “puberty,” but I think that’s kind of a gross word, the way some people feel about the word “moist,” and also, puberty can last for years and include several years of non-awfulness, whereas the transition to teenager doesn’t seem to line up with that. I think Transition to Teenager is an okay term, and I’ll just use that for now. Especially since I don’t think I need to talk about it anymore, except to say I hated it to the point where I really, no-exaggeration-for-comic-effect, genuinely wished I hadn’t had children. I say this so that if you get to that point and you feel the same way about it, you won’t feel like you’re the only one, and it may give you hope that it may not be a permanent regret.

But I feel like I also need to specifically clarify that all this surprised improvement doesn’t mean everything is great all the time, even though I know you know that. We have a 6-foot-tall child who sometimes doesn’t realize his voice and strength are now grown-man-sized, and that he needs to be careful how he uses them. He of COURSE thinks we are kind of stupid about a lot of things. He of COURSE thinks we are unreasonable about a lot of things. There are a lot of times when he acts like he has the worst case of PMS I’ve ever seen. He can be super sensitive about things, or super full of himself about other things, and there are still sometimes discussions where I feel like I’m defusing a bomb, and other discussions where I feel like everything was going fine and suddenly I stepped on a mine. But all this is as if I said I loved the newborn stage, which I do, and then clarified that I don’t love blow-out diapers, or when the baby spits up a whole feeding all over me and the recliner at 2:00 in the morning, or when the baby cries and cries and I can’t figure out what’s wrong: of COURSE those things happen, and of COURSE I don’t like them. Every stage has the parts we don’t like, even if we like the stage.

And I do like this stage. I’d rather try to figure out whether he’s allowed to go to the movies with a girl than to figure out if he can have a playdate at a house where the mom expects me to stay and talk to her. I’d rather make rules about curfew than bedtime. I like how little I’m involved now in his homework and his toothbrushing. Little kids say MUCH cuter things than teenagers do, but the trade-off is that teenagers tend to talk on topics I find more interesting. I like when we’re in the car on one of our trips, and he starts a conversation about why people say not-true or not-necessarily-true things (“Boys/Girls suck!” “Girls/Boys only like you until you like them!” “You were too good for him/her!” “He/She is going to be sorry!”) as comfort after a break-up. It’s fun when he says, “Oh, by the way, Josh is dating Abby now,” and then we talk about who Abby used to date, and how it is that all Josh’s exes are friendly with him even though he has so many of them.

This is also an update on student driving, because I think the last time I talked about that, the word “hate” was involved, and the tone of the post contained considerable despair. But after the first five hours or so (during which time he also had a couple of hour-long sessions with the driver’s ed teacher, which don’t count toward the 50 hours the parents have to do), things improved considerably, so that now I don’t really mind doing it.

And here’s the unexpected part: it’s been 35 hours so far of spending mostly-pleasant quality time with a teenager. We drive for an hour or so, then stop for lunch, then drive another hour or so. He’s good enough at it now that I can look out the window for the scenery as well as for Potential Death. There’s chatting. There are tacos. We decide where we feel like driving, and we go there; the other day, we went to a beach we’d never been to; another day, we drove past the exit we always take, just to see where a highway went after that. It’s a nice time, and that’s not something I expected when we were still driving agonizingly around a parking lot at 5mph.

Another thing I want to update is the social situation. Back when Rob was in 5th grade, I wrote a post about how he said he felt he was “the chosen one”: the kid who always got picked on and excluded. In middle school, sometime in 6th grade, this started to resolve: he made friends with a very social, outgoing, large-friend-network person—or more accurately, that person made friends with him. So then Rob started meeting other people in that group. Meanwhile, a child he’d had to be separated from in 4th grade because the teacher said they could not keep from arguing if they were within 6 feet of each other, turned out to be a “we fought because we were so much alike” type, and they became good friends, and THAT person was friends with OTHER people and THOSE people became Rob’s friends too. And also when he started middle school, there were extracurriculars other than sports, so he joined some of those and made more friends that way. (I wish they’d have some of these non-sport clubs in our elementary school, too: it seems like a shame that kids who play soccer can start bonding in kindergarten, but kids who like math or drama or debate have to wait for sixth grade.) So now he has a very nice central friend group, and also a number of specialized friend groups, and as far as I know he doesn’t get teased anymore than anyone else does.