The video blog isn’t happening this week, but I will have a little something something for you later this week. It’ll be a video, but it won’t be a video blog. What could it possibly be? Tune in to find out!

I’ll be heading out of town to go to a friend’s wedding tomorrow, so the video blog probably won’t go up until Sunday at the earliest. Sorry, everybody.

We had a huge meeting today about David at his school. I must have met ten different people – principals, assistant principals, teachers, aides, specialists, etc, etc, etc. We had to answer a lot of questions about his behavior and development level in order for them to set up a program for him, and it turns out that he’ll have to move to another local school in order to get the attention he needs.

It was a very emotional, stressful, overwhelming experience. Emotional? Yep. I’m biased because I’m his dad, but I swear, I’ve never met a sweeter child. He has no guile in him. He’s not jealous of his younger sister, nor does he pester his older sister just to be mean. I don’t think he even knows what a lie is yet. Everyone at his school loves him. So his teacher broke down crying when she was told David would be leaving her class, which caused my wife to start crying. So the meeting boiled down to long stretches of having lots of technical jargon dumped on us punctuated by someone starting to cry.

The thing is, even in the six weeks since he started at his current school, my wife and I have noticed a marked improvement in both his speech and his behavior. The combination of a more structured environment and other children to interact with has already been very good for him. I can ask him a question now and there’s a good chance that he will answer it, instead of simply reflect it back to me. I’m grateful for what his current teachers have done for him, and I’m eager to see how much he will improve in a specialized curriculum.

Some people were complaining that they weren’t able to leave comments. After much hair-pulling (and a reinstall of the WordPress software), this has been fixed…I think. Pretty sure. No, really, it should be.

Sorry about the brief updates, but we’ve less than two weeks to go on our project here at work and the hours are long. I’ve got a surprise for you guys coming in the mail, and I will have another video blog for you Saturday night. So stuff’s gonna happen, just stick around.

You’ll have to forgive me. I am proving yet again that I’m just too boring a person to have a blog.

Actually, a lot happened to me in these last two weeks, it’s just that very little of it was related to game development. My son David started school last week.

I guess it’s time for me to come clean about my son. He has a mental problem of some sort; we’re not quite sure what it is. The best guess is mild autism. It took him a long time to learn to talk and it took us forever to get him potty trained.

Side story: My wife and I finally got fed up when he turned three and wasn’t potty trained yet. We decided one night to just sit him down on his training potty and not let him get up until he went in it. We both had to sit there and make sure he didn’t run away; it was frustrating for everyone involved though we tried our best to keep it positive. Eventually, David pointed at my wife and said, “YOU change the diaper!” which I think is the first complete sentence we ever heard him say. My wife and I were very surprised, but we recovered and told him, “No, David, you’re a big boy now, no more diapers.” While we didn’t get him to go that night, it was definitely the breakthrough experience for him because he started going in the potty regularly just a few days after that, to our great relief.

The interesting thing is that he learns new stuff every single day. He just turned five about a month ago and he just started kindergarten, but he knows all his shapes, all his colors, what colors combine to make other colors, his entire alphabet, all his numbers at least up to twenty, and even all his planets (I haven’t had the heart to tell him about Pluto). He also draws better than I’ve ever seen a five-year-old draw – when he draws eyes, he actually draws ovals and then puts pupils in them, and both eyes are always looking in the same direction. So it’s kind of frustrating that we can’t seem to get him to understand that he needs to put his pants back on when he’s done using the bathroom.

If he didn’t have the social problems he has, he would definitely be considered a bright child. But it’s impossible to have a conversation with him. If you ask him a question, the odds are good that he will simply repeat the question back to you instead of answering it. He uses words to make himself understood, but it’s usually just one word or a short phrase (“Drink!” “Hot dogs!” “Blue’s Clues!”). Despite our best efforts, we haven’t been able to get him to understand the concept of “not yours” or the concept of “dangerous”. He has actually gotten out of the house a couple of times by waking up before anyone else and figuring out how to unlock the front door – we finally had to put a double-deadbolt on the front door (so that you need a key to get in AND to get out) in order to put a stop to that, because no matter what kind of latch we put on the door he figured out a way to unlatch it, and no matter what we put in front of the door he figured out a way to move it. Needless to say, that was a very scary time for us.

Now he’s started kindergarten. We told his teacher before he started that he was going to be a handful. Fortunately, she realized right away that she was going to need some help with him. The special education teachers examined him and were very surprised at everything he knew (especially when he started drawing). They’re actually excited to work with him. It’s obvious that David learns very easily, it’s just a matter of teaching these concepts to him in ways that he can understand. They believe that there’s a good chance they can get him caught up socially this year, so that when he starts first grade next year he’ll be able to go to a normal class.

You have no idea how relieved I was to hear them say that.

And fortunately, our youngest doesn’t appear to be having the same problems David did.

My son David has always been kind of skinny. It’s been a bit of a concern for me and my wife for a while…even though he seems to eat a lot (and eat a lot of protein), he always looks a little underweight.

He recently had to have some shots, since he’s starting kindergarten this year. So we took him to the doctor. The nurse weighed him and measured him and then told us, “Well, he’s in the seventy-fifth percentile for his weight…”

I was aghast. “He only weighs seventy-five percent of what he should?”

“Oh, no, oh, no!” she laughed. “That means he weighs more than seventy-five percent of five-year-olds.”

“So he’s actually over the normal weight? Why does he look so skinny, then?”

“Well, because he’s in the ninety-fifth percentile for his height.”

I was stunned. He doesn’t look skinny because he’s underweight, he looks skinny because he’s about six inches taller than the average five-year-old! And he just turned five two weeks ago!

Needless to say, I was relieved.

I’m not a big user of RSS, so I hadn’t noticed that my site’s feed was broken until a friend at work told me. It should be fixed now, but the fix involved upgrading the site to the most recent version of WordPress, so some other things might have gone wibbly.  If you see any problems, please let me know.  One additional benefit of this is that I might be able to get this site listed on an aggregator like Qatfish.com now.