A Visit With St. Nicholas -- or Not So Great Expectations

The context in which this year's story takes place can be read here: A Vist With St. Nick 2012

Today was once again Breakfast With Santa day at our local fire department. Last year's visit was a spectacular failure. 

Christmas season is T's traumaversary time combined with holiday excitement dysregulation -- let's just call it a perfect storm--and my best method of coping would probably be to just hide out in the house with the kid for a month, emerging after New Year's Day, but I can't home school, and they send these kids home with the flyers in their folders and they pull them out and show them to you, begging to go to see Santa, and there's no pretending you don't know when or where it is.

I find myself longing for the day he no longer believes in Santa -- I've never encouraged it -- and then I realize I'm wishing his life away, so I stop myself. He went from a tiny four-year-old to an almost-as-tall-as-me-eight-year-old in the blink of a nanosecond, so I have to slow myself down and treasure these young years, as frustrating as they can be.

But. Breakfast with Santa. It's a learning process. What I learned from last year is to not go in expecting a warm, fuzzy, holiday-memories-building experience. So what we were going to do was go in, be ever so grateful that we finally have smart phones and can take photos without having to remember the camera we've forgotten both prior years, expect the child to be cranky and crabby, and just get it over with and come back home. 

Except. We had to throw in the added complication of going to a basketball game the night before. We live in a small, snowy town with a university that has a basketball team that goes to the NCAA tournament almost every year, won it, oh, about a decade ago, and was in the final four last spring. It's what we have here in the bleak, dark months of winter.

And T has never been to a game. We live from paycheck to paycheck, and game tickets aren't in our budget. A kind friend gave us tickets for last night's game. Free. And I have to say, I love going to the games. Football -- meh, but basketball -- what a rush! So much better to be under that famed balloon-like roof than to watch on TV. How could I not take the child?

He loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. It was almost as good as Christmas, which is to say, completely dysregulating.

The view from waaay up top. We could still see all the action, and the main event -- pizza eating -- doesn't require court side seats.

We had a chat about how in order for us to be able to go see Santa in the morning, he would need to be able to realize his brain was out of control and he would need to work on whatever it takes for him to calm down. We got back very late from the game, but he was still revved up, so I had him lie in bed with a book for a half  hour before even trying to get him to go to sleep. It seemed to work.

The secret to Breakfast with Santa is to get there early, to avoid the long lines. But I've been sick all week, and completely worn out, and this morning I was finally not hacking my lungs out, plus I didn't want to drag an overtired kid to Santa, so I lingered in bed, dozing in and out until T got himself up.

"Good morning!" I enthused, realizing immediately that was not the calm beginning to our day he needed. 

We were far behind schedule to beat the lines, but I still held out hope. We got dressed with little fuss -- no arguments about wanting to wear sweatpants and not wanting to wear the sweater with a bit of red in it -- we take our victories where we can find them. We got out the door and to the firehouse to find all lots full and people parking down the side roads in the surrounding neighborhood. 

Sigh. 

Okay, well, I'm a year wiser now. No expectations. Actually, I do have expectations. I have expectations that this will be a pretty crappy experience and we'll suffer through it and tomorrow will be another day. It is not a self-fulfilling prophecy; it is learned coping behavior. If we do better than expected, it's a fist-bump fireworks bonus experience. We take our victories where we can find them.

The list for Santa did not attempt to transform itself into a kite, and we made it into the firehouse intact. We take our victories where we can find them. 

The line for Santa started just about as far from Santa as is possible. We were prepared for the wait though, with our Dunkin Donuts coffees and hot cocoa. 

We waited and shuffled and waited and shuffled. And finally made it to the entrance to the events room. Where my suggesting to T that we not move forward until there was room for us to make it past the stairway to the kitchen that the fireman were frantically running up and down to refill the various food pans and coffee urns was like asking him to step out of line and let everyone else pass him by.

There was no explaining we weren't losing our place in line -- that we were just being considerate of the men who had to keep squeezing by the hordes of people waiting to see Santa. We were just leaving a space for a few minutes, and once we were past the staircase, we would be back on the heels of the family in front of us. This seems completely logical, but it did not compute in his brain. Logic, you see, doesn't work in a brain that is operating totally from its non-logic portions, and by the time we had waited that long, someone's brain was not functioning from a whole-brain place. Leaving a space for the firemen to get by was like leaving space between vehicles in stop and go traffic. Someone might take that space if we left it open. Someone might budge the line = I might not survive = don't try to explain anything using logic.

It went downhill from there. But this year I wasn't hoping for a Hallmark movie moment. I knew it would be a downhill spiral. Expecting the worst kept me regulated and calm, and I have learned that my ability to regulate my actions and reactions are critical in parenting my child and keeping him regulated. Or more regulated than if I lose it. We take our victories where we can find them.

We finally wound our way through to be next in line. List? Check. Phone cameras? Check. Although the Nikon would have taken better photos -- the phone cameras were fooled by the backlighting to think they didn't need a strong flash, so T's face is not well lit. But the photos are not the important part. For the 30 seconds T sat on Santa's lap, he was a happy boy with a beautiful smile. Check. We take our victories where we can find them. 

Then we made our way back in to the truck bay area of the firehouse to wait in line for food. Thankfully, this was a quick line. But Mr. I Drank Almost All My Hot Cocoa was not hungry, something he failed to tell me until he had taken a full serving of home fries, two sausages, and two pancakes. He ate half of one sausage and two bites of his home fries. And then wanted to eat his candy cane. Um, no. The candy cane is for after you eat a nutritious meal. Apparently that is not happening at all today. We'll try again tomorrow.

So, was this a successful trip to see Santa Claus? That depends on one's definition of success. My expectations for how to define success have nose dived this past year as I have come to the realization that my child is not ever going to be "cured" of his past trauma and what it has done to his brain. 

It was Breakfast with Santa. It happened. We made it back home. There were no meltdowns. There was no flight, there was no fight, and there was no repeat of last year's freeze. No one yelled. No one lost their temper. And despite the fact that one of the cones holding the police tape that was creating a serpentine line for the multitudes waiting for Santa was knocked down about a hundred times, it was never once my kid who did it. We take our victories where we can find them.

Did we have grumpiness that lasted the better part of a day? Yes, but we expected it and were prepared for it and it didn't phase us. So while it may not qualify for a scene from It's a Wonderful Life, in the downsize-your-expectations world of parenting a special needs child, it was, I guess, as successful as it's going to get. 

Except note to self: next year, we don't get the child a hot cocoa before breakfast. And maybe feed him here before we go, so there is no on-site "eat your breakfast and this is lunch too" battle. 

It's a learning curve. On black ice. Where we correct and overcorrect and correct the overcorrection. At least this year we didn't do spinnies. 

When I asked him at bedtime what the best part of his weekend was, he said breakfast with Santa. So maybe it was a happy holiday memory for him, and if that's the case, that's what matters in the end. Non-great expectations can turn into victories. 

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!