Saturday afternoon I took Kai and Shen to the local children's museum to give Tina some peace and quiet while she worked on painting the living room. The boys love it there, and it's really nice to be able to have an environment where they can play with anything they can reach, especially this time if year when we're housebound so much of the time. Here's a few pictures of them at play...

As you can see they had a really great time. I love the way they play together so well (most of the time) They are really great brothers. But like I said in the header, there was this really horrible moment. Kai had gone off to some other area, and I was watching Shen play by himself in the cafe kitchen. There is a lofted area just to one side of this space and a boy about 6 years old (I'm guessing) looks down over to see Shen, he gets this really weird look on his face and says, "What happened to his arm?" Now this is a very reasonable question for a child this age to ask, so I patiently answered, "Nothing happened to his arm, that's just the way his arm is."
And then he starts into a stream of consciousness roll: "It looks like it got cut off. What happened to his hand? It looks dead. I've never seen anything like that before. It looks smashed. That is really bad." then he turns and shouts to another kid, "Hey come and look at this!" He just kept going and going, and the things he was saying just kept getting worse and worse. I felt like a deer in the headlights, and didn't really know how to respond, and he was saying it all so fast I couldn't really interject. Finally I stood up and went over to the boy and took hold of his arm. "Look," I said, "you are behaving very rudely. You need to go find another area to play in." I know this was not the right way to handle it, but I was really shocked by what he was saying and just wanted to make him shut the ____ up. Shen had no idea the incident even took place. Later I kind of wondered if I should have asked the boy to come over so he could see Shen's hand, and then explained again to him that this is just the way Shen, was born. But I don't want to use Shen as a visual aid for sensitivity training of slow-witted children whose mouths run off faster than their brains process. The boy did seem to sort of snap out of it when I cut him off, and apologized. Makes me realize though, that this is something we are definitely going to have to work on with both Kai and Shen so they have ways to deal with it when confronted with this type of behavior. Their limb differences affect them so little in their daily life, and are simply just a part of them that we don't really even think about it much. Bums me out that it's going to be an issue. Not fun stuff.