More weird social behavior
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| Tue, 08-22-2006 - 3:30pm |
Hi. If this post sounds familiar, sorry. We had a similar issue a couple of months ago, and I started to write about it, although I don't think I posted.
David (8.5, AS) loves to pretend he is a baby, or play with his brother, who is pretending to be a baby...usually a baby dinosaur or space alien. There's a lot of "goo-goo ga-ga" stuff, and it's all just terribly cute.
That's why it surprises me that David keeps freaking out about every "babyish" thing our neighbor's 1.5 year old does. This little girl is the brother of Nathan's new friend, and they play outside often. The little girl is SOOOOOO cute, but every time she does something age-appropriate, like fall over or talk in anything other than The Queen's English, David just gets all weird. Yesterday there were a bunch of kids outside, with parents, and David was following this child all around, growling and gnashing his teeth at her, and pointing an accusing finger, saying, "Hey BUB!! You should know how to pronounce BICYCLE by now! So quit being so idiodical!" It seems like the more people are there observing, the worse he gets, too. Once in a while, he'd stop bugging her specifically, and go into "evil villan" mode. He'd go around stalking people and doing an evil, cartoonish cackle, "Whooo-ha-ha-ha-HAAAA!!!", and spinning around as if changing into a magical super-villan. When he's like that, it can escalate real quick into him wildly ripping leaves off of bushes, or scooping up handfuls of mud and throwing them.
I ended up telling him that he needed to go inside so we could have a little talk. Of course, he ignored me, so I had to announce that if he DIDN'T come inside, he wouldn't get to play computer games for two days. I can't imagine what I would have said if, for some reason, that priviledge was already gone. Anyway, leaving Nathan outside for the rest of the neighbors to look after, even though he was also being a handful, I explained to David how A) The Evil Villan stuff must STOP, and B) he could either let me help him find ways to socialize appropriately, or he could stay inside. He said he'd much rather stay inside, because he hates those people anyway.
Gosh, now I'm pretty sure I posted about this the last time he was doing similar stuff. I suppose it's nice to have occasional public displays of obviously atypical behavior, just so people won't assume it's merely bad parenting.
This is why I hate taking the two boys out anywhere without DH's help. If David gets like that at a playground or something, it's so hard to deal with. It makes me worry about how things will be on the school playground.
What fun.
Evelyn
