My New Carpool Passenger Is A Total Delight

Since the start of this year, my daily routine of sending my youngest to school every morning has undergone one major change.

A brand new passenger has joined our happy trails. Let’s call him Kai.

Every so often parents in our school chat group will ask if anyone living nearby needs or can offer a ride to and from school – in short, a carpool request or invitation. That’s how we ended up with Kai who lives a few streets from us and who needed a ride to my son’s school.

Kai’s six going on seven this year. This is his first year at the school, even as it’s my son’s last. Talk about coming full circle! (The last time we did a carpool was with my son’s classmate when both were in their first year in the school)

But what’s been delighting my son and me has been how entertaining our new carpool passenger can be.

Of Carpool Naps and…

One of the first things we noticed since the start of the year was that Kai was a fairly sleepy kid. Very often my son and I would find him dozing off while we were on the road. This happened especially frequently for the first month of school, whether it was the morning pick-up on the way to school or the afternoon drop-off at his after-school care center.

Understandable of course.

It was his first month in a school for older kids. All he knew before this year was kindergarten, where one could wake up late and still make it to class in good time. Primary school’s a whole other level. Like us, Kai had to be up by six in the morning and get ready to leave home before seven to await our arrival to fetch him.

And so it wasn’t surprising to find him napping pretty soon after the initial morning salutations. What has been pleasantly surprising are the different sleeping postures he has. Despite being safely strapped in by the car seat belt, somehow our young and petite little friend manages to entertain us with various cute poses.

As seen in the pictures above, these poses include lying almost flat in the back seat. Leaning against the locked door or his hefty school bag like a pillow. Folding himself in half. Or just sitting upright with head thrown back and legs splayed wide apart.

…Flags

The other fascinating thing we quickly learned about Kai was his obsession with countries and flags.

Every day he would carry a big book in his tiny hands that was either a book about flags of the world (see above picture) or an encyclopedia about countries. Not only was he fascinated with names and flags of different nations, Kai knew by hard nearly all of them, including their locations on the world map. Our young friend could rattle off in his six-year-old, unsteady enunciation, names of places like Trinidad & Tobago and the Vatican City without missing a beat!

Without hesitation, he would daily regale us with his vast knowledge by telling us not just the names of these places but also test how much my son and I knew or remembered from what he shared before. So absorbed would he be that no matter how we respond or not, Kai would carry on sharing his knowledge with us anyway without a care in the world.

Every single time without fail, he would begin our ‘global travel’ with the phrase Do you remember…?, followed by some nugget of information about a city or country. Often he would include names of famous attractions in those places as well. Tongue-in-cheek, I would sometimes throw him off his game with a question like Isn’t the Statue of Liberty near your school? Or I would try to bring him back to our homeland with questions like Where is the Kallang River? even though he seems to show little interest in our backyard.

One Carpool. Two autistic kids. Three reminders.

Sometimes, I would remind him that he should start his new trivia questions about flags and countries with my son and me using Did you know…? rather than Do you remember…? He keeps beginning with the latter instead, as though we were in his head all the time, and knows what he refers to each time he launches into another fun fact.

Unsurprisingly, I will have to repeat this reminder to him often — Kai, say “Did you know…”, not “Do you remember…?” — because, just like my son, Kai has autism and many kids like them need constant reminders.

And I do mean CONSTANT reminders!

In truth, this is but one of three reminders. But while this first reminder is for Kai, the second and third reminders are for me.

The second reminder is that people like Kai and my son have what some refer to as challenges with contextual information processing. So in Kai’s case, even though my son and I only meet him during our carpool days, he often talks to us as though we’ve been with him 24/7 and have complete knowledge of what he’s been up to. It explains why he always starts his trivia time with the question Do you remember…?

Because of this, I must exercise patience every time, even as I sound like a broken record when I (after almost three months of carpool) repeat again and again, Kai, say “Did you know…”, not “Do you remember…?”

Most Important Of All…

The third reminder for me is perhaps the most important.

I must be grateful and daily soak in these moments with thanksgiving. Because despite what it seems, these moments won’t last forever. These carpool rides should be seen as a gift. I don’t just get to drive my precious son to school daily. Now, I get to chauffeur another parent’s precious son too. In so doing, I get up close and personal with their daily lives in ways that enrich mine in no small measure.

With such entertaining and funny kiddos on board daily, my rides are so much fuller, more enjoyable, and more unpredictable than were I to be alone, driving from one road to another in silence.

On my off days (and who doesn’t have them?) when I get impatient, or am on the brink of losing my mind with yet another Do you remember…? question from Kai, may I return to this post and remind myself that all’s good with this gift of a carpool!