B is for Boarding

My son, Maury, is a wonderful 11 year old who loves to play video games and, really, not much else. As soon as the car is headed back to the house after any time at all away from home, he is guaranteed to ask one of two things:

"Can I play on the computer when we get home?"

or

"Can I play on the Wii when we get home?"

When we went on vacation after Christmas last year to a resort in the Smokies with an indoor waterpark, Maury simply replaced his usual two questions with:

"Can we go to the arcade?"

We did take him to the arcade a few times, but we, naturally, spent at least some of every day at the waterpark. While there, Maury would spend a lot of time in one of the play areas spraying water at other kids and he would occasionally venture into the wave pool. He avoided the various water slides like the plague.

See, Maury has Asperger Syndrome, anxiety issues, and ADHD. This makes him socially immature, a little skittish, and very prone to running from one thing to another. So, the ways that Maury was playing at the waterpark made perfect sense...until he asked me if he could try out the body boarding.

This surprised me for several reasons. First of all, he had never tried it before and he's not one to sign up to try new things. Second, there was a long, slow moving line for it. Did he really want to wait and wait and wait like that? And, how odd for him to ask to try this on the last day of our trip. He hadn't shown any interest in it any of the other days we had been there.

But I'll be damned if he didn't stand in that line patiently, get on the board, and ride that simulated wave until the lifeguard blew the whistle that his time was up. He then rolled off the board, shot back to the top of the Surf Rider and was ready to hit the road for home.

I couldn't stop grinning I was so proud of him.