Inclusion mom

Last week my daughter had a big project to do for her fifth-grade class, including a written report, a diorama, and an oral presentation. I was in a bit of a panic because the teacher didn't send home much in the way of information on the assignment, and if she had been talking it up in class my daughter did not bring home much in the way of information absorption. But I advised her as best I could, and I thought in the end we'd done a pretty good job. Er, that is, she'd done a pretty good job. It was her project, after all. Not mine.

I never wanted to be the kind of parent who completely took over and did her child's work, although it's sometimes hard not to with my language and learning delayed girl. So I let her lead as much as possible, even if I thought something more complex might be more in keeping with what her peers were doing. Her diorama -- to go with her report on astronaut Sally Ride -- was a shoebox with a computer printout of the space shuttle attached with a paper loop so it stood out a bit from the black-construction-papered sides, a photo of Ride in one corner and a piece of paper proclaiming her the first U.S. woman in space in the other. Simple, but she liked it, and though I was admittedly in charge of the execution, it was mostly her idea.

I figured the other kids' dioramas might be a little more elaborate, but -- oh, my goodness. I caught a few of them on display in the school library today, and they are to my daughter's work as 546-channel digital cable TV is to an old black-and-white with rabbit ears. These were big boxes with clay sculptures and Barbie dolls and curtains and plants and index cards full of detail and wooden extensions and all manner of elaborate scenery setting and story-telling. Part of me was angry that the teacher had never told me that THIS is the sort of thing that was expected; part of me was sad that my daughter would never have the sort of creative vision that could make something like this happen; and part of me was paranoid that all the other parents just knew what making a proper diorama consisted of, and were able to mentor their kids in this direction, and how come I don't have that sort of easy self-evident know-how?

I guess special-ed kids mainstreamed into regular-ed classrooms aren't the only ones who can feel insecure. As a mom with one child who entered regular-ed in second grade and another who's still in self-contained, I'll admit to feeling sometimes that "regular-ed moms" belong to some sort of club I can't belong to, they with their kids who've been together since kindergarten and have older siblings who've gone through the same program and know all the ins and outs of projects and parties and graduations and such. I'm like an inclusion mom: in the same room, but not on the same curriculum. Most of the time I'm happy to keep my head down and do the work that's meant for me, but today -- well, you shoulda seen these dioramas. They remind me that I'm still reading "Dick and Jane" while everyone else is flying through Harry Potter.

Missing Mister Rogers

Feeling a little sad today over the passing of Fred Rogers, who has always provided such a calm and gentle voice in the midst of the hubbub that is children's television. My kids have mostly outgrown his show -- although I've seen my son linger on it now and then as he changes the channels around -- but they were both sad when I said he had died, and asked questions about what happened to him and whether he would still be on TV. If you have a little one who'll be shaken up by this death in the neighborhood, there are some nice resources at www.misterrogers.org, including a tribute with information on where children can send letters and drawings to the Rogers family, and helpful hints for parents on discussing the loss with your child. Kids and parents can also e-mail the show and family from the PBS Kids site.

One of the best things Mister Rogers did for my family was write books on issues of import to kids, most notably, for us, adoption and potty training. Heavy on photos and straightforward with words, these books were just right for starting a dialog with my language impaired kiddos. The misterrogers.org site offers information and inspiration for parents on a variety of topics, from adoption to stepfamilies, disabilities to discipline, birth to, well, death. Even though he's gone on to a whole new neighborhood, Mister Rogers is still taking good care of us.

Web English Teacher

Nothing makes me appreciate teachers so much as trying to be one myself, and I'm about to learn that lesson again by leading a class at our school's weekend enrichment classes next month. Two years ago, when I did this the first time, I only lasted 20 minutes with some of these kids before realizing that if I were their teacher for real and had to deal with them for six hours a day, I would need to scream or throw something. I think this happened the 48th time one girl asked if she could go get a drink of water. The enrichment classes only last an hour, and thank goodness for that.

This year, I've swtiched from teaching counted cross stitch (advice: never try to teach this to kindergarteners) to creative writing, and I thought this might phase me out of the teaching business altogether -- maybe no kid would want to do anything so academic as writing on the weekend, and low enrollment would get me off the hook. But no: they signed up in droves. So now I have to really come up with some good creative stuff, because I have lots of fifth graders in my class and lots of them know my daughter and know I'm her mother, and I don't want to embarrass her or myself. It feels real good to volunteer, right up to the point when you're faced with a tableful of bored children.

In casting about the Web for ideas, I found the Web English Teacher, which offers a really nicely organized array of links to lesson plans, games and worksheets on grammar, phonics, ESL, critical thinking, vocabulary, literature and -- well, hey, thanks! -- creative writing. If only all teachers were so easy to get information out of! If you know of any sites with good writing prompts for kids, grades 1-5, let me know -- I've got a week and a half to be stunningly well prepared. Also, to figure out how many times in an hour a kid really needs to visit the water fountain.

Can you handle this?

There's something kind of appealingly straightforward about the objectification of problem students on The You Can Handle Them All Web Site. It's a behavioral index for teachers, and while I'll admit I feel a little unsettled when imagining my son's teacher running her eyes down the list looking for his handle ("Let's see... The Goldbrick ... The Gossip ... The Greedy ... The Griper ... The Habitual Absentee... The Hater ... The Hider ... ahh, The Hyperactive!"), I have to admit that I did exactly that. And you know, the advice was pretty darn good, very much along the lines of what I've passed his teachers in the past. The closest classification I could find for my daughter was "The Crier (Who Sheds Tears)" -- as opposed to "The Crier (Who Claims Foul)" -- and again, the advice to instructors is just as I would wish. How many times have I asked teachers not to interpret her crying as a negative, or be overprotective on account of it? According to "You Can Handle Them All," they're handling her wrong and I'm handling her right. So despite the somewhat name-calling organizational strategy of the site, I'd say it's a good tool for parents looking to advise teachers, as well as teachers looking for advice. And if nothing else, it's comforting to look at that long list and appreciate all the bad things your kid is not.

Five things I learned from watching the Grammys

1. I still know all the words to “Sounds of Silence” and “Sweet Baby James,” and can sing along at will. Don’t ask me about anything I learned in high school, but song lyrics seem to stake out prime brain cell turf and sink down deep roots.

2. My daughter has strong opinions. My personal preteen hated most of the songs in the show’s first hour (and no, it’s not because she prefers rap or metal; her favorite artist at the moment is Cher, and she kept hoping that maybe Rod Stewart was going to sing.) She declared several times that she doesn’t like Gwen Stefani’s style (and a good thing, too, because if she ever tried to wear a get-up like that, I’d have to ground her for life). She observed, cattily, that Vanessa Carlton’s hair looks dyed. She never wants to hear that Michelle Branch song again, or any Avril Lavigne song besides the one that’s playing on the radio right now. When I complained that she didn’t seem to like anything, she turned to me and slowly said, as though I might be too idiotic to understand, “Mom. Bruce. Springsteen.” But she fell asleep before the Boss came on, and when I woke her up to listen, she stumbled off to bed instead. That’s the way it is with the young people: They say they love Bruce, but when push comes to shove, they’re more interested in themselves.

3. My son digs the Dixie Chicks. He was drawn helplessly to the TV set when “Landslide” started playing, and made me swear to bring the “Home” CD home from my office so that he can listen to it, again and again. Who knew he was a little bit country?

4. CBS is my friend. I fretted about letting my daughter watch the Grammys since recent music shows have had such a reputation for bad language, but for this broadcast the musicians mostly watched their mouths and the censors bleeped out the rest. In the end, I was more worried that Robin Williams might say something unfit for little ears than that a rapper would.

5. I’m old. I’ve written before about how chilling it is to see how much one’s teen-age idols looking like comfortable old grandpas, and while seeing Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor still making music warmed my heart, their obvious agedness put a creak in my bones. It didn’t help that the night’s big winner was all of 23, and so many of the other performers seemed entirely too short-in-the-tooth for comfort. The youngsters’ music, at least, was more easy listening than not, but when they start giving out lifetime acheivement awards to people I’ve been listening to for most of my lifetime, it gives an old lady pause.

Michael who?

All the recent point-counterpoint TV footage of Michael Jackson has left me feeling nostalgic for my long-ago youth, when getting someone to slow-dance with you to "Ben," his poignant ode to a rat, was the height of junior high school romance. That's back when Michael had his whole nose and his original skin tone, well before he took the one-way dead-end road to Weirdville. And as much as I try to be sympathetic to the guy, for old time's sake, I think at this point most folks would agree he's just irredeemably creepy.

Maybe he feels that he can recapture public interest and sympathy with these latest news assaults, but I have to tell him that, judging from the recent conversation I had with three young passengers in my car, his time has passed as surely as my middle-school days. The subject came up as I was driving my daughter, age 12; her old special-ed classmate, age 13; and her current regular-ed classmate, 10, to bowling practice. The 13-year-old asked if anyone had watched the Michael Jackson shows on TV, and wasn't he just the creepiest? My daughter had no idea who Michael Jackson was. Her 10-year-old friend said, authoritatively, that he was a basketball player. The 13-year-old and I corrected him, and then, since we were the only ones in the car who had heard of the guy, we discussed what a freak show he was. And then, as I waxed nostalgic about junior high school dances, the discussion turned to how much they all now hate the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync.

The King of Pop? Isn't that Justin Timberlake?

Working vacation

My kids have this week off from school, but they don't have the week off from school work. My daughter -- amazingly, for the first time in her school career -- has a research report to do, complete with diorama and public speaking. All the fifth-grade classes are doing reports either on famous people or presidents, and her drawn-out-of-a-hat subject is Sally Ride. So we read a book together and took notes, and found some Web sites, and put a print-out of the Challenger in a shoebox, and put together an outline, and are now up to the rough-draft stage. The "we" there is somewhat worrisome, because my daughter, with her reading comprehension problems, is so clueless as to how to proceed on something like this, and I am so bad at giving clues and so good at just taking over and doing. Teachers may be worried about kids plagiarizing from books and Web sites, but in this case, I think it's more likely that my daughter will be plagiarizing me. Must ... let ... her ... make ... mistakes.

I'm also probably overinvolved in the book report my son is doing on George Washington, if for no other reason than I'm the one who asked his teacher to assign it to him. I let that slip, and he's not likely to let me forget it. I guess it is sort of disloyal to demand extra work for vacation-time; but there's not a lot of challenging going on in a self-contained special-ed classroom, and if I can arrange for challenging things to be assigned on my time, I'm going to do it. He wouldn't write a report to please me, but he will do it if his teacher says. And I'll help, a little with the reading and a lot with the pushing and the prodding and the nagging. His teacher gave him a very cute "Book Report Sandwich" to fill out -- title on the bread, characters on the lettuce, settings on the cheese, synopsis on the meat, opinion on the mayo, and drawing on the back slice of bread -- and he should be able to do most of that under his own wording. Unlike his sister, reading and words aren't problems for him. Paying attention for sustained periods is. So we're doing things in tiny bits over the course of the week, and slowly the work will get done. If I'm lucky, he won't hold a grudge.

News flash: Neglect bad for kids

In news that should surprise no one, new research shows that children adopted from overseas orphanages have developmental problems due to early neglect and lack of stimulation. Gosh, d'ya think? Given what an industry early stimulation of children has become in this country, with CDs to play to your children while they're in the womb and computer games for the extremely young and all manner of educational TV, baby gymnastics classes and learning-minded toys -- with all that considered so essential to good development, how could anybody think that sitting in an overcrowded playpen in an understaffed orphanage for most of your early years could result in a child with only minor developmental differences?

Apparently a lot of adoptive parents do think that, or more accurately hope that and dream that and cling to that beyond all reason. Whether research findings like these will change anybody's mind is hard to say; dreams die hard. It may make international adopters more picky about the orphanages they adopt from, which means that the kids most in need of families will be the least likely to get them. Or it may make adoptive parents less reluctant to get their kids set up immediately with early intervention and other developmental helpers. That's the best-case scenario, for sure. I won't argue with anybody that love will make all the difference for these children. But love has to include acceptance of the problems that come with institutionalization, and willingness to get help for those problems without delay; and it has to be unconditional, whether developmental delays are easily caught up, or deep and long-lasting.

Now, if they could do some research as to just what sort of help helps most for children with this background, that would be really ... helpful.

It's back!

I'm happy to report that "Mothers with Attitude" is back from the abyss. You can still access it by the short-but-nonsensical http://www.mamatude.com, or by the new-but-longer-to-type http://www.motherswithattitude.com. Or, if you really enjoy typing, you can still use the old-fashioned http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/Commons/2484. But why would you, when we're so chock-full o' domain names?

What the heck happened to "Mothers with Attitude"?

If you're looking for my main site, "Mothers with Attitude," you may notice that sometime today it dropped off the face of the earth. Don't worry: It's still there. However, I made the mistake of trying to turn it from a Geocities free site to a paying one, and while that's pending they've apparently managed to make the site completely inaccessible. It should return sometime within the next 72 hours, and if it takes that long I will probably have popped a necessary blood vessel and will not be around to keep it up. Hold good thoughts.

Why don't DOCTORS just say no?

In case you're keeping track, here's another thing parents shouldn't be demanding antibiotics for: ear infections. According to new guidelines from "a joint sub-committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians," letting kids ride with otitis media for a few days will do no harm, and the infection may go away all by its ownself. The docs promise that no damage will be done to the kiddo's hearing, and you can always start the meds later. Easy for them to say; they don't know how my daughter used to howl and scream when she had an ear infection. Or maybe they do know, and that's why they don't want her in their offices.

Again, the assumption clearly stated is that hysterical, overprotective parents are responsible for the overprescription of antibiotics and their subsequent decline in effectiveness. How it is we force pediatricians to buckle to our evil will, I'm not sure. Maybe by bringing our screaming offspring and refusing to leave without drugs. At any rate, the joint subcommittee wishes we would knock it the heck off.

In other news, I finally went to my doctor last weekend with my lousy cold, which had mutated into an unsightly skin infection on my upper lip. The doctor thought the skin infection, like the cold, was probably viral, but gave me some antibiotics anyway just in case it was a staph infection. This is pretty much exactly the way I and my children have been prescribed antibiotics most, if not all, of the time -- by doctors who aren't sure it's needed, but want me to have it anyway. Do they assume my mere presence in their office represents an insistence on drug-getting? Has anybody reading this blog ever demanded antibiotics over a doctor's resistance, or has it usually been the other away around? Please use our "comments" feature to weigh in.

Happy Valentine's Day

I've been wondering at what grade level kids stop wanting to give Valentines to everyone in their class, and now I know: fifth grade. At least that's true for my daughter, who has always been perfectly willing to write out little cards to each and every one of her classmates but this year wanted no part of it. She swore that they didn't make little mailboxes in class this year, no list of names came home, and she was adament that she didn't have to do it this time, didn't want to do it, wouldn't do it. If she comes home with a bunch of unrequited cards, I'm going to feel bad, but she probably won't.

If your kid obsesses about Valentine's Day school etiquette the way I seem to be, there are some discussion tips here. We're not going altogether greeting-less this year; my son did Valentines for his special-ed class, and my girl did agree to bring some candy for her teacher, aide and therapist. But I'm sure she and her classmates are already looking ahead to middle school, when they'll put away childish things and start giving Valentines like they mean it, and then of course I will have to worry if she DOES want to give someone a card, and if she gets any that are at all meaningful. Guess I should enjoy the lull.

Maybe McDonald's IS trying to make us fat

I've had little patience with stories of lawsuits claiming that McDonald's is somehow forcing people to overeat their fried specialties and is therefore legally responsible for the plaintiffs' obesity. We may sometimes feel that we're slaves to advertising, but we're not, really. We can choose to eat elsewhere, or to not go out at all. We can choose to order the McSalad instead of the McSaturatedFatBurger. No matter how amazing the fries smell, we are still people of free will. And unless there are pimply teenagers in McDonald's uniforms forcing milkshakes down our unwilling throats, I don't believe we have anybody to blame for our appetites but ourselves.

And yet, there is this: Every so often, I drive by McDonald's in the morning on the way to my office to pick up a little breakfast. And when I do, I allow myself a little indulgence: one of those nice greasy delicious hash-brown patties, hot and oily from the fryer. It's not so good for me, but one of them every now and then isn't so bad for me, either. But McDonald's doesn't want me to have one of them; it wants me to have two. Two for the price of one! Isn't that great! The drive-through order-taker is incredulous when I beg to just have one for the price of one. When I can have two! And two is better! This isn't a case of asking me to supersize. This is a case of insisting that I take more than I have asked for. I honestly have to argue with these people every time I order. Now, if I took the extra and threw it away, I'd feel like I was wasting food. And if I ate it, I'd blame no one else for that decision. But the forcing of extra food on people who don't want it -- that, I blame on McDonald's. Maybe Ronald's got ulterior motives after all.

Go ahead, tell me off

I've added a comments feature to this blog -- and given my level of tech savvy, the chances that I've screwed up the code in some significant way so that it either won't work right or will make the rest of the blog not work right is high -- so if you read something here that you love, hate, or wish to expand upon, you may now do so easily. Be nice, and if you can't be nice, be brief.

Funny business

Here's something small and silly that's made my day today: Dave Barry has a blog! This is good news because I never did get around to getting a Dave Barry page-a-day calendar for my office desk this year, and now I can keep popping over to the blog for my daily laughter fix. Plus, it's new stuff and not excerpts of old. Oh, I know, it's not exactly a big deal, but I've had a rough week. I need all the laughs I can get.

Disasters can be fun!

Are your kids disturbed by the heightened state of terrorism alert we're supposed to be under right now? Mine, I'll admit, are pretty oblivious. Maybe these are some of the blessings of being language delayed, as my daughter is, or spending a lot of time in a fetal-alcohol-effects-inspired alternative universe, as is the case with my son -- in both those cases, you miss a lot of what's going on in the real world, and the real world being what it is these days, that ain't so bad.

I don't really have the heart to force them to sit and pay attention and absorb the full horror of events like 9/11 or impending war or the space-shuttle explosion. They hear a little, but most of it goes over their heads. If I ever do want to put them into a panic, though, I know just where to go: the Federal Emergency Management Agency's perky pages for kids. On bright Web screens that glow with sort of an "elevated alert" yellow, kids can learn about National Security Emergencies, read up on terrorism, figure out what they need to make Mom and Dad assemble for a home emergency kit, and map out their response in case of regular explosion, nuclear or radioactive explosion, or chemical or biological warfare. They can play disaster-related games and quizzes, get a certficate for being a Disaster Action Kid, and read the story of Herman, the FEMA spokescrab, as he seeks a disaster-proof shell.

Oh, it's all positively empowering, and will give your kids plenty of things to lie awake at night worrying about. It made me feel like chewing my nails, anyway. Maybe kids today are cooler about this stuff. Is that a good thing?

Real Naive. Real Idealistic. Real Discouraged.

Well, I guess, in a way, I lost my Internet virginity today. It was my first tangle with the dreaded "intellectual property" rights, and I lost. Turns out you can't say the words "real mom"™ on the Web, or at least you can't say them on T-shirts, as I had in my Mothers with Attitude store. "Real Mom,"™ it turns out, is trademarked to the owner of this site, who politely but firmly told me to cease and desist using that phrase. She also apparently told Cafepress, where my store resides, and they shut the shops with those products down and sent me a "Thou shalt not steal intellectual property" e-mail in the blink of an eye. All of which leaves me feeling angry, frustrated, bewildered, maligned, defensive ... and silly, too, because no one much was buying those shirts, and I wasn't pricing for a profit anyway, and really, who cares? They're no great loss.

But when I thought of them, anyway, they were mine. I had an idea to do it, and although the trademark owner legitimately feels that she owns those words and has worked hard to attach them to herself, I'd never heard of her or that trademark when I had the idea. They were just two common words waiting to be set on a shirt. How is it that common words can be owned? The Internet makes this all so much more confusing because it is now so terribly easy to put your words in very public places, and then so very easy for people to find those words and find fault with them. There was a time when I would have thought that putting those words on a shirt was a fun idea for an adoptive parent, and I would have drawn them on a piece of paper and gone down to the transfer shop and made me up a shirt. No one would likely have challenged my right to do that. Now, though, I can set up a whole store, for free, with the click of a button, and suddenly I'm a trademark violator.

The whole thing has me feeling very paranoid. Should I shut down the rest of my little store, just in case? Is my Web site safe? Could someone trademark the words "Parenting Isn't Pretty"? "Mothers with Attitude"? What if somebody trademarks my name? Do I actually intellectually own anything? Maybe I should just pull all my Internet plugs and go hide somewhere where I can't break any laws.

I know this sort of thing happens all the time, and will probably happen to me again. I've been thinking about another site that I like very much, enormously more successful than my own, that had to completely change its name and url and everything because of a similar situation, and that was exponentially more of a headache for them than losing a non-paying store is to me. It's the nature of the beast, I guess. But somehow, I'm feeling a little less joy in free expression tonight.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Julie Donner Andersen's latest installment in her Therapeutic Laughing column, "A Mom by Any Other Name", is up and ready to amuse you. She covers the names kids give their maternal parent at different ages and stages, from "Mama" to "Moooooooooooom." When we adopted our kids at ages 4.5 years and 21 months respectively, we started them on "Mama" and "Papa," good Russian-sounding names, and those have stuck for most of these 8 years and more. Lately we've been having some drift into more all-American "Mom" and "Dad," which is fine too, and the more attitude-packed "Terri" and "Rick, which is not. My daughter becomes a teenager in April, and we'll see what she comes up with then. She better know I don't answer to "Hey, you!"

No Nick

My son is a major SpongeBob SquarePants fan -- though, thankfully, not yet sophisticated enough to appreciate it on a more adult level, such as the one proposed by Virginia Heffernan on Slate.com. No, my guy is less interested in SpongeBob's "moral vision" than in his tendency to do silly things and make silly noises. He gets so excited by the sponge's antics that he sometimes doesn't come down all evening. And so, of course, I'm pulling the plug.

That's got to be one of the hardest parts of parenthood: withholding something your child really loves, for his own good. In this case, it's all Nickelodeon NickToons that are temporarily banned from our TV -- not just Mr. SquarePants, but "Rugrats," "Hey, Arnold!" and "Rocket Power," too. Not only do these particular funnies wire him up something fierce, but his tendency to pick up phrases and activities and repeat them in other contexts, when no one knows that he's just playing a cartoon character, has started to get him in trouble. The only way I know to make him stop is to remove the source. Maybe if he doesn't hear bully Harold on "Hey, Arnold!" say, "I'm gonna pound you!" for a few weeks, he'll stop saying it to bigger kids on the playground.

He hasn't found anything harmful to pick up yet from gentle PBS cartoons like "Arthur" and "Clifford," or on the Nick Jr. cartoons repeated in the afternoons on Noggin. Franklin and Little Bear, apparently, have no dangerous catch-phrases. And the Food Network is still pretty safe. No need to ban all TV -- it's one of the few rewards he's interested in for good behavior -- but for now, Mom's saying no to Nick. And my boy's left saying, "Barnacles!"

"Parents' False Beliefs Bring Kids to ER for Colds"

I've been too sick with an annoying winter cold over the past couple days to write anything here, but at least now I know from this helpful Yahoo! News article that I needn't trouble my doctor with my sufferings. It gives survey results showing that people who run to the doctor or the ER for mere colds, demanding antibiotics in spite of the fact that they don't work on viruses, are responsible for the downfall of American medicine, or something like that. Actually, the article doesn't talk about adults going to the doctor, but something more insidious: parents who bring their children to doctors. Imagine the nerve of them, expecting somebody to care that their children are afflicted! This appears to be a continuation of the campaign to blame parents for antibiotics overuse, which I railed about in my very first column on Mothers with Attitude.That was three years ago, and I've still had antibiotics pushed on me by doctors way more often than I've requested them. But hey, let's blame parents -- they're an easy target. They're all too tired or too preoccupied by their children's health or too miserable from catching their children's cast-off colds to complain.

School lunches from all over

I'm pretty happy with the lunches at my kids' school, mostly because they're affordable and save me the trouble of having to pack lunches myself. The offerings seem decent enough, neither as unhealthy as selections I 've heard of at other schools nor as surreal as ones I remember from my own youth. Occasionally my son or daughter will ask for extra money to buy chips or cookies, but they get none from me: Eat what's on the tray is my response. And if they complain about that, I'm going to show them this editorial from today's New York Times, which lists the particulars of school lunches in several different countries. The aim is to show how healthful the meals are in, say, Moscow or Paris as opposed to New York. But I know that when my kiddos complain about their bill of fare, just showing them the South Korean menu of Squid with Hot Sauce and Radish Kimchi will make their cafeteria chow seem a whole lot less scary.

For Mothers Who Read

The Web site Salon.com used to have a section called "Mothers Who Think," and since it's been discontinued I've missed the thoughtful views on parenting that used to reside there. But recently, the Book Club feature on Slate.com has reminded me of it -- sort of a "Mothers Who Read." Last week, as noted here, the discussion centered on a book dealing with infertility; this week, an adoptive parent and adoptee discuss "Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption" by Barbara Melosh. Since the parent doing the discussing is a dad, I guess it's more like A Dad Who Reads Makes Mothers with Attitude Think. But it's good reading, for sure.

Some enchanted IEP meeting

I attended the nicest IEP meeting yesterday. Honestly, it was unnatural. Even when I'm on good terms with the child study team members, and no matter how many wonderful reports I've had about the child in question during the year, the IEP meeting is usually everybody's opportunity to bombard me with all the problems they've been kindly concealing, and, in my daughter's case, all the evidence that points to her needing way, way more help than I am wanting to give her.

But not this time. This time, everybody thinks she's doing just great. The teacher said she's been getting 90s and 100s on tests. The speech therapist said she's making wonderful progress. The child study team leader agreed to do some non-mandated testing to see if we can quantify the improvements we're seeing in her reading comprehension, and thought my modification requests were quite reasonable and appropriate. Nobody disagreed with my plan to keep her in a regular-ed classroom next year in middle school; previously in IEPs, I had been told she should really, really, really go to resource room, but not this time. This time, the team couldn't be more agreeable.

It almost made me want to stand up and say, "No! She's doing awful! She needs more help! Put her in resource room! Put her back in self-contained! If things are this great, we just must not be paying attention!" And maybe that was their evil plan. But I remained calm, and basked in the universal praise for my child and my hard-working parenting self. I asked the child study team leader for a favor involving my son, and again -- although it involved extra work for her without a clear necessity for it -- she agreed. As I walked out of the building, one of my son's old teachers offered me an opportunity to participate with the staff in the buying of lottery tickets, and I felt lucky enough to do it. When my daughter came home, she brought a present for me from her teacher: the url for a Web site full of graphic organizers, which the teacher knows I like because I keep nagging people to use them with my daughter. So pleasant and civilized it all was. And if at some point I stepped through the looking glass into alterna-special-ed-world, I didn't notice.

Something new to worry about

We already knew that sitting too long in front of a computer could give you a backache, neckache, headache, blurry vision, and seriously annoyed family members. But who knew it could give you a blood clot, too? The condition, nicknamed "economy class syndrome" as it was previously mostly seen in people who spent too much time in cramped airplane seats, is brought on by going for long hours without standing up; a blood clot forms in those idle legs and travels to the lungs. And if I read anymore about this, I shall become convinced that such a thing is happening to me right at this very moment. Time to take a walk!

Touching an angel

April Cain's latest column on Mothers with Attitude, The Healing Power of Touch, reminds me strongly of how my son behaved when we first brought him home (and for quite some time after that), and gave me a much-valued opportunity to think about how far he's come. Like April's son, mine had a sensory system that went into high alert when someone tried to touch or hold him. Nearly two years in a Russian orphanage gave him no neural experience of sustained loving touch, and it took time, patience, and sensory integration therapy to turn him into the cuddle-bug he is today. He's cuddly well past the age at which boys stop wanting to snuggle with their moms, but his body now craves that which it once rejected. Amazing things, our nervous systems.

Reading April's column brought me back to those early days when I was trying so hard to figure out what it was with him, before I realized how neatly the diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Effects put the pieces together, before I could reflexively pick out signs of sensory integration dysfunction in so many children in addition to my own, when I was operating on an instinct which I had no particular reason to trust. My brain's undergone some changes, too.

Remembering recess

"Is Recess a Necessity or a Hindrance?" asks an article on the Bella Online site. When I was a kid, I'd have voted for hindrance, because I deeply hated anything that required physical coordination or exertion. Ladder bars were torture, games of catch invitations to display my klutziness before my disdainful peers, dodgeball resolutely un-dodgeable. I tried to just sit off to the side and read a book during recess, but teachers would push me back into the fray. Abolishment of recess? A dream come true for me, it would have been.

Maybe I lived too soon, because according to some reports, things like recess and physical education in primary grades are in danger of disappearing. They're still hanging in at our local elementary school, though, and my kids would undoubtedly vote recess a necessity. My daughter's coordinated in ways I could never dream of being, and she enjoys playing outside at any opportunity (reading books, not so much). And my son, hyper fellow that he is, needs a little time to let off steam in the middle of the day. The cruel irony of life in a northern climate is that, come winter, you may lose recess even if you still have it; sub-freezing weather, rain and snow all mean indoor confinement whether you find recess necessary or hindering or whatever. I'm hearing reports of movies and board games and moderate chaos for those 20-or-so midday minutes, which are mildly annoying for my girl and mildly disorganizing for my boy. They'll be glad when recess returns with the spring. And I'll be glad it's them, not me.

Valentine goodies

Just in time for Valentine's Day, the Mothers with Attitude Mall now features a Forever Family Store, with heart-bedecked items declaring "You Are Mine Forever" and "Love Makes a Family." A cute little teddy bear, too.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Kathy Winters has graciously agreed to allow her poem "The Misunderstood Child," which made the rounds of some special-needs mailing lists yesterday, to be posted on Mothers with Attitude. It's an insightful look at the challenges of children with hidden disabilities. Read it and forward it to your own personal support groups.

My own personal misunderstood child is having a good week, even though yesterday saw him home sick from school with a fever and a cough. His behavior has been good since his very bad patch last week, and I'd like to believe it has something to do with the techniques I've been using from the book "Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach" (see Saturday's entry for more information). I'd like to believe it, and I'm almost scared to believe it, because transformation is not a bad word to use to describe the improvement in his attitude and willingness to cooperate, not every second and not without challenges, but in general and in surprising ways. Could it be this easy? Maybe not; he's been known to behave well when sick, so maybe it's some combination of fatigue and cough syrup that's making him more easygoing. It's a nice break, anyway.

Around the Web

There's an interesting book discussion on Slate.com on "Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America" by anthropologist Linda L. Layne. Two editors who are currently pregnant but previously miscarried talk about the book and their personal experiences, and while I've never suffered a miscarriage (never even got as far as the conception part), I can certainly relate to envying pregnant women and feeling less interesting to OB-GYNs when the OB part of the picture drops out of focus. I don't know if any of this discussion makes me more likely to read the book -- less likely, maybe -- but the conversation's interesting reading all by itself. ... Adoptive parents with children from Russia or Ukraine may want to stop by this site to take a survey on the accuracy or in- of the preadoptive health information they received on their little ones. We were lucky to receive very accurate information -- maybe because we were specifically looking for special needs -- and so the language of this survey seems slanted to me in favor of blaming agencies. But since the blameworthy experience many parents have had with dishonest agencies is probably the impetus for surveys like this, that's probably unavoidable. ... The Sensory Integration Network Web site has had a facelift; stop by and check out the new design. I haven't browsed through it enough to see if all the good old information is there, but it sure looks organized.

Tiptoeing through the developmental levels

If you're a little obsessed with charting your child's rate of development -- and it's hard not to be, in a society that is so very fond of benchmarks -- here's a site that will feed your need to wonder and worry. Part of the Washington State Department of Health and Human Services' Web site for foster parents, the Child Development Guide allows parents to navigate through "normal characteristics" in yearly increments for the areas of physical, intellectual, social, emotional and moral development. You can start at your child's chronological age in any area and then work backward (or forward, I suppose, but not in my household) to pinpoint your young one's exact developmental level. The accompanying parenting strategies can then be used with confidence.

I've been saying for a while that my fetal-alcohol-affected nine-year-old is really more of a 4-year-old emotionally, without really knowing what that means. So I took a look at the emotional characteristics of four-to-five-year-olds and -- sure enough! -- there were the behaviors we've been so bothered by recently:

Exhibits a great deal of name calling; can be demanding and/or threatening. Often is bossy, belligerent; goes to extremes, bossy then shy; frequently whines, cries, and complains. Often tests people to see who can be controlled. Is boastful, especially about self and family. Is beginning to develop some feeling of insecurity.

So then I clicked forward to see what we might be expecting next, and ... well, the five-to-six-year-old description could pretty well have applied to him, too. And the six-to-seven. And really most of the levels I looked at. So it's not exactly a precision instrument. But you know you're going to go spend a few hours there anyway.

The lonely little discussion board

Got a nice e-mail yesterday from someone thanking me for starting the Adoption Watch discussion board (noting, rightly at least in my research, that there was no similar forum for the examination of the way adoption is depicted in all manner of media). I was happy and somewhat surprised to get this appreciation, since the lack of interest in the board when I started it back in July was so resounding that I'd kind of abandoned the idea. Still, the board's there, and maybe it's time for me to mention it again and invite folks to stop by, post reviews, and argue. Surely there's something out there in media-land that somebody's up in arms about.

Accentuate the positive

After a lengthy foray into more general non-fiction, I'm back to reading parenting books. I'm galloping through "Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach" by Howard Glasser and Jennifer Easley, because my difficult child could certainly use some transforming right now. I don't know that I buy all of the authors' assumptions, but the basic approach is right on, at least for my fetal-alcohol-affected boy: Give all your energy and big reactions to your child when he's doing something right, not something wrong. The book suggests following the pattern of a video game, in which all the rewards and successful experiences come with following the rules, and breaking the rules leads to a quick, unemotional, unarguable ending to the fun. The recommended method ends with a fairly involved system of credits and privileges, but starts with the simple act of noticing and commenting on the things kids do when they're not misbehaving. It's not so much a matter of catching them being good, but creating spontaneous opportunities for them to be good when none would have existed, and recognizing their acheivement. Or even just describing, in a neutral way, what you see them doing, so they know they're seen and appreciated. It sounds so simple it just might not work, but I have to admit, in the couple of days I've been trying this, my son does seem more relaxed and cooperative, and I certainly enjoy him a whole lot more. Maybe there's a little mind control to it on both sides.

I also picked up a copy of "The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun: Activities for Kids with Sensory Integration Dysfunction" by Carol Stock Kranowitz last time I was in the bookstore, mostly because I was so thrilled to see it prominently displayed. It looks to be a skimming book as opposed to a reading-cover-to-cover book, but I'll be checking it regularly for play and therapy ideas for my son. I was particularly interested to see that many of the ideas utilized plastic grocery store bags, of which my son has approximately 100 in his room at any one time (alright, it's a weird thing to collect, but hey, they're free), so we won't have to be buying any equipment.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Just posted is Julie Donner Andersen's latest column, You Think YOU Had a Hard Day, in which she opines that moms will always win any bad day contest, hands down. In our house, the most recent Big Bad Day was had by my son, who (as noted below) came home with not one but two "bad behavior" notes on Tuesday from his self-contained special-ed class. His teachers may have felt he wasn't listening and spurning their attempts at discipline, but in fact he was seriously rattled by all the yelling and disciplinary actions, to the point that he was determined not to go to school the next day. "I need a day off," he said, from the moment he got up until the moment we got into the school building.

Now I know I'm supposed to be tough about stuff like this -- I know, because the school principal told me so in no uncertain terms Thursday morning -- but the fact is, I told the school secretary he wasn't feeling well, and I took him home. There is a small kernel of truth to my sick-day plea: The last two times he has begged to stay home and I have made him go to school, he's thrown up during the course of the morning, and wound up coming home anyway. So it was, in some ways, a preemptive action.

But there was more to my decision than a concern for his digestive health, and that is: Sometimes we all just need a mental health day. My boss has been known to give me a day off after a particularly traumatic day at work; why shouldn't a child who's had a day when he spiraled further and further out of control get 24 hours to regain it? He had a relaxing day; we watched some TV, read a book, did some mental math problems and a science experiment. And the next day, he went back to class. I didn't get any notes, so he must have done okay. Or maybe they're just not going to send me notes anymore. Either way, my day's better.

Never too early to watch what you eat

As if the threat of zits, bad body image and hip-huggers weren't enough to encourage a girl to watch her diet, here's a report indicating that a low-fat diet for pre-teens may offer some protection against breast cancer in later years. The research is pretty speculative, based on the assumption that it would be good to lower blood levels in puberty of hormones that have been linked to breast cancer in adults. And as incentives go, telling your daughter that "if you eat that potato chip now, in twenty or thirty years you might be very, very sick" is pretty weak. But maybe it'll give us moms more rationale to push healthier diets. And eat all the snack food and chocolate before they can get to it.

FAS in the news

Well, how about that? Fetal Alcohol Syndrome made the Yahoo! Health News KidsHealth listings today, right there between "Heart Murmurs and Your Child" and "Common Childhood Orthopedic Conditions." The article's not a bad overview, and it's nice to see it get front-page play, if only for a day. Another interesting fetal-alcohol-related page to check out is this quiz to give you a feel for what it's like to have FASD. Sure rings true today, when my son came home with not one but two notes complaining about his behavior -- behavior pretty much exactly like that described in the aforementioned quiz. Aren't special educators supposed to know how to deal with this stuff?

Celebrity non-endorsement

Well, I guess the whole issue of medicating kids who have trouble in school is settled now: Tom Cruise has spoken. According to an AP report on a press conference in New Zealand, where he's preparing to shoot his next movie, Cruise "advised parents on Saturday to work hard to help children having problems at school and not immediately put them on medication." Well, thanks, Tom. We'll try.

The star went on to relate his own childhood academic struggles, which were remediated finally not with pharmaceuticals but with Scientology. You can hardly argue the fact that Cruise has grown up to be a successful adult despite his early difficulties. And as it happens, I'm in agreement with him on the wrongness of medication as a first resort. Still, I can't help but bristle when celebrities make proclamations about how ordinary folks ought to live their lives and raise their children. Look to your own house, y'all.

Support and fiery humor

If you're afraid your child's educators see you as the Mother from Hell -- or, more likely, if you're proud of that designation -- you should know that there's an organization just for you. Mothers from Hell 2 is, as their Web site proclaims, "a national group of parents, relatives, friends, and anyone who just plain 'gets it' fighting chipped tooth and broken press-on nail for the appropriate education, community acceptance, desperately needed services, rights of and entitlements for individuals with disabilities. ... MFH2 offers more support than a 44DD underwire and more empowerment than a tanker full of caffeine, chocolate & Viagra!" A $10 annual membership gets you a subscription to the quarterly Brimstone Bulletin, access to a members-only list serve, and 10% off MFH2 merchandise. Wear one of their T-shirts to your next IEP meeting and child study teams will cower at your feet. (Hey, bring one of our tote bags, too.)

Lyrics to share and lyrics to squash

I have no clear idea why it's on a government Web page, much less under the umbrella of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, but there's a very nifty listing of song lyrics here nonetheless -- kiddie songs, songs from movies and musicals, patriotic ditties and popular favorites ranging from "Yes, We Have No Bananas" to the theme from "Friends." The NIEHS does present some lame attempt at connection by claiming that music is part of our environment; and the fact that it's part of the site's Kids' Pages (where you can also find games like "Toxic Waste Bug Bash") allows it a certain irrelevance; but I'll bet that there's really just some obsessed techie in the NIEHS Web site department with this endless list of song lyrics, and he or she just wanted a chance to show it off. Well, nice show, whoever! A useful service indeed.

Speaking of song lyrics, in the "this is what I've come to" category I must report that today I allowed my daughter to buy a CD that had been edited to remove offensive content. I carefully picked through the bin and looked for one without the Parental Advisory Sticker so I'd know it had been sanitized. I remember how apalled I was by the blatant censorship of those stickers back when I was young, childless and idealistic, and Tipper Gore, Frank Zappa and Dee Snider were battling it out; and I remember tsking when I heard that, since big chains like WalMart wouldn't carry advisory-stickered music, whitewashed versions of offensive CDs were being produced. But now, you know -- I just don't think my 12-year-old really needs to be exposed to the entire breadth and depth of Uncle Kracker's vocabulary, especially since she really just wants to hear "Follow Me." So I've become that thing which I used to hold in such contempt, a squasher of artistic expression. And really not all that ashamed of it, as it turns out.

Sarcasm has its limits

A recent study confirms what I have long suspected to be true about my daughter, and that is: Kids don't get sarcasm. The Canadian researchers found that until age 10 or so, children find no humor in sarcastic comments; the young ones take the comments at face value, the older ones recognize the insincerity of the remark but just think it's mean. Which fits with my observations of my girl, who although 12 chronologically is 10 or under linguistically. My husband, for whom sarcasm is often the conversational mode of choice when dealing with uncooperative kids, has always been annoyed when our daughter disregards the clearly intoned intent of his comments, and more annoyed when I point out that she might not realize he wasn't saying what he meant. Now -- joy! -- I have Canadian researchers to back me up. Yep, that'll sure settle the argument.

Middle school fears and hopes

My daughter is continuing in a minor panic about the impending doom of middle school, just eight months away. The current #1 fret is that she'll never be able to change her clothes fast enough for gym class. And granted, she does take her time with clothing transitions at home, sometimes disappearing into her room for tens of minutes just to put on her PJs. When I explained, though, that the locker room won't have music to listen to and hair accessories to play with and a mirror to pose in front of (and that she wouldn't want to pose anyway, with classmates looking on), she started to see how changing might be able to be accomplished at a faster-than-grass-growing pace. But she still doesn't get why she can't just wear her school clothes for gym. I've explained about body odor and having appropriate workout clothes and keeping school clothes clean, but I think she suspects what we all secretly know is true: It's just another example of school-induced torture. Let's wait until kids get to the most physically insecure period of their lives, and then make them change in front of one another! Heartless, is what it is.

But while the fifth-grader is facing the change of schools with dread, I have to say that I'm feeling kinda cautiously optimistic about the whole thing. In the past month I've spoken to two people who will be working with her next year -- learning consultant and guidance counselor -- and was impressed that they seemed open-minded and willing to help. Heck, I was impressed that they were even willing to take my phone calls. My daughter's transitional IEP meeting is at the end of this month, and I'm going into it with a suggestion from the learning consultant that we keep her in an inclusion class for the time being -- as opposed to adding resource room, which everyone on the Child Study Team but me has been pushing for. Could it be that, in middle school, I'll actually have an ally for keeping this girl in a regular classroom? Probably as likely as my daughter being able to change in under five minutes, but miracles could happen.

Free books!

Well, e-Books. As if there weren't already enough paper-based books on ADHD, now you can read or download an ADHD/ADD e-BOOK from PediatricNeurology.com. The material seems to pull together some good basic information about attention disorders, and has the advantage of being free. The site also offers a Childhood Seizure e-BOOK -- of interest to me at the moment because there seems to be a very good chance that my son is now having absence seizures (it's always something, isn't it?) -- as well as articles on just about every other sort of pediatric neurology issue you can think of, from tics to tumors. I don't know about you, but I can never have too many things to worry about.

Bubble babies and dress codes for parents

Saw a couple of interesting parenting-related articles in the local paper recently. This one questions whether parents today are unreasonably overprotective of their children, to the point of raising a generation of "bubble babies." In our rush to guard them from every negative experience and even the slightest possibility of peril, various experts opine, we may be encouraging passivity, obesity and anxiety. And on the subject of too much protection being a bad thing, check out this article about a parent in St. Louis who volunteered to chaperone a school field trip but caused a stir when it turned out that what all the kids took to be just another mom was really a cross-dressing dad. Some parents were outraged when they heard of this -- allegedly protective of their little ones' knowledge that there's such a thing as a transgender adult -- but what you gotta love about this story is that THE KIDS DIDN'T NOTICE until their parents got all up in arms about it. If no one had made a fuss, it would have been a non-issue, and parents and children both would have been spared uncomfortable explanations. But where the ticked-off parents really lose me is in their proposed remedy for the situation:

"The parents have asked the district to let them know whenever the father in question visits Castlio Elementary School, so they can withdraw their children from class. And they are pleading for a dress code that would require all adults who interact with students to 'dress in what a 9- or 10-year-old perceives as normal clothes for a man or a woman.'

Oh, dear me. A dress code for parents? Legislated by 9- or 10-year-olds? What if they all get together and say that they perceive clown suits as normal clothes for a man or a woman? Or, worse, that they think all women should wear pumps and pearls? If men and women both wear jeans and t-shirts, is that going to be a problem? I guess there's a certain justice to the idea, since kids have to abide by dress codes that require them to wear what adults perceive as normal clothes for 9- or 10-year-olds. But still, I really don't think we want to go there.

Heavy backpack? Lift, don't fall.

What's the most common cause of backpack-related injuries among youngsters? You're probably thinking in terms of hideous spinal malformations caused by the weight of heavy books on developing shoulders, but guess what: according to a recent study, kids were more likely to get hurt falling over a backpack left carelessly on the floor than actually putting the thing on their backs. Now this news makes my day, because it both pokes a hole in my daughter's attempts to get out from under her allegedly back-breaking pack and into a wheeled model, and reassures me that other people's houses are every bit as messy as mine is. All I need is a study proving that wheeled backpacks cause dislocated shoulders from all that heavy pulling and bumping around, and I'll be a happy mom.

Last year's hottest health stories

InteliHealth lists the Top 10 Health/Medical Stories of 2002, at least as so judged by the Harvard Medical School faculty. The one that's most interesting to parents in particular is "6. Increasing Rate Of Type 2 Diabetes In Children." The one that was the biggest deal to me, personally, in 2002 was "1. The Limits Of Hormone-Replacement Therapy." And the one that I'm looking at as my big story for 2003 is "2. Walter Willett's Healthy Eating Pyramid," which mixes up the order of the standard USDA food pyramid to put red meat, butter, refined grains, starches and sweets at the tiny tip-top and whole grains and vegetable oils at the eat-a-lot bottom. It reflects a lot of what I've been thinking would be an improvement in my eating habits, and a lot of what I've heard would be best for the kiddos. It will probably go the way of most New Year's resolutions, but dietary backsliding is a Top 10 health story of mine now and forever.

Kids get Prozac, I get depressed

Here's happy news for those who are convinced that all childhood problems can be medicated away: The FDA has given its official OK for Prozac to be prescribed to depressed children. Not that it's never been prescribed for kids before -- doctors have been giving the adult-approved med to children for years -- but now everybody can just feel a little bit better about doing it. The drug was found to have about the same side effects in the young as in the older, with the added effect of slowed physical growth. That's seen as a small price to pay to help the up to 25 percent of U.S. children who suffer from depression.

Twenty-five percent! Can that be true? A quarter of kids today are diagnosed as depressed? And we think that's due to a massive coincidental chemical imbalance in their brains, and not a massively out-of-whack society that either makes kids depressed or makes their parents seek that diagnosis for them? I'm sure that the drug will be a life-saver for some families, and I feel like a Grinch being grouchy about it; but the fact is, I'm not one of those who are convinced that all childhood problems can, or even should, be medicated away, and this whole thing just makes my heart sink. Eli Lilly, Prozac's maker, says it has no intention of marketing its drug for children; but ah, come on, with a quarter of the pediatric population as potential clients, you just know it won't be long before Prozac ads are popping up in "Highlights," Chuckie Finster's endorsing the stuff on Nickelodeon, and the Prozac Web site features a whole special section for kiddies. The junior self-diagnosis quiz should be a whole lotta of fun.

Family trees in fiction

I was reading a beat-up paperback library book with my daughter over the Christmas break -- an entry in the "Babysitter's Little Sister" series -- and was surprised to find a really nice treatment of different families in general and adoption specifically. The book is "Karen's Twin," and although Amazon.com lists the paperback version as out-of-print, it's probably lurking in more school libraries than just ours.

The main character is proud to be a "two-two," with two of everything in the two households she lives in -- one she and her brother share with their mother and stepfather, and the other with their father, stepmother, stepsiblings, and a little sister just adopted from Vietnam. Part of the plot centers on paperwork problems surrounding the adoption, and I liked the fact that, while Karen sometimes thinks of the new family member as a pest, when she fears that the adoption may not go through, she springs to the tot's defense. Not to worry: the book ends with a "Happy Adoption Day" party.

A good deal of the story centers around an in-class "family tree" assignment -- the bugaboo of so many adoptive parents -- that is handled creatively by all the children; Karen, for example, makes a tree for each of her "families." When the class gets to invite members of their family for a special day, Karen invites her father and adopted sister, another brings the grandparents who are raising her, and another brings his foster parents.

The main plot -- in which one of Karen's classmates wants desperately to be her twin sister, and essentially stalks her for much of the book -- is interesting only in that the twin wannabe picks Karen because she's got the most interesting family in the class. As part of the "Babysitter's Club" sub-genre of grade-school fiction, "Karen's Twin" ain't exactly art, but it's amiable enough, and I much enjoyed the very matter-of-fact way in which family differences were treated. That's the way I try to treat them with my kids, too. If you're looking for ways to validate that point of view with your own personal pre-teen, this is a book worth checking garage sales for.

All juice or no juice

More to-do about juice on the InteliHealth site, this time reporting findings from the American Dietetic Association that "children and adolescents are drinking higher amounts of less nutritious fruit-flavored beverages and carbonated soft drinks than 100 percent juice." All-fruit fruit juice can provide kids with vitamins and make up their food-pyramid fruit servings for the day, but "juice drinks" and soda mostly just give them big ol' mouthfuls of sugar. The association's recommendation, naturally, is for parents to limit kids to juice and nothing but the juice. And I try, oh American Dietetic Association, I try. But the juice-ish beverages all have flashy labels and clever names and cool-looking bottles or foil pouches. The battles I have with my son at the supermarket, putting my foot down over Kool-Aid or Hi-C or Bombastic Berry Blast or some such. A nice bottle of pure apple juice just can't compete. But, you know, I'm sure that if I sit him down and explain the nutritional ins and outs of the situation, he'll eschew that sweet stuff in a second. Yeah, that'll happen.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Just posted Julie Donner Andersen's latest installment of her "Therapeutic Laughter" column. Titled PTO Hell, it tells of her travails in dealing with the Stepford Mom-filled Parent Teacher Organization at her children's school. I'm sure most of us have felt the wrath of the perfect at some time or other, although I have to report that the folks in charge of the Home School Association (as they call it here) at my kids' schools have been pretty charitable toward me and mine, maybe because my kids are in special ed and they don't expect (or often get) much from the moms of the so-classified, maybe because I've managed to do my share of volunteering, and maybe because I never go to meetings and hear what they really have to say about me. I'm taking Julie's experiences as a warning.

Also new to the site: a couple of additions to our long-dormant games page. Stop by to waste some time and you'll now find a daily trivia quiz and a mood indicator game, for your frittering pleasure. What, you got better things to do? Don't be a Stepford Mom.

Tops in 2002

What better day than New Year's Eve to take a little look back at what America's been searching for in 2002, courtesy of Google's 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist. In what might be called the Surfing People's Choice Awards, Google's year-end run-down lists the most popular search-engine queries in a variety of categories. It makes me feel very out-of-touch with the "zeitgeist" to see that, while I use Google frequently, I never made any of these "popular" searches -- not "Spiderman," not "Jennifer Lopez," not "Eminem" -- and that, in turn, the searches that were most frequently made by me -- "fetal alcohol," "sensory integration," "behavior management," say -- are nowhere to be found among the most common. People were apparently too busy searching for information on Ferraris and mp3s to put sites on adoption or special needs in the Top 10s. Ah, well. We all knew we were out of step, didn't we?

My site certainly wasn't the most searched-for by anybody, but I do note with amusement that, of the folks who found the "Mothers with Attitude" home page through a search engine, 71% got there by typing the word "attitude." A search with that term today found "Mothers with Attitude" on page 4 out of 91 pages of results. Not bad! Out of all the uses of "attitude" on the Web, I was in the top 40. With a site as tiny as mine, you take validation where you can get it.

Square peg finds success

Caught a nice bit of reassurance for those of us raising kids with learning and behavioral differences this morning in Slate's Today's Papers:

The financial section of the NYT honors a dozen people who had wildly successful years in 2002. At the top of the list is David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue. ... Neeleman doubled his company's profits in the nine months ending on Sept. 30—some of the worst months in airline history. He's a father of nine, he never finished college, and he suffers from attention-deficit disorder.

A google search on Neeleman turned up this USA Today article from October in which the CEO talks about his ADD and shares details from his life that will sound familiar to anyone with a child whose train of thought often seems to be running on a track in a different dimension. I was particularly interested to note that Neeleman, who diagnosed himself with ADD, refuses to take medication for it out of fear of losing all the magical things that seem to be working for him. I've often thought exactly the same thing about my own flighty son; but however you feel about medication, in a time when there's so much pressure to "fix" what's "wrong" with our kids, when we hear that they'll be failures if we don't get them under control or make them succeed in school or sand down their bad habits, it's helpful to hear stories of those whose high-flying success may have been a result of those very rough edges. Nice news for a Sunday morning, anyway.

Just limping back from my little Christmas 'net break. Our holidays were pretty peaceful; the only ones to melt down were adults, which means that my easily overstimulated boy is starting to learn to give his own self time outs when he needs them. Merry Christmas to that!

Santa was plenty generous to me. I got lots of good books to read, so I can pretend that I'm actually the kind of person who has time to sit down and do that. The tomes under the tree for me -- I'll list them for folks who like to compare reading lists, of whom I am one -- were The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform and the Future of the Church by George Weigel; Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes; American Studies by Louis Menand; Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 by Thomas L. Friedman; and finally, shamefacedly, NOT because I asked for it but because my sister-in-law remembered I once said I had a crush on him as a preteen, Danny Bonaduce's autobiography, Random Acts of Badness: My Story.

Aside from that last one, it's exactly what I wanted. But all those good words weren't the best gift I got this Christmas. My kids gave me something infinitely more wonderful: They got along. They played together nice. They camped out in my daughter's room and played with the matching Barbie minivans their grandmother gave them and were just as friendly as you can imagine. My daughter even told me she'd told her brother she loves him, which is so far from her ordinary attitude as to be miraculous. And I know, it won't last. Four days post Christmas, the peace and unity is already slipping. But oh, it was nice while it lasted, going about my business on Thursday with the two of them happily occupied together, seeing enthusiasm and camaraderie in their relationship rather than hostility and spite. Probably hostility and spite is really a more natural big sister-little bro dynamic than peaceful playing, but Christmas is a time for dreams.

You go, girls

Nice girl-power-y site here for preteen types whiling away the endless days before school starts up again in January (or for moms who want said preteens to get up off the couch and DO something already). It was clearly created with Hispanic teen-ish girls in mind, but the site is bilingual and offers plenty for muchachas from any cultural background to enjoy (though adoptive parents may want to be sensitive to the section called "Family History," which emphasizes how important one's family heritage is; I don't think it's entirely inappropriate to adopted children, but you might want to provide some guidance and talking points). On the games page, along with tic-tac-toe and word searches, are quizzes on drinking and driving, inhalants and poisons, values and self-esteem. It's all really rah-rah and upbeat and well-intentioned, which means it will probably be poison to kids, but that doesn't mean we can't plop those little preteen butts in front of the computer and insist they play. Along with "Know Yourself" and "Know Your Body," there should be a section called "Know When Your Mom Needs a Break."

No baby pictures? No problem.

Well, here's one way to tackle the dreaded "baby picture project." If you're tired of having to educate educators as to why asking for baby pictures from everyone might not be fair to adopted children (and any child who reasonably might not have such a snapshot, including children whose mothers are chronically disorganized and those who always forget the camera), tired of creating or executing alternate assignments, tired of torpedo-ing time-honored school traditions that everybody clings to but you -- if you've got a great kid but no baby pictures thereof, consider investing in the fine art of photo regression. Here's one artist with an Internet site who'll consider conceptualizing what your child looked like as a baby and, for a few hundred bucks, provide you with 8x10 glossies. Maybe this will give your child an awareness of having been a baby that he or she may be lacking. Maybe this will give him or her a privacy-preserving way of handling schoolmates' questions. Maybe it will just give you an easy out from discomfiting assignments.

And maybe it's all just a little bit creepy. Some people claim that their kids have real concerns and regrets about the lack of documentation of their younger years, and that may be. I can't really argue with anything that increases a child's sense of selfhood. But I wonder if it's emotionally sound to fake these things -- to use technology to pretend that missing pieces are really there. It may be a pretty picture, and it may be fun to imagine, but it's still a lie. And the fewer of those we tell our children -- and the fewer we tell as adoptive families -- the better we'll be in the long run, I think.

Get your hip 'n' happening interventions here

Looking for the "newest and hottest interventions"? The Youth Change Web site is offering them up, along with live on-line help for solving behavior problems; workshops, books and tapes; and newsletters on "ADD, Apathy & More." And of course, the first thing that comes to your mind when looking at a cheerful site like this, bedecked with cartoons of smiling children, is, "Folks, if my child's behavior problems could be solved NOW with a visit to one Web site, I would save so much money on therapy bills and medications that I could buy me the Brooklyn Bridge."

But I'm certainly not above casting about for interventions, and while I've never found a Web site that's Solved All My Problems, I've certainly visited many that have pointed me in the right direction. What tickles me here, and troubles me a little, too, is the fact that these interventions aren't just tried and true, or teacher recommended, or parent approved, but the "newest" and "hottest." Are we really to the point of marketing interventions the way we market cars, clothes and records? Maybe so. There do certainly seem to be trends in interventions, and waves of enthusiasm. ABA seems to be hot for autism intervention; sensory integration therapy could probably be characterized as new and hot, if you take a broad view of what "new" means in terms of recognized therapies; nutritional interventions are pretty hot at the moment, with advocates every bit as zealous as any pop star's fans. I'd say medication was a pretty hot intervention if I hadn't just visited the bookstore yesterday, and noticed that the "Ritalin is wrong" books now far outnumber the "medication is our friend" advisories. So maybe Ritalin is so five minutes ago, and blaming parents for having jobs or disagreements or divorces, as most of the new wave of ADHD books seem to do, is so very today.

Personally, I try to stay way ahead of the curve.

What makes a successful family

Lots of interesting food for thought on this site about raising adopted children with special needs. I particularly liked the part about the qualities of successful and satisfied adoptive and special needs families, such as this: "The most satisfied parents are those who are process oriented rather than outcome driven. They enjoy the challenge of adapting to each new developmental stage and the changes that brings in the child. They thrive on finding creative ways to deal with their child's behaviors and problems. They thrive on the process of being an advocate for the child's needs, and integrating him into their family, school and society." This and a long list of similar observations are gratifying because they reflect the things that I have always felt we were doing right as a family; and also, because they validate my need to buy more and more parenting books. See, I'm not a spendthrift and a slave to each new theory -- I'm enjoying the challenge of adapting to each new develepmental stage and thriving on finding creative ways to deal with my child's behaviors and problems. Yeah, that's it.

New on Mothers with Attitude

I'm feeling pretty calm this holiday season. The last UPS shipment from all my on-line gift-shopping arrived yesterday; most of our Christmas cards are mailed (save for the ones to people I've forgotten, to be mailed when I receive one from them); the dreaded holiday program at my kids' school is over and with it a world of stress for my son; presents are wrapped and waiting for our tree to go up this weekend; child-watching arrangements have been made for the week of no school; the menu is mostly planned for Christmas dinner; and I even managed to make it to my church's penance service on Tuesday, so I'm going into the holiday properly confessed (or improperly, depending on your feelings about communal penance, but I digress). The only major hurtle ahead is making it through Mass on Christmas eve, historically a near impossibility for my son. But other than that, I'm ready to say: Bring Christmas on! (Never mind that my kids have been saying that for a month and a half.)

If at this point in the season you're in need of a little spiritual uplift, read April Cain's latest installment in her "Thinking It Over" column, The Real Meaning of Christmas. It's so touching, it will have you casting the made-for-Hallmark TV movie in your head. Also new on the site this week are additional selections in the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome section of our bookstore, including some family stories that are pretty touching themselves. The rest of the bookstore will be updated with new offerings soon; it should be done by now, but hey! I've been getting ready for Christmas.

Looking for a little brain research?

Here's a cool site at which to while away some time: the listing of hot topics on the brains.org site. Billed as a way to "stay informed with the latest research in neuropsychology and education," the page offers alphabetically sorted items on everything from Attention Deficit Disorder to Violence. A few that caught my eye (in quotes, with my comments after):

"A new study out on medicating ADHD, shows that the best results were obtained when using Ritalin (MPH) mixed with caffeine. The study showed that impulsivity and agression as well as planning skills were most effected by the combination of these two drugs. (When used separately, Ritalin is more effective than caffeine and amphetimines work about as well as Ritalin.) Leon, M. 2000. Journal of Attention Disorders, vol 4(1), 27-47." ... Does Starbucks know about this? Look for ADHD Blend, coming soon.

"Using fMRI techniques, Yale University has found an interesting brain abnormality in persons with autism and autism spectrum disorder. In most brains (yours and mine) we use one area to discriminate or identify objects and a different area to identify faces. In the brains of persons with autism, they use only the first region (inferior Temporal gyri) to identify both objects and faces. Schultz, et.al. (2000). Archives of General Psychiatry, vol 57(4), 331-340." ... Makes me think about Temple Grandin's book Thinking in Pictures and the entirely different way people with autism seem to experience the world and language.

"Homework or no homework? That's a difficult question. According to research, student achievement has little relationship to whether or not the class has assigned homework. In elementary grades, teacher assigned homework actually correlated to students' poor attitude toward school. Achievement DOES relate positively to how much time the parents spend assisting with homework - which should come as no surprise to anyone. Cooper, et.al. 2001. Journal of Experimental Education. vol 69(2) 181-199 and Journal of Educational Psychology (1998), vol 90(1),70-83." ... Now, I actually like homework, because it helps me keep track of what my kids are doing, and gives me a firsthand chance to evaluate what they can or cannot do. Where I have trouble, though, is that fine line between "assisting with homework" and "doing their homework for them." I seem to cross it often (though not as often as they'd like).

"According to a study out of New York's Columbia University, praise students more for their effort than for their intelligence. The study showed that in 5th graders, praising intelligence actually caused them to work less, experience less enjoyment and less persistance in tasks. Praising effort had just the opposite effect. Mueller & Dweck (1998). Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. Vol 75(1) 33-52."

"Indiana University completed a study of students with Learning Disabilities(LD) Half the LD students were included in the regular classroom for reading and math. Half the LD students received reading and math instruction in a resource classroom. The LD students in the regular classroom made significantly more progress in reading and comparable progress in math when compared to the students in resource classes." ... This item and the one above are EXACTLY along the lines of what I've been trying to convince my daughter's child study team of for years. Maybe I'm just ahead of my time? Gotta order up some of these studies in time for next year's IEP meeting. And you can bet I'll be trolling this site for more validation.

Defending the apostrophe

Having just finished signing and stuffing Christmas cards with my husband, who, when addressing envelopes, insisted on using an apostrophe to pluralize the last names of our friends and relatives even though I gave him my every assurance as a professional copy editor that it was grammatically incorrect and also annoying, I was tickled to stumble upon the site of the Apostrophe Protection Society -- dedicated, as am I, to the proper use of this essential piece of punctuation. You can stop by for a quick English lesson, see examples of egregious incorrectness on signs and storefronts, and share your personally outrageous finds on a message board. I haven't seen anything like it since I belonged to an e-mail list for copy editors that routinely engaged in flame wars over proper comma placement.

None of this has anything to do with parenting, I guess -- except that, next time your sloppy writing kid tells you nobody cares about grammar no more, no how, you can call up this site and prove that there are indeed folks whose obsession with punctuation far, far exceeds your own. See? Somebody does care.

Christmas concerts and other holiday hassles

The Christmas program at my children's school is this Wednesday, which is a relief because it means the end of the routine-destroying rehearsals that drive my son so batty during the month of December. As I've written before, I have my doubts as to whether the good things about these annual extravaganzas (musical enrichment, the discipline of working as a group and being onstage, the opportunity for parents to get together and go "Awwwww...") is worth the bad things (study time lost, kids without musical ability forced to spend lots of time proving it, kids without standing-still ability tested beyond the very limits of endurance). I know, at any rate, that they're not good for my boy. Judging by the comments I'm getting about his rehearsal demeanor, his teachers know it too, although whether they're placing the proper blame on the disruptiveness of pageant preparation, I don't know. After Wednesday, at any rate, it will all be over. I'm hoping he doesn't display a little disruptiveness of his own onstage.

Christmas rehearsals are my son's greatest source of holiday stress. If your personal stress producer is a child with RAD, check out the Christmas message from Nancy Thomas for tips on making it through to the 25th. If dealing with child study teams has got you down, the folks at Wrightslaw want you to remember to follow their survival tips at this time and throughout the year. The About.com Special Children site has a nice list of links to articles on dealing with everything from depression to family reunions (oh, wait -- aren't those the same thing?), and on Mothers with Attitude you can still find the article from a mom of 18 on establishing Christmas traditions for adopted children. And if all that doesn't help, just remember that all of this holiday frazzle and frenzy does eventually come to an end. Holiday stress will pass. Then we can move on to general winter stress, followed by spring stress, summer stress, and fall stress. Merry whatever, y'all.

A vaccine kids can't get

I've been worrying off and on about whether I'll have my kids vaccinated for smallpox when the opportunity's offered, and here it turns out I've been worrying for nothing: according to an Associated Press report, there are currently no plans to provide the vaccine for children at all, unless there's an actual outbreak and all safety bets are off. Although testing a drug on children before prescribing it for them has hardly been considered a necessity in most other areas of medicine, it is apparently giving pause here -- and since a vaccine that has major health risks of its own can't ethically be tested on children, the tots will just have to go un-immune for now. Would that such caution extended to other vaccines as well.

If your unvaccinated little ones are nonetheless curious about the potential scourge of smallpox, there's a child-friendly FAQ on the KidsHealth site. Mom and Dad can get more details from a FAQ from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Adding to mom's balancing act

From the "Too Much of a Good Thing Is a Bad Thing" file comes research from the U.S. agriculture department and Cornell University that the antioxidants in dark grape juice, while good for your heart, are bad for your ability to absorb iron. That might not be a big deal for adults who are obsessed with cholesterol and looking for something other than red wine to lower it, but it's a big deal for kids, in whom iron deficiency can lead to anemia and, from there, to "mental, physical and behavioral impairment, particularly in infants and toddlers," according to the experts. Dark fruit juices in general appear to be iron-uptake-reducing, while lighter-colored juices have an opposite effect. The researchers stopped short of suggesting the witholding of dark grape juice for tots, but did recommend a balanced palette of beverage hues for maximum nutritional correctness. So there you go, moms: Now in addition to making sure your kids have a balanced diet that hits all the proper points on the food pyramid, and that their fruit juices don't contain corn syrup or aspertame or dyes or preservatives, you need to make sure that the colors of those juices assort themselves through the day in all shades from white grape juice to dark. So what if this means you have six or seven bottles open at all times -- you want to be drinking to their health, right?

Calendar girl

'Tis the season to ... buy calendars, among other things. Such a fresh start a new calendar gives you! This year, I'll be heading into 2003 with Mom's Family Calendar, a great wall planner for getting every family member where they're supposed to be when; the Jeopardy! page-a-day calendar I get my husband every year so we can start our mornings sparring over trivia; and a new planning system from Franklin Covey, purveyors of motivational organizational products. This new system replaces the Palm Pilot I purchased last year, which replaced a nice spiral blank book I was going to personalize to be my perfect planner, which replaced a pricey leather-bound system from Levenger, which replaced... well, I forget now. About ten or twenty other system-to-end-all-systems. I require a new life-planning system every eleven months or so to maintain the illusion that I really could be an organized person if I just had the right tools -- my house would be neat, my work would be done during daytime hours and not at 2 a.m., my children would get to school on time and appropriately clothed (the school nurse gave my daughter a pair of gloves last week because I'd sent her to school with socks on her hands to keep them warm, so I'm heading into the new year with a lot to prove on this score). Deep down, I know that what really needs to be changed are my personal habits, and not my paperwork ... but the paperwork's easier.

If you're still calendar shopping, you might want to surf by the About adoption site, which has some recommendations of 2003 Wall & Desk Calendars with an adoption theme.

180 channels and everything's on

It's official: My family now has more television channels than it knows what to do with. Our cable provider's been peddling digital packages that offer in excess of 180 channels, not to mention movies on demand that you can order and watch over the course of 24 hours, pausing, fast-forwarding, rewinding and stopping like they were tapes from the video store. We've got two Disney channels, three or four Nickelodeon channels, multiple HBOs, Encores and Starz-es, video magazines, and about 45 channels that just play music. Oh, it's a veritable wealth of programming, and as soon as we figure out how to use the remote, we'll be in television heaven. Now, I know there are moms out there who think TV is evil, a terrible influence on children, a major cause of youthful violence and immorality and hyperactivity and bad posture. Well, I ain't them. TV is my respite, and 180 channels means that my babysitter just agreed to work overtime. Tune in, turn on and leave me the heck alone -- that's my motto. Just hope the kids will let me watch something I want to watch every now and again.

A close family is a happy family

Despite what you may be feeling these upcoming holiday days, when the kids are home from school and underfoot and your relatives are over for dinner and bickering and your spouse is snappish from the stress of putting together toys with 3,467 pieces -- despite the feeling that your family is making you crazy, a close-knit family actually makes you much more happy. Really! They've done studies! Close families were found to "inoculate" children against despair, so when your kids whine that you're making their lives miserable, just chuckle and say, "That's not what they're saying at the University of North Carolina!" And a sociologist at the University of Chicago says that being married makes you happy, too, even if you think your marriage isn't the greatest. You're still as happy or happier than you would be alone. Really. Even without the inlaws. Sociologists wouldn't lie.

An adoption story, nice and not-so-

In my real, off-Web life I work for a Catholic newspaper. We wanted to do a nice story on adoption for National Adoption Month in November -- as, indeed, does every newspaper in the country, taking a brief break from all the scary adoption stories they run for the rest of the year -- and so the agency that handles adoption for our diocese set a reporter up with a family for a nice puffy piece about how great it is to adopt. I read the story eagerly when I finally got it to lay out and copy edit, and it seemed like pretty good news, a profile of a happy family who already had one adopted child and was now in the process of adopting another baby. The article hit all the right notes, about adoption being a wonderful way to form a family, about how there's no shame or secrecy to it anymore, and children should be informed and proud of how they came to be loved by their parents. Information on how to adopt was offered to anyone who wanted to follow in the successful footsteps of the family in the article. It was all set to run the last week of November ...

...except that the family got cold feet. The baby's adoption was not quite final, and they worried that his birthmother would see their names and pictures in the paper and cause trouble. They hadn't realized the article would feature them so prominently. They weren't comfortable with the exposure. Could we change their names, and not reveal where they live? Or maybe hold the article for awhile, until all the papers were safely signed? As the office adoption expert, I nixed the name-change scenario. Better no adoption feature for National Adoption Month than one that paints adoption as a situation where names need to be changed to protect the profiled. Yes, adoption's wonderful, we're proud of our family! -- just as long as you only use our initials, and on second thought, give us back that picture. We wound up holding onto the story in the hope that they'd okay it after the adoption was final, but their feet, once icy, never warmed back up. So much for promoting adoption.

I suppose I can't blame these parents too much. Domestic adoption is apparently fraught with peril for adoptive parents who can be cast aside at a birthparent's whim -- whether that's good or bad depends on your perspective in the process, I suppose -- and I don't know that I wouldn't keep a low profile to protect my family in similar circumstances. But at the same time, this whole thing points out a dichotomy that I see so often on e-mail lists for adoptive parents. Adoption is wonderful and the media should do more good stories ... but my child's adoption story is private to him or her and not appropriate for me to tell. Schools should be up on all the latest adoption language and should use sensitivity in dealing with family issues ... but there's no reason they need to know my child is adopted, or get any information from me. If people knew how many happy adoptive families there were, they wouldn't judge adoption so harshly ... but because they judge adoption so harshly, I'm not going to tell them about my happy adoptive family.

Is it any wonder, then, that the bad stories seem to be the only stories that get told? People with nothing to lose will always be more forthcoming than people with something to protect. Must the media forcibly "out" happy families -- as our paper could have done, and maybe would have if the editor didn't feel sorry for the priest in the middle -- in order to offer counterpoint? If adoptive parents are going to go to such lengths to hide their light beneath a bushel, they shouldn't be too surprised if all anybody sees is darkness.