Thursday, December 11, 2008

Skull and Crossbones Pajamas

I've been cruising the Internet for sleepwear for our young son, and came across a set of skull and crossbones pajamas from Gap, and all I can think is "What would his psychiatrist have to say about that?"

Do you remember the jokes we used to make, the beginners of the gayby boom, about how we wouldn't be saving up for college but for a therapy fund? Well... luckily, our son's psychiatrist is through the Kerr Early Intervention Program, and therefore paid for by you and me through our tax dollars, but we will be transitioning to a privately paid one next month, and we'll have only one more meeting with this one, who I met with yesterday to talk about our son's progress in kindergarten and his meds management.

Unfortunately, we often seem to get off the topic of his adjustment to his autism classroom and his time spent in a typical classroom, and onto our older son's occupations and obsessions. The time before yesterday was a long lecture on the brain damage caused by violent video games and the inadvertent messages sent to our youngest because of his brother's participation in same, even though he, the big guy, is forbidden to play them around his little brother.

Yesterday, when she good naturedly brought up the topic again, wondering if I'd gotten over my irritation over the lecture, I ended up sharing about our oldest son's newest obsession, playing zombies V. humans in our blacked out basement with nerf guns. Pretty harmless, huh, especially for seventeen year olds?

Apparently not harmless. No, our five year old doesn't play zombies V. humans and he's not in the blacked out basement during the game, but hearing about it secondhand is a "BAD IDEA" and may lead to fear of actual zombies in our basement. I'm sorry, even with his someone erratic notion of reality, he knows there aren't zombies in our basement.

Ghosts maybe...

I haven't brought up that his thirteen year-old sister's wardrobe exists almost entirely of shirts with skull images, or the collection of skulls from various animals we "hypothetically" might have as naturalists, but I hate to think what she might predict coming from pajamas with skulls and crossbones and little santa hats...

I think I'll pass on the pajamas.

1 comment:

Mo said...

I'm not a child psychiatrist, so I can't argue with the stated concern, but to ask your teens to change sounds unrealistic. From what you have written, they sound like thoughtful kids with good values. That seems more important than asking them to conform. Some of my students who can't think for themselves could use a little skull and crossbones...