Life With Derek

My children used to watch a show on Disney called Life with Derek. I can't tell you much about it because I, admittedly, didn't pay much attention to it. There was a time when I watched everything that my children watched. At some point, that changed. I think it was when my older two children moved away from Nick Jr and PBS kid shows and gravitated to things like Pokemon. I tried to keep up, but by the millionth PI… KA… CHUUU shriek (a threshold that was probably was achieved in the third episode) I found that I simply could not stand it any longer. It may or may not be coincidence that it was right about then that I really started discovering the internet. Oh, I still had to hear the shows they were watching, but tried my best to let it become nothing more than background noise (something I also learned to do whenever hubby used to watch pro wrestling.)

Regardless of not really getting into the TV series, the title always made me smile. You see we have our own Life with Derek here. And trust me, life with our Derek is anything but boring.

When Derek was around three years old, he told me that he choose our family long before he joined us. According to his story he was in heaven with God, looking at different families and trying to decide which he’d choose. God pointed us out to him. Well, we just happened to be at Disney World at the time he was checking us out and were having so much fun that he agreed that we were the right family for him. I remember feeling a sense of wonderment as my baby told me that tale. Sure we had talked about God before and probably mentioned heaven too, but how he came up with the idea that he was there before he was born is still a mystery to me. BTW, we were at Disney World a year before he was born, but of course he probably heard stories about that so I guess that doesn't prove anything other than he had a pretty great imagination even at three. Still, I have to admit that I do like to think that he might have really picked us.

My son’s physical entrance into our family should have given me a clue about what was to come in our Life with Derek. Both of his older sisters choose 2:30 am as the perfect time to jump start labor, so when I woke up at 2:30 am that fateful morning I just knew that it was the day. The problem was, there weren’t any contractions. There was only…dampness. It wasn’t pain that woke me up. It was some kind of spastic jump/kick that was apparently strong enough to break my water. On the way to the hospital, I kept waiting for contractions to begin. They didn’t. Looking back now, I think I can finally understand what happened. You see, he probably got bored and thought that it was a good time to be born and so he made a beginning effort to start the whole process – with the karate kick - but instead of finishing whatever it is that babies do to trigger labor, he obviously got distracted. After all, there was that interesting umbilical cord in there with him. He most likely thought, “hmmm…I bet it would be fun to get all wrapped up in this thing.” So that’s what he did. He twisted the darn thing around his neck. By then the doc had bullied, I mean talked me into that horrible pitocin stuff to start contractions. And so, for the first time in his life, the world forced Derek into doing what he should have done on his own.

It wouldn’t be the last.

Naturally Derek finds ways to be himself regardless of how much the world tries to mold him to what it wants him to be. Sometimes I worry so much about if he’ll ever find a way to fit in. Other times I just have to laugh. Sometimes I do both…like when I read his answers to a worksheet on “Dealing with Peer Pressure.”

Q. What was your friend or friends pressuring you to do?

A. Study

Q. What kinds of things were your friends doing or saying to pressure you?

A. to study

Q. How did you feel about being pressured?

A. Weird

Q. What did you decide to do at the time?

A. Fart

Q. What happened as a result of your decision?

A. I farted

Q. How did you feel about your decision?

A. farty

Q. Would you do anything differently today? Is so, write what you would do differently?

A. Yes, break the world record for the longest fart.

Yes, my son is brilliant.

To be continued….