Summer Check In And Updates

James Guttman 0:02

Hipod, it is me. It is James Gutman. Welcome back to another edition of the show. It is uh past the midway point of July. We're getting halfway through the summer. Apologies if that makes you sad. Uh, every Friday, back here on HiPodumDad.com, anywhere you find streaming services. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It has been it's been cool, man. My birthday was last week. I know you guys were here on the podcast. We talked about it, things I've learned, uh, things that I don't know, man, just change change who we are as we get older and we start to observe things and think about things. In fact, I wrote about that very subject in the blog on Monday. And you guys know hiblogomdad.com. Every Monday, new blogs talking about my life, my son, my kids, my daughter.

The Bed Lucas Destroyed

James Guttman 0:46

And um this week I wrote one that I guess is like you know, five years in the making, six years in the making. Lucas got pretty much a new bed, right? So for years, when we moved into the house after my divorce in 2020, I moved into the place I live in now, January 2021. And we've been here, it feels like five minutes, it feels like forever. I don't know which one, somewhere in between. And when we moved in, I got Lucas a new bed. So we got a new bed frame, a new mattress, new, I got everybody a new bed frame. Olivia got a new bed frame, new mattress, all that stuff. Hers is still pristine, six years later. It is, you know, she sleeps on it. What are you doing? Uh his, oh my God. I don't know. It was like Tasmanian Devil sleeping time. And I've written about it. My boy sleeps like a tornado. I called one. I don't know what he did. He would jump on the bed. I would listen. I would hear screws falling out of it. I'd be like, oh my God. Um, he broke on the box spring all the bars, right? When I say broke them, I don't mean like they came out a little bit because I went in, I fixed them. No, I mean like he snapped them like the karate kid. Like it was insanity, right? I'm trying to put it back together. I'm like, why isn't this? Oh, this is broken. Destroyed it. So he got a new box spring and I kept the mattress. But then I'm like, this mattress is gross. It's been six years. It's memory foam, which I think most people with young kids or kids with special needs know you don't really buy memory foam. Uh, you want to you want to buy forgetful foam if you have to get foam. Nothing that remembers um the horrible things he did here last week. And the bed had gotten to the point where the mattress was just pointless. Like he would lay on it, right? And the where he would lay on it, it would sink into the box spring. It was crazy. And he was like sinking like quicksand. But didn't care. Lucas is, I can't curse. I don't want to curse. Captain cool as hell. We can call him that. I call him sometimes the other thing. I got it from an old big brother episode. Captain Cool is Lucas. And uh he doesn't care. Lucas does not sweat things. Lucas is a no-seller in that he doesn't uh sell it. Like if something bad is happening, something he doesn't really, you can't see it in his face. He doesn't care. He's like, whatever. So I would send him to bed and he would just go to bed. And I would look, I'm like, he can't be comfortable. But he would fall right to sleep. And I'm thinking maybe he is comfortable, maybe he's cool like that. But I didn't want it anymore. I didn't want him to have that mattress. So I kept thinking I could buy him a new mattress, and I finally bought him a new mattress. And somebody outside my home, somebody who doesn't have a kid, like my son, will then say to me, Is he excited about his new mattress? Do you like it? I don't know, probably not. Doesn't care. Maybe he likes it. Oh. Was he complaining? Was he upset with the old one? Could he not sleep? No, I didn't care. So why the hell did you buy him a new mattress? Right? It's not what it sounds like.

When People Ask Why Bother

James Guttman 3:30

But you know what? At the end of the day, it falls into the same story that I've told before about taking him out to do things and how, and I've talked to people who are in marriages or in relationships where this is sometimes an issue, right? You have a kid like my son, nonverbal, profound autism, and you think to yourself, you know what, Lucas might like the circus. Let's all go to the circus. Now, if everybody is on board with, yeah, that's great, let's go to the, it's fantastic. But if you have a partner or somebody that you're with who doesn't think like that, someone who's like, why are we going to the circus? He doesn't even care anyway. He doesn't care about the circus. And you're trying to sell it, we're gonna go to the circle. No, it's fun, it's gonna be nice, we're gonna have fun. You then go to the circus, you drag him to the circus. Let's make this a little clearer. You're dragging him now because Lucas doesn't want to leave the house. Lucas wants to stay home all day, do nothing. Luke, we've got to go to the circus. Pull him into the car and he's crying, doesn't want to go. He get there, he doesn't want to get out of the car, he doesn't want to get his iPad. You're pulling him in, he's digging his heels into the gravel outside the in the parking lot. You're you're pulling him into the circus. And then you get there, and oftentimes I tell this story and it ends with, and then he loved it, and it was great. Sometimes you get there, he doesn't. So now you've driven an hour to a place you don't want to go to on the off chance your kid might like it, and everybody else is blaming you for choosing it. And that could be very frustrating. I'm not saying that's happened before. Maybe it did. I don't know. We don't go into detail. Um, and we had that. Lucas and I had that, and it depends on who you're with. And when I say it depends on who you're with, uh, about two years ago, I think I had written, or three years ago, um, for Lucas' birthday, me and Olivia took him to Sesame Street Live in Brooklyn. And I love Olivia. My daughter is, and I we don't talk too much about her on here. She is she's Captain Cooler as hell. You know, she's she doesn't let things bother her at all. Olivia knows sales things better than I do. Like things just kind of roll off her back. So we went out to Brooklyn for the Sesame Street thing, and Lucas did not like it. That's when I discovered that Lucas doesn't necessarily love Sesame Street, he loves starting and stopping certain videos, whatever. He doesn't really care about like Abby Kadabi or whatever. So we went and we laughed. Livia's like, we should go. I'm like, yeah, we so we left after like 20 minutes. Lucas was happy to leave. We went and got food, we took some pictures, it was cute. Um, that's the way you would want it to go. But sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you have the other person go, why did we even do this? Why didn't we come here? This is your stupid thing. I told you he doesn't even care. Why are we here? And that energy can destroy your will to do it again. Not even that, not even energy over fighting about going there at all. But even if you bring somebody who's who is apt to start fights or is apt to start arguments,

The Circus Problem And Partner Energy

James Guttman 6:16

that negative energy is in the air, everyone's on edge, it becomes such an issue. And the one thing these things all have in common is that the person who's bringing the negative is not focused on Lucas or the kid with special needs who's going here to try out if he likes it. And the bed is the exact same way. Many people in my position would not have gotten him a new mattress, they wouldn't have gotten him, maybe a new box spring because that was like freaking ridiculous. But the mattress, no. Because he doesn't care. Why does he care? Lucas doesn't care. Why does he need that? And what's funny is that the title of the blog came very close to being one that summed it up much better than what I had on there, but it was too visceral of a headline. I felt like when I read it and when I heard it, I thought to myself, like, ugh, makes me feel bad. So the headline that we ended up using was my nonverbal son's silence isn't permission to do less, which is nice. The original title was that it's easy to accidentally neglect him. And it is. And that's one of the things that's something that I as a parent try to remind myself of, right? Um, I'm not patting myself on the back for buying him a mattress. That's not something to pat yourself on the back about. You're supposed to do that for all your kids. You know, you take care of your kids. I'm grateful that I didn't get complacent with him. I'm grateful that there was a point in his life where I realized just because he's not asking to go to the circus doesn't mean he doesn't get to go to the circus. Lucas gets to do everything everyone else does. Now, as he's gotten older and I figured out well, he likes this, he doesn't like that, and things that we could figure out. But we still try things all the time. New foods, new activities, new toys, new places. I take him to new places. I want to take him to the beach coming up. He hasn't been to the beach since he was like tiny. You know, we've gone to um we've gone to the beach, like to walk on the beach, but he's never really gone for a beach day, sitting on the beach and whatever, playing. So I might do that. But there's a part of me, right? Because to me, the beach is like the circus. I don't necessarily go to the beach. I'll go at night. There's I'm on Long Island. If you don't live on, you know, go to the beach, you're kind of wasting your money. But I go, I go at night, I go with friends, I go with people I meet. We go to this, there's this clubs on the beach, there's a place out in, you know, Lindenhurst, and it's like you're right on you know the beach itself. So you can go get a drink, you sit, you watch the water, it's nice, it's calming. But the kind of beach day that you take with a kid is different. That's the kind of day where you bring towels and you got sunscreen and there's like a sandwich in the bag. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of worry, even when you have a kid who is not, you know, on the autism spectrum. So to bring Lucas is a scary thought. On top of it, on top of it, I'm still haunted by the memories of other times I've taken him to the beach. And a lot of us, in my position, feel the same way. And again, I've written about it, and I've always tried to like phrase it as that like I forget who he is, right? Like in my head, I forget that these experiences that he had that might have been negative were from when he was like five, six, seven years old, and he's now 15. So we took him to the to the beach like a decade ago, feels like yesterday. And I remember he just wanted to run because Lucas was a runner. He ran everywhere, and he kept running underneath the docks where there was all like the broken glass and the shells. I'm like, oh my God. And we had to keep going out there to rescue this boy, and he was so fast, you know. Oh my god, he's so fast. So my head, I'm like, I can't bring it on the beaches in here. And I'm like, wait a minute, that was a different kid. So I make myself do this. Am I gonna do it this week? Maybe not. Am I gonna definitely try to do? Yes,

Silence Is Not Permission To Do Less

James Guttman 10:05

definitely gonna try to do it. But it's the same process, the same idea of he might like it, but he also might hate it. And then it becomes a frustrating day for me, with no reward other than the fact that I now know he doesn't like the beach. But we still do it. And if you're listening to this podcast right now, if you're one of the people who tune in every Friday, if one of these people who writes to me on social media or of course on the on the blog itself, I know you're not the type of parent who doesn't do those things. Um and it's it's it's funny, but one of the things, like I I try to respond to all the messages I get from everybody. If you guys write to me, I always try to respond. Uh, it gets hard sometimes on on Facebook or whatever. We get I try to like all the comments if I can and respond to people. But people email me a great deal. I get a lot of emails, and I always try to write back something. Um but one of the things that I've been writing from the beginning to people, and it's so funny because it's not, it sounds like a line, it sounds like some sort of, and it's not. It's it's something I remember writing to somebody early on in the blog where they wrote to me, you know, I was reading your blog, and I'm so worried that I'm failing my son, and you know, I I try to do these things for him, and I forgot. And sometimes it'll be tied into either something that I did, you did this, I didn't do that with them, or just simply like I get so worried. And I get said, I go, listen, I'm like, I know that you're a good parent because you care. Because if you didn't care, you wouldn't be reading a blog about raising a child like this. Like you care enough to go online and look it up and do whatever. So I know a lot of the people on here listening to this are in my boat where it's like we're doing these things for our kids. Sometimes it feels thankless. Sometimes we wonder, like, is it worth it? Should it be this? Should it be that? And I'm telling you, just from my own experience, it is so worth it. And it's worth it because he notices, right? Like he doesn't need to love the things we do, but he knows that I'm bringing him places. He knows that he's included in the conversation, even making him

Beach Fears And Letting Kids Grow

James Guttman 12:09

put down that iPad, which he hates in the moment. I know that he knows that he's putting down that iPad because he's a part of this, as opposed to just sitting by himself in his room or in the car seat. Um, he's not a car. Why did I say car seat? He's older now. Um, or you're maybe your kids in a car seat. Maybe that's why I said that. But regardless, like sitting in the back and kind of just being left to his own devices. Like he knows he's a main character in my house. He's a main character in my life. He's a big part of everything that we do. And we love him and we include him. And that's why you do it, man. That's why you buy the mattresses, that's why you take him to the circus. It's to remind him. I'm your dad, I love you. And I'm doing these things for you. And if you hate it, we'll leave. But you gotta try. That's what we're doing. So, yeah, I don't know, man. Once we do the beach, you're gonna see pictures, you're gonna see all that stuff anyway. So don't sweat it. So if like we hit September and you haven't seen beach pictures, you could definitely be like, yo, where are the beach pictures? And uh, and then I'll beat myself up about it. But no, but you're we're gonna go to the beach, I'm telling you. Maybe this week I'd like to uh do something fun with this kid. That does it for me, guys. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for all your support. Follow me on social media. Hi, James Gubman, H I James Gutman, two Ts. Uh, find me on Hiblogomdad.com, hi podomdad.com. Uh buy the book, Hi World I'm Dad. It's it's all about dad. Until next time. This is James Gubman saying, be well. Bye, Pod. I'm dad.