Our scene opens with a few three-year-olds sitting quietly at a table doing puzzles, with adult supervision. What could possibly go wrong, you say? Everything's going so well, you say? Guess again.
The child on my left is doing an animal puzzle. The child on my right is doing an alphabet puzzle. The letters are little wooden cutouts that you have to place into the right spot on the board. Capital and lower case. So clean-up time approaches, and I tell the child (let's call him Bob), "Bob, it's time to clean up, put the letters away." At this point Bob calmly looks up at me, holds up his right hand, and gives me the middle finger. Why? Because there is a capital "R" on it, that's why.
Why is it that when a child sticks his head through the railings on a banister, or his foot through a hole in a tree, or some other appendage somewhere else it doesn't belong, it always manages to fit IN just fine, but suddenly stops fitting when it's time to reverse the process? Point proven: You CAN fit a square peg into a round hole. You just can't get it out again.
So there I am, looking at an autistic three-year-old with an R on his finger flipping me off, while seven other autistic three-year-olds surround us in various stages of cleaning up, making a mess, wetting their pants, biting each other, and other usual morning activities. I give the R a small tug. It's not coming off. The finger is slightly pinker than the rest of the small child. What now?
The teacher tries lotion. The nurse tries Vaseline. An aide tries soap and water. Someone else tries ice. Someone suggests calling the janitor to bring a saw. I'm suddenly reminded of that old song, "In came the doctor, in came the nurse, in came the lady with the alligator purse!" Meanwhile, we are trying to run a classroom and prevent seven other little disasters-to-be from killing one another, and Bob is just sitting there, watching people put various things on his finger, occasionally yelling, "The letter R!"
This goes on for almost an hour. Finally, someone decides that taking a saw to the child's finger at school would be a bad idea; I was busy with the other kids, but let's just say I heard the word "liability" an awful lot. So plans are made, mom is called, and Bob is whisked away to the emergency room.
Long story short, Bob came back a few hours later, and was hopping around acting like any other hyper three-year-old. He was fine. In other news, today I was bitten, kicked, scratched, spat on, and finally, punched in the eye. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.