Play it safe -- don't play

Spring is here and summer's coming, and with it all manner of dangers from which we're called to protect our young ones. What are the top-five greatest perils for children in the warm-weather months? Sunburn? Heat stroke? Dehydration? Mosquitos? Ticks? Nope. According to a report by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, it's bicycling, basketball, football, baseball/softball and soccer. These sports account for the most injuries that bring children ages 5-14 into emergency rooms. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons recommends things like abiding by the rules, wearing the right equipment, and warming up as ways to play and stay out of the ER, but personally, I know the best way to keep my family safe: Keep them inside the air-conditioned house, watching TV and staying out of harm's way. That'll give me a happy lazy summer, anyway.

Perfect kids for $14.95

I've always been a sucker for new and innovative parenting techniques, as my drawers full of magnetic behavior chart bits and bookshelves piled with parenting primers will tell you. Right at the moment, we're having good luck with the Nurtured Heart approach, so I'm temporarily out of the market. But if I weren't, I'd be buying one of these babies: the Wheel of Dreaded Consequences. It's creators swear that this gadget, which allows transgressing young ones to spin for their punishment, will eliminate all disciplinary problems, make your children perfect ladies and gentlemen, and cause you to become the envy of all the parents in the neighborhood. I'm suspicious of anything that promises all that for under $20 -- but come to think of it, that's never stopped me before. I'm bookmarking this site for when my daughter grows into the entire breadth and depth of her teen attitude. For her, of course, a dreaded consequence would be having to read a book, or accept a kiss or hug from mom. With any luck, I'll have enough time to make a real good list.

The doctor's Web site will see you now

Ever wonder what the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry would have to say about your child problem du jour -- "Children Who Won't Go to School," maybe, or "Children and Lying," or "Fighting and Biting"? Happily, you can now look those answers up without making an appointment or paying through the nose. The academy's "Facts for Families" pages offer information on everything from "adoption" to "violence on television," "music videos" to "talking about sex" (alright, maybe those last two aren't that far apart). You can look them up by keyword or run down a numerical list, and the information is provided in English, Spanish, German, French, Polish and even Icelandic. EVERYTHING you'd ever want to know about childhood psychiatric problems, and you don't even have to set foot in a waiting room. Gotta love the Web.

Putting together a parent's portfolio

Here's an idea I've been playing with. You know all those notes we write to teachers, full of wisdom about what works for our kids and what doesn't, background on their special needs, advice on handling them most effectively, pleas for helping them reach their greatest potential? You know how we compose them so carefully, send them off to school in all their magnificent wordiness, and then wonder if anybody ever bothers to read them? Well, how about this: How about we share them with each other? Maybe as parents we can learn things from one another, or at least get good ideas and templates for writing our own school-bound tomes. I've posted a few preliminary entries in a prospective "parent's portfolio" -- a behavior plan, an introduction, some observations on a particular child's learning tendencies -- on the Mothers with Attitude site, and invite other parents to submit similar items that may be of help, or that you'd just be happy to see live somewhere other than a Child Study Team file cabinet, for posting on the site. E-mail your masterpieces to motherswithattitude@yahoo.com, and be sure to include your name and some information about the child for whom it was written. I promise to read and respond -- which is probably more than you can say for the folks you wrote this stuff for in the first place.

Baby teeth for science

Looks like the tooth fairy may have competition for all those baby teeth she collects. Researchers at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research have found that stem cells can be extracted from the pulp inside the little choppers. The discovery was made when a researcher's six-year-old lost a tooth, and Dad noticed there was still some living pulp inside it. Subsequent lost teeth went straight to the lab, and the discovery of the stem cells within may lead to advances in the repair of damaged teeth, regeneration of bone and the curing of neurological diseases. And of course, while applauding this great scientific breakthrough, as a mom I have to wonder: Did this scientist-father convince his daughter and various little friends to give up their teeth for the good of the public health, or did he sneak in their bedrooms at night and snatch them from under their pillows? Did he give better than tooth-fairy rates, since the teeth were being put to work and not, say, into a drawer? And, most importantly, is there a place that other parents can go to cash in their own offspring's tiny teeth? My daughter's got a complete set of the adult version, but my son's still got a bunch to lose. We'll see if the tooth fairy wants to negotiate.

Why the new IDEA's a bad idea

If you've been wondering what you should be doing about the reauthorization of IDEA, Wrightslaw has your marching orders. The special-ed advocacy site details plans for deluging our legislators with complaints over the proposed changes -- including optional 3-year IEPs and elimination of short-term objectives and discipline protections -- on April 29, and tells you just how to call or write for maximum effectiveness. There's also an in-depth analysis of the proposed changes to get you sufficiently hot and bothered. Personally, considering what a dither I get into over IEP meetings, going a few years between doesn't sound like such a bad idea; but some of the other changes do sound pretty scary. If you've been putting off panicking about the reauthorization, now's probably the time to start.

AOL, COD

In these troubled times, when there seem to be so many things to protest and so many folks exhorting you to write your legislator for one thing or another, it's good to see someone using the postal service for some really important social work: the banning and total de-proliferation of AOL CDs. At No More AOL CDs.com, you can find out where to mail your unwanted AOL CDs -- you know, the ones that fill your mailbox and your magazines, whether you want them to or, most likely, not -- to contribute to the noble effort of collecting a million of the darn things and dumping them on AOL's doorstep. At the site, which I see has been visited by hundreds of thousands more people than Mothers with Attitude has ever come close to attracting, you can also find fascinating bits of trivia (did you know that a million AOL CDs stacked would be higher than three Empire State Buildings? and don't you think you've received about that many in the past month?), AOL CD-inspired haikus, and clever photographic renditions of possible uses for the round plastic thingamabobs. It may not be as important as the IDEA re-authorization, or cloning, or vaccinations, or the plight of the poor, or the future of Iraq, but at least getting involved with this particular movement will help you get rid of some clutter. And that's a good cause, right?

Speaking of clutter, Julie Donner Andersen addresses the endlessness of housework and of her family's efforts to make it so in her latest "Therapeutic Laughing" column. She doesn't specifically mention AOL CDs, but you just know Teen Girl has about 50 of them under her bed.

Happy birthday to her

Pray for me: Today, I am the parent of a teenager. My daughter's 13, and plans to remind me of that fact every darn morning for a year. So now that I'm the mother of a teen with attitude, I thought I'd take a bit of a surf around the Web to see what advice is out there for parenting past the tweens.

I started by calling up the Google directory listing for "parenting teenagers." Interestingly, the top category was "Treatment Options"; who knew that being a teenager was a treatable condition? I clicked on the link for the teen parenting pages of about.com, but one look at that site's menu -- the "Teen Health Hub" featured acne, braces, masturbation, puberty, STDs and teen sexuality, and the top ad was for "A Parent's Guide to Boarding Schools" -- made me feel not quite mature enough to deal with any of that stuff. I moved on to a site called Parenting Adolescents, but made the mistake of starting with a look at the site's advice column. My question would be something like, "How can I get my 13-year-old to wear a dress to her 5th-grade graduation"; but the first question here was "I am a mother of a 14 year old daughter. She had been having sex with her boyfriend....," and the number of the national suicide hotline was prominently displayed. Yikes to that. I liked the approach of the Teens Are Not a Disease site, but there was an advice column there, too, and frankly, I was afraid to go near it.

By that time, I was hoping that the reason all these teen parenting sites seemed to be so far over my head was that my daughter was just such a brand-spanking-new teen, with no time yet to have become immersed in big-time teen issues. So I did a Google search on "thirteen year olds." And instantly regretted it when I saw some of the site titles and information that came up: "Thirteen year olds are having sex." "Most thirteen year olds desperately want to be able to talk with their parents, but they do not know how to start the conversation." "Thirteen-year-olds accused of armed robbery." My daughter often doesn't know how to start a conversation, it's true, but it's more a matter of language delays than emotional reservations. As for the other two -- I've only been the parent of a teen for less than 24 hours. Don't make me go there.

You can almost always make me go to the bookstore, because my collection of parenting books requires constant additions to stay up-to-date. But books on parenting teenagers sure don't look like real fun reads. Lots of stuff about communicating with your kids, helping girls keep a good body image and survive bad peer behavior, and helping teens pass through "the turbulent passage to adulthood." Amongst the top choices are a book on teens and alcohol, a book on teens and sex, a book on teens and jobs, a book on teens and violence ... but no books on teens who are happy and well-adjusted and give their parents no trouble at all and require no special handling whatsoever. Where do I buy that book?

Ah, well. The years ahead are sure to hold challenges I can't even imagine now -- and with luck, they won't be the ones all these teen-minded doomsayers are imagining, either. My mother was a strong believer in the theory that if you worry about all the bad things that could possibly happen, they won't; and maybe it works, because my own teen years were relatively uneventful. Now that I'm a mom, though -- I'll tell you, I'm thinking a lot about the decision my husband and I made, when we adopted our girl at age 4.5, not to adjust her age backward to make it more in keeping with her delayed development. I thought at the time that, whatever benefits might be found in that sort of birthdate fiddling, it was dishonest and dangerous to essentially lie about a child's age. But now -- I don't know, today I'm kind of wondering if it's too late to reconsider. Do you think she'd mind being 11 again?

Party animal

My daughter is having her 13th birthday party on Saturday, and I'm afraid it's turning her into a social monster. She's never been one of those Alpha girls, able to make fellow students quiver at her every whim. Frankly, since she's two years older than her classmates and less than facile in the areas of language and popular culture, I've always been afraid that the Alpha girls would eat her for lunch. For whatever reason -- maybe because she's too easy a target, maybe because she doesn't understand subtleties of the spoken word enough to be hurt by cleverly concealed digs -- she's not been teased or tormented to any dramatic degree. And I've counted us all lucky not to have to deal with the ramifications of outright peer rejection.

But now comes this birthday party. Her fifth-grade teacher has forbidden the handing out of invitations in the classroom unless you're inviting everyone, which my daughter does not wish to do. So we had to scurry around getting addresses and mailing cards to the chosen invitees. Unfortunately, though, the teacher hasn't put a moratorium on birthday-party discussion, and so every day for a week or so my daughter was coming home and announcing that so-and-so had asked to come to her birthday party. And since the guest list at that point was expandable, I told her that of course we could send out extra invitations. It's nice to be in demand, even for a moment. Maybe these party wanna-comes don't really like my girl and are just taking advantage of her for free bowling and cake; maybe they're stringing her along and won't really come; maybe they'll bring really bad presents; but I can handle all of that. What I'm having trouble handling is the fact that she so ruthlessly told some people NO.

A girl who my daughter claims has teased her and been mean, for example, asked to come to the party and got a public no. Now, surely, I would never insist that the birthday girl invite somebody who's been cruel to her. But isn't it a little mean, too, to say "Alright, you can come, and you, and you, and you, but not YOU"? Another time, my daughter mentioned telling an aspiring partygoer who was teasing her a little that she would uninvite her if it didn't stop. And the girl stopped. There's some sort of Disney Channel-like "revenge of the less popular" scenario going on here, and part of me wants to applaud it, but at the same time -- when the party's over, and my daughter has no more leverage, is some of this going to come back to haunt her? I'm thinking maybe she was safer when she was beneath notice.

To each his clutter

Spring cleaning has hit our house, but amazingly (all right, all right -- not so amazingly) it's not me who's doing the tidying up. The bringer of order to chaos is, of all people, my son, who out of the blue has decided to bag up the enormous pile of freebie car magazines that's taken over a corner of his room and move them out for recycling. He's been collecting these magazines for years -- from the supermarket racks, from the place we get bagels on Sunday, from the outdoor plastic receptacles by the fast-food joint we go to sometimes, from kind-hearted grown-ups who know he loves the things -- and any suggestion on my part that he move some old ones out before moving some new ones in has met with general hysteria. They're his treasures! He knows and loves each and every one! Even the ones at the very bottom of the pile that he hasn't looked at in months! He couldn't bear to part with them!

Except today, he did. Out of the blue, he started emerging from his room with bags of mags, instructing his dad to take them to the recycling pile at once. When I gushed with pride over this hard thing he was doing, he told me he'd decided that he should clear them out once a year. Are you spring cleaning? I asked. Yes! he replied, and let's hope that such a worthwhile activity will now extend to the bunches of bunches of shopping bags he's collected, and the bags and bags of receipts, and all those millions of tiny items that make it impossible to walk across his room in the dark. Just as long as he doesn't get any ideas about going after my personal clutter. Those catalogs teetering in a stack by the window, the three-hundred or so read or half-read parenting books piled precariously atop my bookcase, the shoes that never quite make it to the closet, the crates of children's school papers crammed under the bed -- hey, they're my treasures! I couldn't bear to part with them!

Desperate times...

...call for desperate measures, so in order to pull myself out of the attention-deficit-like tailspin I've been in over the past week, I've finally joined the FlyLady mailing list to take advantage of the endless supply of organizational, housekeeping and de-cluttering advice offered thereon. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to get with the program of cleaning the sink every night until it shines, or wearing shoes every day even when I'm just loafing around the house, but I do like the idea of attacking clutter in short ruthless increments, and focusing on one part of the house each month. So I'll give the FlyLady's methods a try, and see if she can get me soaring out of the rut I seem to be in. I'm due for an emotional crash landing in a couple of weeks when we finally have the behavioral portion of my son's IEP meeting, but at least my sink will look good.

Creative whining

So I'm still floundering around through this limbo-like week during which I muddle around feeling overwhelmingly busy but have nothing to show for it except a mild case of GameBoy wrist, and I get an e-mail from a longtime reader sharing that she and three friends with small children have gotten together and, oh, you know, in their spare time, written a play, which they are now performing around San Francisco. I can't even squeeze out a couple of hundred measly words a day for this blog, and here other mothers are blithely running around creating works of art. Now, maybe they don't have daughters who can have a word spelled out loud for them twenty times in a row and still repeat it back wrong; and maybe they don't have sons who run merrily through the church after taking Communion yelling "I love you! I love you!" at prayerfully taken aback Mass attendees; and so maybe they have vast stores of mental and creative energy that I have long depleted. But still; sheesh, now I have to add writing a play to the long list of the things I'd do if I were a really good creative energetic organized Mama, along with getting my kids decent IEPs and teaching my son to tie his shoes. Man, I've got a lot of catching up to do.

What, me procrastinate?

Boy, have I been a bad little blogger this week. No entries since Tuesday! Surely I must have some sort of excuse, beyond simple procrastination, and a tendency to fall asleep immediately after my children's heads hit the pillow. Hmmm. Well, there was the fact that my son's IEP meeting was yesterday, and all week I felt the need to put together checklists and recommendations and all manner of paperwork with which to deluge the Child Study Team. Not that I ever actually DID put them together, mind you; it's just that it didn't seem right to work on anything else until that was done.

Let's see, what else? I did waste some time on my day off Wednesday doing things like buying birthday presents and gathering what I needed to get my taxes done, leaving little time for idle typing. Then, too, the fact that I begged my son's teacher to assign him chapter books we could read together and do extra-credit book reports on means that I have to sit down and wrestle him through a reading selection every evening -- that on top of reading my daughter's free-reading book with her, and reading her much-too-hard classroom assigned book TO her (it's "Number the Stars" by Lois Lowry; anybody want to try explaining the Holocaust to an extremely learning and language-delayed 12-year-old fifth-grader?).

But I think, rather than relying on these excuses, I'll place all the blame for my lack of journal entries on my friend who gave me her old color GameBoy last weekend; my daughter quickly appropriated it, but gave me HER old color GameBoy, and the charms of slightly technicolor "Dr. Mario" have been tough to resist. Let's see, strategize IEP goals, or play Dr. Mario? Sort through tax records, or play Dr. Mario? Come up with something thoughtful and entertaining to write, or play Dr. Mario? Pretty soon, my eyes will rebel at staring at that tiny screen, and I'll be back to the somewhat bigger computer one at a more faithful pace. Of course, my daughter's getting a GameCube for her birthday next week, and if they make Dr. Mario for the big screen, you may never hear from me again.

Music to our ears

It was a proud moment tonight when my daughter performed as a fifth-grade trombone player in her first All-City Band Concert. Unfortunately, it was a proud moment out of a concert made up of several million moments. Band after band after band after band after band took the stage after my daughter's group was done, with fifth-grade parents trapped in the room by the promise that their players would be out later for a finale. I've now seen the future for my girl in instrumental music -- the sixth-grade band, the seventh-and-eighth-grade band, the high school band, and various jazz bands and orchestral combinations in between. Having stayed to the very end and listened to every note, I can report that the playing does improve as the kids get older, though maybe not as much as the conducters who chose the music thought; that the district's recently added string program still has a long way to go; and that the high school marching band rocks.

The good thing about all this is that our district has managed, in a time of tight budgets and property tax wrangling, to maintain a thriving music program. The possibly less good thing is that, if my daughter keeps working hard and practicing, we will be sitting through many, many endless concerts like this one in the years to come. Perhaps music fosters discipline and perseverance in parents as well as students. But I saw an awful lot of high school parents sneaking in late.

It's a miracle

I've written on Mothers with Attitude a time or two about my son and the impossibility of him sitting still and quietly during Mass on Sundays. And so I'm happy to report here that we seem to at last have found something that works, and that something is the Nurtured Heart approach to behavior management. Not only has it made him easier to deal with all through the week, but the grace it's granted his wild nature has even extended to Sunday mornings. Recently he's been sitting calmly through the service, and has even gone up for Communion without saying "Get out of my way!" to the others in line or "Thank you" instead of "Amen" upon receiving the Host. Last Sunday was quite possibly his best Mass outing ever. This morning was not so successful, since he lost control as we headed from the Cry Room to the sanctuary for Communion and started shouting "Co-moooooo-nion! Co-moooooo-nion!" and had to be taken to the car, but he was so quiet and peaceful during most of the Mass that I can't hold that against him much. Dare I hope that we are headed toward a time when he might actually kneel and pray and participate in the Mass, rather than just lie still and focus all his meager powers of concentration on staying in control? Maybe in another 10 years.

If there are any other Catholic moms out there reading this, I'd like to share a couple of resources I've been enjoying this Lent: a Web site called CatholicMom.com that offers everything from faith-based parenting advice to Gospel-themed coloring sheets for kids; and "Magnificat," a magazine that's like a cross between a missalette and a prayer book and allows you to have little prayer services and even a Mass of your own every day of the week. Tuck it and a kid's word search from CatholicMom.com in your purse when you head off to Mass, and if your children don't make it all the way through and you have to camp out with them in the car, you'll be all set to make it a spiritual experience.

Adoption on film

I finally caught up with the movie Lovely & Amazing the other day on cable. I'd been curious about it because one of its several subplots involved adoption, and of course the question then always becomes: Is it good for adoption, or bad for adoption? As I posted on Adoption Watch back when the movie first appeared on my radar screen, the characters include an African American 8-year-old who has been adopted by a white woman with two grown daughters. And since the relationship between the mother and daughter is portrayed as warm and loving; and the relationship between the older biological sisters and their adoptive little sis generally tolerant and caring, at least as much as it would be between any self-absorbed women and a much younger sibling; and the child not oversentimentalized, overly wise or tough, I'd have to say it was good for adoption. For the image of females as something other than neurotics obsessed with appearances, not so much.

One thing that particularly caught my attention about the adoption storyline was how the girl -- while certainly shown to have her own mind and her own take on things, including the quirks of her elders -- starts to take on some of those quirks herself, in her own style. This is something I watch for in my own kids, with some trepidation; are my own personal fears and neuroses, many of which I inherited from my own mom, a matter of nature or nurture? and will I find a way, in spite of myself, to inflict them on a generation not genetically linked? or will they be different -- "in a good way," as one big sister says to the youngster -- due to their different biological makeup? At the end of the film, when the girl prepares to welcome her adoptive mom home from the hospital by fussing over the elaborate arrangement of pillows the older woman had somewhat obsessively arranged on her bed, it's hard to know whether to feel heartwarmed that the child is so intent on doing something to make her mother happy, or chilled that she's taken on the family trait of preoccupation with silly little things like pillows. I was secretly rooting for her to just throw the darn things on the floor.

In other adoption-related movie news, Daughter from Danang, an Academy Award-nominated documentary about a Vietnamese adoptee reuniting with her birth family, will be shown on PBS Monday at 9 p.m. Is it good for adoption or bad for adoption? Watch and report.

Government appreciation

My husband and I have kept the war pretty much out of our conversation with the kids at home -- details only when they ask, which is hardly ever, and least of all the politics of war support and dissent. But I guess not everyone's taking that tack. This afternoon, when our 7-year-old niece came to stay with us after school, almost the first words out of her mouth were a very cheerful, "I hate George Bush!" When I asked her where she got that, she said, "My mommy! I hate George Bush because he got us into a war!" She then started to rattle off what she'd heard about the war lately, but I cut her off. War analysis is pretty much inescapable for grown-ups these days; I don't need to get it from second-graders.

Free speech is a glorious thing, but although I may have had my reservations about this war and this president, it bugged me to have a child so blithely dissing our leader. (And shouldn't she at least be hating Saddam Hussein, too?) If you'd like to build up your own personal child's respect for at least some aspect of the federal government, the Federal Government Kids' Page lists youngsters' pages for many government agencies, from usual suspects like NASA and the Forest Service to such unlikely entries as the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the CIA (check out the decoder game!). And of course, there's always www.whitehousekids.gov. If they can't stand the commander in chief, they can take the tour hosted by his dog instead.

30th percentile, here he comes!

My son had his 10-year-old check-up with the pediatrician yesterday, and the big exciting news was that he's in the 25th percentile on the growth chart for weight, and the 10th percentile for height. This is a big deal because for years and years and years he was way off the bottom of the chart, with no apparent ambition to hop onto it, and only last year skimmed the lowest regions thereon, at 7 percent for weight and 5 percent for height. And now he's hit the one-quarter mark for weight! Not bad for a scrawny kid with FAE who's always eaten like a pig but for so long resembled one of those children you can feed with a contribution of 20 cents a day. He's a growing boy, he is.

If you're wondering how your own personal kiddo measures up, this Google Search will link you up with oodles of height and weight charts, including this one for children with Down Syndrome and this one for children from China.

Oh, good grief

Yesterday, I attended a "Special Needs Resource Fair" presented to mark the opening of a special needs resource library at our local Jewish Community Center. There were to be tables with information on services for children with special needs, and a keynote address which, according to the handout I got from my kids' school, was to be on "Words, Strategies and Wisdom to Help Parents Deal with the Challenges of Raising Special Needs Children." And can't we all use a few of those every now and then?

Turns out, though, that the speaker only had one strategy: acknowledgement of the crushing, unresolvable grief that all parents of children with special needs live with. Excuse me? Her theory was that all the problems between parents and professionals arise because parents are acting out their grief in some way -- through denial, maybe, or projection -- and professionals are reluctant to acknowledge the poor parents' enormous sadness, and just assume they're trying to be a pain in the behind. She scoffed at pediatricians who say parents should find a way to accept their child's condition and resolve their grief, because the grief is UNRESOLVABLE. She gave examples of parents demanding some silly right or other from the school system, and advised therapists or principals to reach out to the parent and say, "You must be feeling very sad about your child." In her world, the parent would melt, feel understood, and immediately back down. In my world, the professional would get smacked upside the head.

I don't know, maybe she's right about the grief -- for some parents. For myself, I don't think I'm in denial when I say that grief is not the dominant mode of my existence with my challenged children. I may cry when they have a setback or when a Child Study Team member makes a big deal about how far behind they are, but in no way is unresolvable grief the driving force of my life. Maybe that's because I deliberately adopted children with special needs, and so had a head-start in the acceptance game. That doesn't mean I had any idea going in how completely those special needs would take over my life, and how involved I would get in behavior management and doctor management and special education management and reading every book about neurological problems, learning problems, behavior problems, language problems I could get my hands on. But I didn't start from a place of expecting normalcy. So perhaps people who do -- who give birth or adopt dreaming of a normal child and normal development and normal lives -- do indeed feel grief as a constant weighty presence. But is that ALL they feel? Is there no joy, no pride in hard-fought accomplisments, no righteous indignation at insensitive professionals, no heartfelt advocacy for the legal rights of our special children? Is it all just the acting out of grief?

The speaker seemed to feel it was, and when the program went on into a movie in which parents talked about how sad they were, I used the cover of darkness to get the heck out of there. And run back home to my kids, who always find a way to cheer me up.

Tidying is torture

Now here's a headline I love to see: Spring Cleaning Has its Dangers. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons warns, according to a HealthScout News report, that "a number of those chores can be dangerous or deadly if you don't take the proper precautions." The Academy goes ahead and offers such precautions, but really -- if we followed them all, we'd never need an Orthopaedic Surgeon, so what's the incentive for them to really make cleaning strain-free? Surely they've left off some important warnings here and there, just waiting for the cases of dusting elbow or sweeping shoulder to come rolling in. No, thanks, I say -- keep your precautions, I'm keeping my house messy. I'm taking no chances with my aging bones, thank you very much.

Personally, I've learned to just overlook all manner of clutter and uncleanliness, so sitting out spring cleaning's no trial for me; if your standards are higher, but you don't wish to risk your own personal skeleton in the pursuit of good housekeeping, the Club Mom Web site is offering a contest in which you can win thousands of dollars of cleaning and home improvement services. Of course, you might be risking carpal tunnel syndrome typing in your information, if you haven't left enough dust on your desk to cushion your wrists.

Pushy mom

I made my daughter cry today. Or rather, I allowed a situation to progress to a point where she could no longer hold back her tears.

We were on her fifth-grade field-trip, I as class-mom chaperone, to a science museum that has among its exhibits a "touch tunnel." My daughter gamely got into the 40-minute-wait line for the exhibit along with her classmates, but as discussion of what the tunnel was like went on during the wait, she began to be convinced that it was altogether too scary. She questioned a friend's mom who had been through it before, and heard about it being pitch dark, and having different steps and drops, and keeping your hand against a wall to keep from getting lost, and knew she couldn't possibly do it. She'd say "I don't want to go," and the friend's mom and I would try to talk her into it, and this went on until we got to the final curve near the entry, at which point she began to cry. I thought I could still talk her through -- but then her instructional aide, who hovered throughout the day in a most infuriating way, came up and assured her she didn't have to go, and that got the attention of the museum employees who assured her she didn't have to go, and at that point I just cut my losses and pulled her out of line. Considering I had already checked in my glasses in anticipation of tunnel entry and could barely see, that was a fairly scary feat in and of itself.

And really, it wasn't such a big deal for her to miss the tunnel. There were other exhibits. To be honest, I was a little apprehensive about groping my way through the dark myself. Maybe I should have let her quit at the first sign of anxiety. I pride myself on picking battles, after all. I'd resolved to insist that she go to the IMAX movie, which also had her spooked. Maybe I should have been quicker to let the touch tunnel slide. I often try to persuade educators that her tears are no big deal and she shouldn't be babied on account of them; but I hate to see her cry, too.

... and then again, I hate to see her babied. Her friend's mom told me later that she thought my daughter would have persevered through her tears if the aide hadn't swooped over and given her permission to back out. I really would have liked her to fight through her fear. I really would have liked her to not be the only kid in the fifth grade to wimp out of the tunnel, and have her teacher and aide and all the folks I try so hard to persuade that she's tougher than she looks see her looking entirely un-tough. In recent weeks, I've had to force her to do a couple of important things that she was really afraid of and begged me to get her out of -- the All-City Band, for one, and the swimming lessons her class at school gets bused to -- and she found both to be much less terrifying and much more fun than she ever suspected. Ditto the IMAX theater; during the show she whispered to me several times, with smile bright enough to see even in a darkened room, "I'm not afraid!" Perhaps the one I most have to convince that she's tougher than she looks is the girl herself. The learning curve's pretty steep.

The thing that's most amazing to me about all of this is that my daughter has undeniably gone through scarier experiences in her life than most of her peers have even dreamed of. Compared to leaving an orphanage at age 4.5 and going off with strangers who don't speak your language, riding in vehicles you've never even seen like cars and trains and planes, going to a new country with new customs and fitting into an entirely new entity called a family -- compared to that, a touch tunnel is unbelievably tame stuff. Yet she did the former with aplomb, and the latter leaves her quaking. Perhaps she used up her entire supply of tolerance for the unpredictable before the age of 5, and will now forever cling to the safe and sure. She can surely cling to me. But if I can possibly manage it, she'll be crawling through the dark with me, too.

The Red Cross wants you to get ready

If you're feeling insufficiently prepared for a terrorist attack, or insufficiently panicked, the American Red Cross is here to help. The agency's Web site offers detailed downloadable publications on how individuals, families, neighborhoods, schools and businesses should stock up and steel themselves for each level of the Homeland Security Advisory System. There are special sections on "Children & Disasters," "Special Needs," "Animal Safety," and the intriguingly named "Personal Workplace Disaster Supplies Kit." My own personal workplace disasters usually involve computer meltdowns, and are best prepared for with a good supply of comforting junk food, but I guess that's not what they're talking about.

New on Mothers with Attitude

We loaded up on goodies right before our Cool Site of the Day Sunday, but never announced them here. So hop over to Mothers with Attitude and check out ... April Cain's moving Thinking It Over column on the effect that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has had on her family ... Julie Donner Andersen's Therapeutic Laughing column on the effect that an additional child has had on the decibel level in her home ... the addition of Wrightslaw special education books to our Parenting Special Needs bookstore ... new features on our news page, including expanded headlines, quotes of the day, word of the day and This Day in History links ... a word game of the day from the folks at Merriam-Webster on our fun and games page ... and Just Managing, a new e-mail support list for parents handling their children's challenging behavior through behavior management instead of meds (unless my husband and I are the only parents in America who are doing this, which, judging from the fact that the huge influx of visitors to the site on Sunday yielded nary a list member, may indeed be true. But it's not much fun to e-mail myself.)

Kids get real

Reality television continues its relentless creep into every corner of the TV schedule with the news that NBC and the Discovery Kids cable channel will be hosting a kiddie version of the home-decorating duel "Trading Spaces." The original program, a hit on TLC, features grown-ups decorating rooms in one another's homes and then behaving like children if they don't like the results, so perhaps the leap to actual little ones isn't all that big. Yet the idea that reality TV, with all its manipulations and orchestrations and creative editing and bad behavior, is now not just for immature adults anymore saddens me, as does the thought of kids fussing with designers over how to mess up the bedrooms of their peers. Shouldn't a kid's room be the ultimate statement of his or her own taste, or lack thereof? Or, at the very least, of their parents' taste or lack thereof? Can't we at least keep the bad taste in the family? Maybe I'm overreacting; maybe it'll be fun. But on that inevitable day when "Survivor Jr.," "Minor Mole," "Big Brother: The Next Generation," "Fifth-Grade Fear Factor" and "Bachelor's Prom Date" fill the airwaves, let's remember that it all started with decorating.

Routine, sweet routine

I'm always carefully aware of the fact that my son needs his routine, and will react negatively if it's departed from. But this is one of those weeks that's made me realize I need the dependability of events and schedules just as badly. A succession of deviations from the norm -- as small as an extra project that took up time I usually use for something else, and as major as 20-some grieving relatives descending on our house for a post-wake supper -- have left me frazzled and frantic, to the point that today I was as out of control as my son gets on a bad fire-drill/assembly/Christmas-program-rehearsal messed-up day at school. A lot of what had me so hysterical was the effort to make things more comfortable for him, and maybe that's why he weathered the unpredictable week a lot better than I did. But boy, I sure do need to get back to the same old boring routine. And maybe take a time out.

Awards on board

So it's finally Oscar Night, barring any last-minute war-related pre-emptions, and my overwhelming favorite to win buckets of awards is "Chicago." Of course, it's not Hollywood savvy or advanced critical skills that lead me to make that pick; it's just that it's the only film of all the many many nominees that I've actually seen. My kids haven't even made me see any of the animated contenders; I'm a complete Oscar nincompoop, except for "Chicago," and I wouldn't have even seen that if my friend hadn't taken a day off from work and dragged me out to play. I will say, it's the perfect film for a frazzled mom who only gets to sit in the dark with her very own bucket of popcorn once a year or so -- pure entertainment, tuneful and fun, not entirely frivolous but not so sad or thought-provoking that you can't go right back to obsessing over your kids once it's done. So, you go, "Chicago"! If I've only got one horse in the race, it'd better be a winner.

With the Academy's red carpet rolled up this year, and Joan Rivers and Barbara Walters effectively benched, those looking for some Oscar warm-up fun can turn to the Web. Check out the Family Oscar Quiz on parenting.com; there are also quizzes and a crossword on teachervision.com, though specifically what they have to do with teaching I can't guess. And if you haven't yet had your fill of award features, photos and trivia, Entertainment Weekly has more than you can possibly stand, including Oscar odds. "Chicago" is lookin' good.

Speaking of awards... Mothers with Attitude, the parent site of "Parenting Isn't Pretty," is today's Cool Site of the Day. If you found this blog after checking us out as a cool site, well, welcome! And if you didn't, please surf over to Cool Site of the Day, click on the "Today's Site" button, and vote for us in the voting frame. Of course, the idea that anything I have anything to do with could get the designation "cool" would amaze and amuse my daughter, now less than a month short of teendom. "Embarrassing Site of the Day," she might vote for. Anybody know where I go to sign up for that?

War abroad and on the home front

I'll admit I haven't talked to my kids much about the war in Iraq, partially because there didn't seem much that two elementary schoolers could do besides worry themselves sick over it, and partially because I couldn't quite imagine how to explain what we're doing there in terms that would be comprehensible to the learning disabled (and frankly, in this particular area, a whole lot of us seem to be learning disabled.) But my daughter got a phone call from a friend Tuesday night that spilled the beans, and she came running up to me after with that same look she gets on her face during a thunderstorm and said, "Barbara says we're going to war! Have you heard anything about that?" I admitted I had. She asked if this meant we had to personally travel somewhere and fight with people, or if people were going to come to our house and personally fight with us. I tried to reassure her on both counts, although living as close as we do to the site of the former World Trade Center, it's hard to be really sure about that second point. I tried to give her a little explanation of why we were at war, and it was either simple enough to satisfy her or so confusing that she didn't care anymore, because she hasn't mentioned it since. If your kids aren't as easily comforted or contented, Connect for Kids has a wealth of resources for helping kids cope with trauma, terrorism, disaster, violence and the nightly news. The site promises more of the same on its home page on March 24.

If, on the other hand, the battles you're most concerned with right now have more to do with special ed than special ops, the always excellent Wrightslaw site has oodles of info on the latest in the reauthorizaton of IDEA. But it's way too traumatic for children.

Adoption in the news

Well, look here: "Medical issues in adoption" made the KidsHealth News this morning. It's always nice to see an adoption-related topic pop up among my Yahoo! Headlines, and although this particular article doesn't contain anything blazingly new or revelatory, if it keeps any prospective adoptive parents from believing that everything will be rosy just because they wish it so, it will be worth its pixels. I'll admit to wincing a bit, though, at the advice that parents adopting internationally should make an extra trip just to check the kid out before committing -- I know seeing the child before making a commitment is becoming something like conventional wisdom, but all I can think about is how very different our daughter was when we first met her at the Russian orphanage from the way she's been in our family, and how very differently things might have turned out if we hadn't traveled there 100% determined to bring her home with us.

I think the idea that you can make an informed choice on whether or not to adopt when meeting a child under such stressful and artificial circumstances is an illusion -- both because positive traits sometimes don't show up, and because negative ones sometimes don't either. I'm a believer in making a leap of faith and resolving to deal with whatever comes. But then, I'm a Mama Bear to two kids with special needs and get my back up when people talk about trying to rule out things like FAS/E before adopting, so I'm probably not one to judge by. At any rate, I was happy to see that the article starts out with "Being an adoptive parent can be extremely rewarding," rather than the sort of "Being an adoptive parent opens you up to a world of heartache" lead that so many adoption-related news stories have. Finding rewards in situations in which others might see only heartache is the real trick.

The show must go on ... sort of

In these troubled times, as our nation moves toward war, as some of our young men and women put themselves in peril overseas and others put themselves on picket lines at home, as our leaders put aside diplomacy and push for battle and the world waits for the fallout, I know the question most of us are asking is: How will all this war stuff affect the Academy Awards? Thankfully, answers are starting to emerge from show producer Gil Cates, who has announced that in keeping with the somber times, the show that celebrates entertainment will try hard to be a little less entertaining.

That means no red-carpet entrances with pre-show hosts babbling ineptly at celebrities. No paparazzi snapping up all the ostentatious, ugly, and ostentatiously ugly gowns being flagrantly displayed. No fans in the bleachers screaming out the names of their favorite stars. No guarantee that ABC won't cut away from the proceedings for war coverage, or cancel the show altogether. Stars are toning down their wardrobes and the show's script writers are toning down their jokes and activist actors are toning down their unscripted comments for the cause. And we, as good Americans, should tone down our expectations for an evening of fun picking apart the rich and famous, criticizing their taste and their speechmaking abilities and their voting choices. These are desperate times, ladies and gentlemen. No singing along to "All That Jazz."

And I guess it's a good time to be serious. Never mind that it's the one night a year I make my husband put the kids to bed so that I can devote myself solely to watching a TV show. Never mind that my friends are coming over to watch the show after surviving two children's birthday parties in as many days, and will need something to smile about. Never mind that giving awards to people who work in show business has an inherent frivolity that no amount of modest black gowns and thoughtful film montages can erase. We all, every one of us, must, if we cannot avoid being self-serving, at least avoid the appearance of being so. And if nothing else, we will have this one tiny triumph to celebrate: We may not be able to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but we can get rid of Joan Rivers.

Breakfast with Emeril and the dust-dinosaurs

Would breakfast in bed served by celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse be your idea of Mother's Day nirvana? I've been thinking about this since I saw a pitch for Good Morning America's "Emeril's Breakfast in Bed Contest," and I'm not so sure this is going to be as good a deal for the winning mom as it is for "Good Morning America." I mean, sure, it means you get a decent meal on your special day, something of which I have not always been assured (my husband's still living down the year he forgot to make reservations at my favorite restaurant and we wound up at some two-bit diner off the highway, not that he cares). And since the prize will be awarded based on an essay detailing why you're deserving of such a special repast, it means you'll actually get some recognition for your motherly wonderfulness, instead of merely prying a "Happy Mother's Day" out of your nearest and dearest. It would certainly be exciting to have a film crew in one's house and a famous chef in one's kitchen -- especially to my son, who's a devoted viewer of "Emeril Live" and would be fairly thrilled to have Emeril live in his own abode (not to mention the cars and trucks that would probably accompany him and the film crew, and the keys he might be able to beg a look at).

It would be thrilling, sure... if the prize included the complete and thorough cleaning and organizing of my home, including the replacement of my crotchety oven and redecorating of my messy bedroom. Without that -- well, I could start cleaning up the desk area of my bedroom now and it wouldn't be done by Mother's Day 2004. Do I want all of America to see my fingerprinted kitchen cabinets and sticky kitchen floor and kitchen walls pockmarked by food flung from the jittery fingers of a nine-year-old boy who still eats with his hands? Do I want all of America to see the dust-dinosaurs under my bedroom furniture and the kid videos stacked to precarious heights and the shoes that I never quite manage to stick back in my closet? Good night, America, no way. I'll keep my Mother's Day celebration in the family, thank you very much -- although if my kids wanted to bring me breakfast in bed, that would be just fine with me.

Wounded in action

One of the seldom-discussed dangers of parenting a small boy with big impulse control problems is that sometimes one of his impulsive, unpredictable movements connects forcefully with an unsuspecting part of your body. When my son was little, it was usually a matter of his head whipping back when he was sitting on my lap and catching me square on the nose. Last night, it was my left eye that got walloped by that very hard head. I was crawling into a playtent at his insistence, and he decided to lunge forward quickly as I was creeping forward slowly, and the tent not providing a lot of leeway for sudden movement, eye and head met with painful force. I saw stars then, and lots of floaters and flashes this morning, and so spent most of the afternoon in the waiting room of the opthalmologist, watching soap operas and listening to senior citizens complain about the wait. I can now tell you, if you've never had the experience and might at some future time think to try, that the things the doctor does to check for a detached retina are way more uncomfortable than anything you might have done to detach it in the first place. At least the doctor got a good laugh when he asked me what I got hit in the eye with, and I had to confess that it was a small boy's head. "Watch out for small boys," he said. And, oh man, I'm tryin'.

Public service messages

My daughter had another one of those anti-drug programs at school last week, the kind where law-enforcement officials stop by and hand out pencils and bumper stickers and book covers urging kids to Just Say No. And as noble an idea as that is, I wonder if there isn't at least some squidgy feeling of inconsistency in delivering those unequivocal anti-drug pep talks in your modern classroom where an appreciable percentage of the student body is already on drugs, albeit the school-friendly anti-ADHD kind. Seems the message should really be, Just Say No to Drugs, Unless the Drugs Will Help You Sit Still for Lectures Like This, In Which Case, the Nurse's Office Is Open! But I guess that won't fit on a pencil.

A little further down the road of good intentions, the Century Council is offering an interactive CD-ROM, Alcohol 101, full of bells and whistles designed to convince college students that drinking and driving, drinking and studying, drinking and fraternizing, and drinking and playing sports are all very, very bad things. There's a personalized reading of how little alcohol will have a negative effect, and an animated trip through the brain so kids can see directly what their brain looks like on Daiquiris. It all sounds like it might appeal more to the kind of kid who stays in the dorm playing computer games than the kind of kid who goes out partying, but parents of the college-aged may want to just go ahead and order their free copy anyway.

Getting guys to read

What does it take to make boys better readers? Maybe a little less "Little Women" and a little more "Captain Underpants." That's the assumption behind Guys Read, a Web site and literacy program developed by "The Stinky Cheese Man" author Jon Scieszka "to help boys become better readers, better students, better guys." On the theory that lads lag in literacy at least in part because female teachers are picking the reading material and it's just not gross enough, "Guys Read" offers lists of good guy reads and a discussion group for boy-book banter.

Now in my house, the girl's the one who doesn't like reading; at least until this year, when my daughter's feeling for reading went from "hate" to "sorta like sometimes," my son was always way more willing to sit down with a book than his sister. But there may be something to this book selection thing: When I mentioned to my husband that I really wanted to read "Sarah, Plain and Tall" with my boy, his dad gave me that look -- the look I usually get when I suggest, say, watching a movie starring Hugh Grant -- and said, "Why would he want to read THAT?" I'll have to point out to him that "Guys Read" strongly suggests that fathers make the time to read with their sons. Perhaps they can bond over "The Stupids Die" by Henry Allard, one of the site's recommended reads. Sounds like about as much fun as watching the Three Stooges.

Your Internet shopper

Searching the Web to bring you things you never knew where to find, or never knew you needed in the first place ... If you've got a kid who's mature enough not to want to wear a diaper but physically in need of one nonetheless, Drymids offers four undergarment designs that look like regular undies (there's even a sporty pair of boxer shorts) but contain a hidden absorbant pad. The kids in the photos on the site sure look happy about it. ... If you love someone with autism, you can show it with products from The Autism Online Store, which declare, well, "I Love Someone with Autism," on everything from coffee mugs to boxer shorts. ... If you've got an IEP meeting coming up (my son's is mid-April), the Mothers with Attitude Store now offers a bunch of products with its popular totebag slogan, "My child has an IEP* *Involved, educated parent." You can find it on t-shirts, sweatshirts and stickers, but sadly not on boxer shorts, because, um, we hope you're not showing THOSE to the Child Study Team. ... If your kid's in need of some midday support (no, not the kind provided by Drymids), Messages for Kids has just the thing: cute little greeting-card-like missives for Mom to tuck in the lunchbox. Too bad my kids get hot lunch. ... If your kid has proprioceptive sensory integration issues and likes things like weighted vests, you can get him or her a weighted quilt from Quiet Quilt. Designed by a mom who loves someone with autism and custom-made, the quilts aren't cheap ($170 for a full-size, $87 for a mini version and $27 for lap size), but you can register at the site to win a lap quilt in a monthly contest. Or you can do what we do, and bury your squiggly kid under the heaviest afghan in the house.

Have a Coke and a smile

It's like McDonald's funding studies on obesity, or La-Z-Boy underwriting research on the value of exercise: Coca Cola has donated a million bucks to the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry to be used for research, and will also help the academy develop educational programs on good oral health. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is already crying foul, declaring that no organization that promotes tooth decay should have any traffic with those dedicated to stopping it. They see dark intentions by the soda giant to undermine our national oral hygeine, but maybe they should be worrying less about Coke's motives and more about the dentists': After all, though they may advise against sugary snacks and drinks, there's no denying that cavities equal money in a dentist's pocket. Maybe the academy will stay on the up-and-up and not use its Coke cash to soft-pedal the dangers of tooth decay. But if you start seeing soda machines in dentists' waiting rooms and cola-spiked fluoride treatments, you'll know the fix is in.

Sinking to our level

Is your child's carseat installed correctly? A recent study suggests that 80 percent of the kid-saving devices aren't put in properly. And why is that? Is it because hooking the dang things up is ridiculously complicated? Is it because car manufacturers make doing anything creative with a seatbelt a contortionist's dream? Is it because kids hate the things so much they sabotage them? Or maybe because the instructions appear to have been written by people who learned English from the back of a cereal box?

No, indeed, on that last one: The problem, researchers surmised, is just the opposite. Instructions are often written at a 10th-grade reading level, and a large percentage of parents just don't measure up to that degree of erudition. More than half of U.S. adults, apparently, can only comprehend text written at an eighth-grade level or below, with half again of those maxing out at fifth-grade level. The solution suggested is to dumb down the instructions, and that's not a bad idea regardless of whether you buy the low-reading-level theory; really, when we're talking about instructions, if you can make it simpler, why not? I mean, we need something more than those instructions that try to communicate a whole bunch of steps with one simple picture, but something less complicated than a high-school textbook. If my daughter's social studies textbook is any indication, even a fifth-grade reading level might be needlessly confusing.

I should probably feel unsettled, reading this study, to find that a quarter of American adults are reading at a level of fifth-grade or less. But it's actually pretty hopeful news to me, because I just got a report saying that my 12-year-old fifth-grader is reading at a third-grade level, and now I don't feel so bad about it. Hey, if she only makes two years worth of progress over the next six years, she'll fit in with a quarter of the adult population. As long as she never needs to install a carseat, she'll be fine.

Out of the loop again

I've been having another of what I'm going to start calling "inclusion mom experiences" these last few days. These happen when those of us with our brains so deeply in the machinations of special education and advocacy find ourselves completely clueless about the commonplace events of mainstream education. Last week, it was the care and construction of dioramas. This week, it's the All City Band. Turns out our city has one. A press release touts it as featuring "the finest fifth-grade instrumentalists" in our school district. And my daughter's been invited to join.

The first I heard about any of this was when my daughter's classmate, in the car on the way to the bowling alley, told me that my daughter made All City but he didn't. He revealed that his big sister hadn't made it either, and his parents really thought he might have a chance to make it, but no. Apparently families plan for this, anticipate this. And here I am so busy fighting inclusion battles and plotting IEP strategies that I never even got a chance to worry about it in advance. My daughter didn't really know what it was all about, and now that she does -- the bus trips to rehearsals, the performance at the high school -- she's in a panic about doing something out of her nice safe routine. But if she's not excited enough, and I'm not sure how excited I'm supposed to be, we've got plenty of people ready to be our excitement advisors. My daughter's trombone teacher e-mailed me to make sure our fine instrumentalist was okay, because she didn't give much of a reaction when she got the news; and her classroom teacher actually telephoned tonight to let us know that this was really a big deal. I'm getting the idea now.

And all I can think about is how my mother would have lived for this. She would have known years in advance that there was such a thing as All City, and she would have followed my every note in breathless hope for it, and she would have had to lie in a dark room with her stomach in knots on the day the letters were to be handed out, and she would have been heartbroken if I didn't bring one home. She'd probably have called the music teacher to plead for my reconsideration. It was wonderful to have such a passionate advocate, and somewhat daunting, too, to have such nervous tension borne on one's behalf. So perhaps this is a good thing about being an inclusion mom, and being out of the loop when it comes to regular-ed contests and laurels: It's nice when one of them comes up right, but you don't have to obsess about the honors missed. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

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.