Shopping with the master of disaster.

So, we were shut in most of the day yesterday between the annoying drizzle of rain and the low (for here) temperatures. Lucas, my sweet little idiot, was all ramped up on energy because the apartment really isn't big enough for him to safely release any. (When he starts things break. Or get annoyed. Or both. It all really depends on the sentience levels in question.)

Finally, after dinner, and after a few hours without rain, I'd had enough. After having browbeaten Joan for long enough we finally left the apartment as a family to take a longish walk.

Lucas has a new game, incidentally, that causes heart stoppage in the adults in his life. It follows these steps:

1. Run full-tilt down the sidewalk.
2. Suddenly collapse to his knees.
3. Follow that up with collapsing to the ground in a sprawl.

He loves it and plays it endlessly while we look on in shock (the first few times) and annoyance (Joan and her mother) or laughter (me).

This is where shopping enters the picture. While we were out, we walked past a small supermarket. I'd been there lots before but Joan and her mother had never stopped in. Since we needed some vegetables, Joan's mother decided to go check it out. (It turns out that some things are available there cheaper than the usual haunt.) I took Lucas inside partially for warmth and partially for the sheer fun of it.

Lucas, in his inimitable fashion, and after the initial wariness of someplace new, took to the place like carassius auratus auratus takes to oxidane^[1]. He ran up and down the (very narrow) aisles happily looking at all the strange stuff while his father desperately tried to keep up without knocking anything off the shelves.

Now, I've seen badly behaved children in departement stores before, especially in Canada where parents seem to think that it's perfectly OK for their children to pull things off of shelves, open packages, etc. In China this is more rare. Even by local standards, however, Lucas was a marvel. For example quite by accident we stumbled over the toy aisle. This was like kiddie crack for Lucas: dozens of interesting things that he wanted and wanted now. Here's the difference, though, between Lucas and tens of thousands of other children I've personally witnessed. He'd follow these steps:

1. Point excitedly at an item and say "要！" (want!).
2. Look expectantly at me with a grave face.
3. Listen to me gently say "no".
4. Move to the next item.
5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Note the absence of any of the following:

• Tantrums.
• Whining.
• Clinging.
• Grabbing. (Well, he did grab one thing, but this was after looking at me and me nodding because I was considering actually buying one; I decided against on quality grounds.)
  

Other dumb things he did included playing shy with the store clerks (who subtly flocked in his general vicinity like flies to sugar) in just the right way to charm them and, get this, quietly going past the bulk candy (which he recognized excitedly) after being told, once again, "no".

I actually enjoyed going shopping with a toddler. Man, I must have done something really nice in my past life to warrant this kind of son!

^[1]Goldfish takes to water.

Beware the Joaninator

Yeah, I said I'd do this yesterday, Mom, but life happened and as it is I can't even do the mega-update I was planning. Here's a brief summary of my current status for those just sitting on the edge of their seats. I'll be posting details on each of these later as I get time alone.

• The move was a success, although I threw my back in the process and was in agony for a couple of weeks afterwards. (I need some medication now. I'm fresh out.)
• The new apartment, although smaller, is far more intelligently laid out and outfitted so it's actually much more comfortable than the older, larger place. And it has a seated toilet. I can read again finally!
• Lucas adapted almost instantly to the new environment and is entering his "terrible twos". Wilful but cute, so that makes up for it.
• I've been doing a little bit of daily teaching every day for a bit of spending money.
• We're actively looking for our own apartment now.

Each of those items will get expanded upon within the next week (knock on Lucas' head).

---

Now to explain the title.

There was one little incident in the move that was a bit negative. (I mean aside from shoving a shard of glass from a broken ink bottle deep into my thumb while unpacking.) The incident was unpleasant, but I emerged from it with a newfound respect for the toughness of my wife.

The complex we lived in was a "secure" complex with on-site, live-in security and all that jazz. All of this is run by the building manager, Mr. Peng. Mr. Peng is an irritating tick of a man; the kind of guy that shakes your hand and leaves you feeling mysteriously oily. Having him in charge of security is kind of like having the RCMP investigate its own officers' misconduct: futile and a recipe for disaster.

One thing, for example, that Mr. Peng does is he rents out empty apartments in the complex off the books to his friends. He also treats the security guards like dirt and is suspected of entering tenant apartments when they are not present (he's never been directly caught at this but there's lots of circumstantial evidence).

After moving, Joan and I went back to the apartment to clean it. We decided that the school treated us decently so we're going to be decent and clean up the place for them. This was a huge job that was shaping up to be a multi-day thing. (Marion, your "Magic Erasers" were utterly defeated by the kitchen. I was shocked.) During our time there, Joan had her scooter plugged in to charge up. When she left to pick up lunch, she didn't want to carry the charger all the way up to the fifth floor only to carry it all the way back down again when she got back. Instead she put it in the (secured) stairwell under the stairs.

When she came back it was gone.

She knew right away that Mr. Peng had taken it. Why? Because he'd tried it earlier and was caught in the act. At the time he pretended he was looking for the owner of the charger, but in reality he was walking away from the place he found it and doing so rather furtively. So when it went missing for real, he was the first (and only) suspect.

Joan worked herself up into a real fury over this. (Mental note: never steal anything from Joan. Ever. For any reason.) She was angrier than I've ever seen her before. And in the process we cooked up a scheme to get the thing back.

Joan wrote a note saying, basically, "my husband saw who took it; we won't say anything if it's returned to us within an hour". She posted this note on the building manager's door. This led to Mr. Peng's first error. He came to confront us about the "outrageous accusation". He challenged me to my face to say that I'd seen him do it. I hadn't, but he didn't know this. There are lots of places he could have been seen from and he knew it. Without any friendly gesture and without anything he could hang any hopes upon I nodded certainly. Yes, I'd seen him walk away with it.

This was the gamble. Had he stuck to his guns he'd have left room for doubt and it would have been a "he said; she said" scenario with no resolution. He was, however, shaken by the absolute positive he'd got from me there. Suddenly he wasn't so sure he'd gotten away with it.

First he tried the "I'll help you find out who took it" route. This was mistake #1. He went out and acted all concerned, asking any of the tenants outdoors if they'd seen anybody who didn't belong entering or exiting the complex. A woman who'd been outside with her son for a long time and who'd been near where anybody entering or leaving would have to have passed said "no, no strangers entered or left". This eliminated an outsider. The rest of the tenants in the building were not on the list because a) they were mostly gone and b) we're talking about people who are making a MINIMUM of a hundred grand a year.

Next, shaken by me saying I saw him walking away with the thing in his hands, he went to his apartment to show me the thing I must have seen: a plastic bowl of sorta-kinda the same colour. This was mistake #2. In doing this he placed himself at the scene of the crime at the time it happened. When he showed us the bowl, I just flatly laughed at him, explaining that I can tell the difference between a small, rectangular light cyan object and a large, round dark cyan object at only 5 stories. (Hell, I could probably spot the difference a block away!)

Now is when the Joaninator sprang into action. She gave the man a tongue-lashing I've never seen her give anybody before. (Hopefully I never see it again.) In the process Mrs. Peng joined the conversation and it turned into a three-way shouting match. A shouting match Joan won.

In the end she won the cruelest (and most appropriate) way I can even imagine. She threatened, in short, to expose Mr. Peng's sideline rental service. You know, not only threaten his livelihood, but to basically say "give this thing back or you're going to jail for something else I know about you".

For face reasons, of course, Mr. Peng couldn't admit he stole the thing. Instead he offered to pay for the missing charger "because we're such good friends". Joan phoned the dealer, got the price on the recharger and took the money. Then we left. And we didn't bother doing the deep cleaning we planned on because, frankly, we lost interest in being nice to the people running the building. Let them hire a cleaner now.

A little coda that was entertaining. The recharger cost 100RMB. When Joan went to get it, she told the story to the shop attendant who laughed and said it's too bad this wasn't known beforehand. The recharger, you see, was on special for 100RMB. Usually it was 150RMB and the shop staff all agreed that a thief should have been forced to pay the higher price.

Settling down to the new routine.

So, the last couple of weeks have been very crazy and I lacked all energy and desire to think about my life at all, not to mention telling people about it. Things have settled down (somewhat), now, so I'll do a brief recap.

Lucas' medical problem is definitely not a serious version. There is every indication, in fact, that he could have learned to walk on his own and just been a little odd-looking while doing it for the rest of his life. There's even the possibility that there isn't a problem at all and that he's just a slow developer walking-wise. Still, that being said, I support the therapy for him. It's really simple analysis:

1. We don't do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. He's saddled with it for life. (bad outcome)
   
2. We don't do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)
   
3. We do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. The therapy helps him. (good outcome)
4. We do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)

If we don't do the therapy, we've got one bad possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. If we do the therapy we've got one good possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. (I'm not factoring in the cost of the therapy because the analysis is specifically for "should we spend the cash?" I'm also not putting in pessimistic evaluations like "we do the therapy and it makes things worse" for reasons I'll outline below.) Basically the answer writes itself, doesn't it?

Anyway, after some serious adjustments to lifestyles, we've settled into a new routine. I've had glimpses of his treatment in bits and pieces over the last little while but today, courtesy of visiting friends of Joan's mother and my own availability because of the national holiday (Grave-Sweeping Day), I got the whole picture and can paint a copy of it for those of you who haven't fallen asleep because of Yet Another Lucas Blog Entry (YALBE). Here's what my son goes through every day.

First he's bundled up and taken to the hospital. Upon arrival he's scheduled for the "neural channel balance" treatment. When the time comes, he's taken into the torture chamber treatment room and hooked up to the machine. The first round, for ten minutes, has electrodes on his wrists and at his elbows. He's given low-voltage, low-amperage shocks about 2.5 times per second making his muscles twitch. He hates this with a passion and starts squalling along with the 10-15 other babies in the room being given the same indignities. After a few minutes of this he stops squalling and just whines a lot. Now I'll point out that this treatment is not painful (I tried it out once for a lark as a form of exercise a few years back). It's just really, really annoying and to a baby undoubtedly really, really frightening.

After the ten minutes on the arm, the electrodes are moved to the ball of the foot and the back of the knee and he's left twitching there for 20 minutes. He hates this even more and squalls the entire time, exhausting himself. When this is finished he's moved to a different machine and hooked up behind the ears. I don't know what this particular machine is called since the labelling is all in Chinese, but it doesn't seem to cause any visible twitching. Further, once the electrodes are glued on and the machine turned on, Lucas slowly relaxes and, because of the exhaustion from the first two rounds, falls asleep. This goes on for 30 minutes.

Once the electroshock neural channel balance treatment is completed, he's moved over to physiotherapy. There a very nice doctor (and very patient, something he has to be to deal with a child as strong and wilful as my son!) puts Lucas through his paces. Now in the past, according to Joan, Lucas actively fought with the doctors. I saw no signs of this today, however. He didn't cry. He didn't struggle (much). He whined at a couple of things, but mostly he just patiently endured and played with Joan and I while the doctor forced his feet and legs into proper postures and held him there for a while. (The one time he whined loudly, but not quite cried, had the doctor forcing him to squat and stand repeatedly for about five minutes straight.) This goes on for about 40 minutes. After that Lucas is left free to crawl (and walk!) around the physiotherapy room with its padded floors and walls (not to mention the large selection of toys and balls, the former supplied by the various parents in the room who share with each other).

Some of the equipment in this room amused me. It looks very basic and unsophisticated, like a rustic's notion of a hospital, but each piece was actually quite well-designed for its task. One piece, for example, for assisting with balance, is basically a platform with a V-shaped bottom. The doctor stands on the platform, helping the baby stand, and then rocks the platform back and forth. In a western hospital this would be an expensive piece of electrical equipment, likely computer controlled, but in the end would do exactly the same thing -- just for a thousand times (literally) the price. Sometimes the technology fetish of the west amuses me.

Anyway, back to Lucas' day.

This is his lunchtime. Normally he's taken back to his bed in the hospital and is fed, but today was special. We dragged him out of the hospital and into a restaurant with Joan's mother and the visiting friends. After that we returned to the hospital for the manual torture massage therapy. Again Joan insists that he usually fights the doctor and screams loudly, and to give her credit the other babies in the room (six tables, four were active) were certainly lending credence to this report. Whatever the reason, though, Lucas today just slept through it. I mean that literally. He slept through 30 minutes or so of the 45-minute massage.

The doctor was very good. Very strong, but very skillful, fingers worked over my boy quickly, precisely, firmly and yet gently. (I wish I could find a masseuse like that for my back!) Lucas woke up toward the end, when the massage moved up to his head, and he started a low-grade whining when the masseuse started working on his head around his face. Otherwise, however, he was having more fun playing with Joan and me than he was having annoyance at the massage. This despite the fact that all around him were babies screaming at the top of their lungs as they were manipulated up and down the entire length of their bodies.

Then it was time to come home again, Lucas cheerful, practically bubbling and me silently bursting with pride when I mentally compared his behaviour with that of the other babies I saw. (That same comparison, incidentally, is why I so confidently assert that his problem is not a serious one.) I also left with considerably more respect for Chinese hospital treatment than I went in with. Chinese hospitals are still a little weak on germ theory, it seems, but surgery and now physiotherapy they're both top-notch at in my opinion.