January 15, 2005 - Saturday
This time we all went to the boys' swimming lesson together and it was great to see Harry doing so well and, even better, being so confident. During just his second 45-minute lesson he was already doing this: swimming without his teacher, Chrissy, holding onto him at all. Of course, he did have three styrofoam bubbles strapped to his back to help him stay up, but that is much less important to me than seeing him comfortable enough in the water to be excited about her not holding on. I guess it is like Harry to not want any help learning things, but he was so proud, and it was great.

Jeremy clearly loves being in the water, too, and that's also wonderful. But admittedly, at three he simply doesn't have the motor skills and isn't going to learn as quickly. It's enough that he is just getting comfortable being in the water so that when the motor skills for paddling with his arms and kicking with his feet do start to come around, he'll be in really good shape. On the other hand, he does seem to be doing well with the kicking. And he looked this happy the whole time.

This afternoon was Rip's birthday party and it was kind of rough. I suspect that it must have been all the anticipation of having his own party, but Rip's five-year-old emotions got the better of him. He broke down in fits of pique many times while we were there, overtly blurting out classic lines like "this is the worst birthday ever!" Of course in hindsight, that outcome really wasn't all that surprising. I'd worried about something like that happening if we would have had a larger birthday party for Harry. After all, a similar, if much less extreme, thing did happen to Harry on his third birthday when we had a larger group of people. We ended up not having a big party last month and I initially regretted it a little when Rip's mom started planning something special for Rip (she first talked about having as many as eight kids, although it was ultimately just four: Harry, Jeremy, and two other kids they both know). In hindsight, I feel kind of lucky that we did what we did for one more year.

There is another, more disturbing aspect of Rip's party for me. Rip and Harry are best friends by all accounts, including their own admissions, but Rip is the more outwardly demonstrative of the two and I've often worried that he tries to be controlling of Harry, if not manipulative. Last time we were there Harry's mother saw Rip's trying to get Harry to play with his slipper instead of any of his toys and that's certainly the kind of thing that was going on today. Rip was constantly trying to confiscate the toys Harry (and the other kids, but mostly Harry as best as I can tell) was playing with or criticizing the way he was playing with them. Much worse were the emotional jabs directed at Harry. For example, Rip yelled out "Harry ruined the song" after we all finished singing Happy Birthday and then burst out crying, didn't blow out his candles, and eventually was forced to leave the table. I think I understand what Rip might have been trying to say - I know they have a special cha-cha-cha way of singing Happy Birthday at their school and Harry probably either did or didn't sing it that way, contrary to Rip wanted - but Harry was just enthusiastically singing along with the crowd. In fact, Harry's was one of the first voices to join in at the beginning when the candles were lit. On the one hand it's just the silliness of childhood, but I can't help worrying that having a best friend tell everyone that Harry ruined his party probably didn't feel too good. I do suspect that because Rip has no siblings, Harry is the logical one upon whom Rip does much of his social experimenting and that's probably fine to an extent. Friends have to figure things out, too. But that's not the kind of friend Harry needs if it makes him feel less self-confident, as may have been the case this week with the baby sheet.

I do have to acknowledge that Rip's usual outwardly happy and confident demeanor is probably great for Harry, because that rubs off on him. But, I worry that might just make things worse when Rip unknowingly pulls the proverbial carpet out from under Harry. I did talk to Harry about the singing immediately, telling him he was very nice to have been the first one to start singing and that Rip was just being silly, and I talked to him about it many times through the rest of the afternoon. And he said he was fine and he understood Rip was just being silly. But who knows what's really going on in his mind. I think I might have taken something like that pretty hard when I was a kid.

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