Christmas

As I was driving to work this morning I was contemplating the meaning of Christmas and I realized that more than once, God has sent a child to teach a lesson.
He once sent his own son to teach the world about love and in a less grand, but no less profound way, he sent me a child to teach me about love.

Kids

My son is almost 5. At his recent well-child check-up his pediatrician told me I should make sure he doesn't gain anymore weight "until he grows into his current weight" he's 42 inches tall and weighs 43 pounds. But two days later, his preschool teacher tells me she's concerned because he is so thin you can see his ribs. I think we have become a society so concerned with numbers and statistics that we are not even looking at the individual child. If your child is outside for an hour or more a day and practically crys when it is time to go inside, then he can probably have that slice of pizza or a brownie. If your child looks at going outside as a punishment then maybe skip that extra snack. If parents took responsibility and monitored their child's habits, not just their eating habits, but their playing habits too, then we wouldn't have this problem... and btw the motion sensing video game is not a substitute for going outside and playing tag, or really learning to dance.

But I suppose the real problem is that for a young child to go outside and play, the parent would have to get up and go with them... and aren't we all so busy? Im not, yes I froze my butt off today taking myson outside in the snow, but he's worth it. He's worth not turning on the computer till after the sun goes down, and not watching tv, not talking on the phone. My child is worth getting up and playing with, and yours should be too.

My "Naughty" child

Alex, for the most part, is a good boy. He doesnt bite, or scream, or steal, or draw all over the walls, but he does seem to have some issues and I am at the limits of my patience with him today.
Sometimes Alex will get upset over things that don't make sense. Today he was determined to believe that his coat wasn't his coat simply because it wasn't where he had left it. What followed was an hour long argument about him needing to put on the coat and him arguing that "the other kid" would get mad if he took his coat. There was no other child that this coat could have belonged to. We were at my father's house, it's snowing like crazy outside, all I wanted was for him to put on the coat. He cried, he screamed, he collapsed in panic. What could possibly cause him to think this wasn't his coat?
I know alex displays some symptoms of OCD and severe anxiety. He once tried to change the empty toilet paper and I later found a whole roll in the garbage that he informed me was messed up because it had torn when he tried to start the roll. My sister told me that she found five unopened cheese sticks in the garbage, he told her that he couldn't get them open so they needed to be thrown away. Just a few minutes ago I caught him throwing out a new pacage of hot dogs because he had tried to open them and the package had torn.
I'm seriously lost about how to correct this behavior.