A Teenage Boy

Dear all,

M has grown up so quickly.  When did it happen?  Wasn’t it just yesterday I was telling him how to pee into the toilet?  Oh, that’s right.  I DID just have to talk to him yesterday about this.  Wasn’t it just yesterday I was encouraging him to string more and more words together to form sentences?  Right.  Same thing.  Just yesterday I had to beg him to stop grunting.  Wasn’t it just yesterday he’d take two naps a day and shove food into his face with glee?  Ditto.  It WAS yesterday.  So being a teenage boy isn’t that different from being a toddler, from what I can tell, except he isn’t nearly as cute as he used to be.  I had unflinching patience when he was chubby and cuddly.  My patience is now directly related to the amount of words in M’s limited vocabulary.

M has a vocab of about five words, but these are sounds, really and do not qualify as words per se.  Mostly he communicates with one word, ‘Wa’.  I think this means, ‘What’, but it is hard to tell because he uses this sound as a response to each question or statement directed at him.  ‘Huh’ is another popular response for either question or statement. ‘Nnn’ is ‘no’ and ‘yy’ means ‘yes’.  ‘Mmm’ is a bit trickier because it has at least three or four meanings. It is as likely to mean ‘what’ as it is to mean ‘yes’.    It could also mean he likes the dinner he is shoveling into his mouth.  (Don’t mistake this for a compliment, however. It is only a primal response to the filling of his stomach, which is always empty.) There is also an outside chance that he is using this particular grunt to communicate that he agrees with you, but this is unlikely.

About four months ago, his room took on an odor that can only be described as stench. While he was away recently, S and I dragged his mattress into the yard to air every day for four days.  I thoroughly cleaned the room.  Aired out his shoes.  Got rid of old clothes that may have been retaining odor. By the end of the week, the room smelled just fine.  M returned and within days it again smelled like the inside of a gym bag/mouth/decaying bowel system.  HE doesn’t smell, so is it the chemistry of a teenage boy that makes the room so pungent:  a caustic combination of otherwise subtle odors that just blows your mind? Does it fade in time? Will he ever move out? 

The most foreboding aspect of all of this is that R cannot smell anything in M’s room.  Please don’t tell me that in a couple of years, BOTH their rooms will smell like this!

With love from England,

T-Ann