It is sink or swim time for him now. The 7 hour a day musical theater class is very challenging in all kinds of ways. The director is even having him work through his lunch because he has a lead role and they are only taking a month to do this play instead of half days over two months like they did last year.

He doesn't want me at rehearsals so I stay home. He doesn't want me to help him practice his lines like I used to because some of the lines are embarrassing--there is mild sexual innuendo throughout the play. He also doesn't want me to be there to see him kiss the princess which he will have to do as the prince. He says it is embarrassing but he will get over it, but he doesn't need me watching him while he does it. His friend told me that my son had to work on Song of Love with the girl who is playing the princess after lunch so he was supposed to be going over the song lyrics as he ate his lunch so I left his lunch there. I couldn't even stay for a few minutes.

My son learned that he can write notes easily using his iPhone that he keeps in his pocket and there are a lot of notes to take, lots of things to remember when you have a lead role.

The director, on top of asking him to have his lines memorized by next Monday wants him to write a 10-minute play and turn it in to her on Monday. She talked him into running for assistant director or something like that and writing a play is a requirement for this. He agreed to it and now he's regretting it but he says he will do it if he has to.

I talked to the director this morning and told her I wondered if he would be able to write the play and memorize all of his lines in such a short amount of time but she said she knew he could because he had such a good memory. She has known him since he was four and she has never seen him have trouble memorizing anything. I told her his memory used to be good before he had such trouble sleeping because of the brace and the migraines and the foot and back pain. She still thinks he can do it.

I have noticed that my son seems to be enjoying the attention he is getting from the girls in his class. This could be a motivating factor in getting all of the work done in time.

For now he is spending enough time around other kids. I don't know how much is really enough. I know that it usually gets kind of lonely at home when school starts and all of his friends go back to public school and he only sees them once or twice a week.

I do think he learns more at home by himself than he would in a classroom but he would miss out on classroom discussion. I really wanted him to take a co-op literature class in the fall but he says he will learn more if he doesn't have a teacher telling him what he has to read. He says he can talk to me and his dad about what he reads and he does this all the time.

My dad agrees with my son and says there are lots of people who were self-taught. He doesn't think my son needs any more friends because there are about twenty kids ages 4 - 20 in the musical theater group. He says he didn't have any friends as a teenager because he had a job and school and didn't have time for friends. He said it didn't hurt him.

I just see that my adult daughter has so many friends that she has kept in touch with since high school and she just seems to have so much fun with life. I want that for my son too.