Is The School Haunted?

A few months ago, Lady Di was nice enough to accompany her mother to the Mayo Clinic while she underwent some tests. This required an overnight stay for Lady Di, leaving me in charge of the kids.

First thing on the list was to let the kids talk me into going out to the Chinese Buffet for supper. As we sat in our booth enjoying our sweet and sour whatevers, a dad and his son sat in the booth next to us. Number One Son said, "Don't look, but that kid is kinda strange. He goes to my school."

And any parent of an Aspergers kid will know, that the act of N1S calling someone else strange is like Twitter calling Facebook a big waste of time.

So I looked.

"That's not a nice thing to say about someone.", I answered.

"He's always acting like a dinosaur in school, but I guess he's a nice kid.", N1S amended.

Then N1S got up and went over to talk to the kid which was a nice thing to do. It was great to see him use skills he has learned in his friendship groups at school. Aspergers kids usually have difficulty interpreting social cues, which makes initiating and maintaining friendships a challenge. Perhaps a kid who acts like a dinosaur in sixth grade could also use an extra friend to say hi at the buffet.

While N1S was gone, Sweet Pea turned to me and said, "I bet that kid likes to scare people."

"I suppose that's what dinosaurs do, huh.", I concurred.

"He probably hides somewhere and jumps out to scare people.", SP offered.

"Why do you think he does that?", I queried.

"Because he's the ghost of N1S's school.", was SP's answer.

After thinking for a minute, I realized what SP meant. I then explained that N1S said that the kid goes to his school, he's not the ghost of his school.

It seems that social cues aren't the only things that get misinterpreted in our family.