Vacation stress

I have a bad track record with the administrative part of traveling. It's the check-ins and check-outs that get me. Probably my worst behavior in this area involved screaming at the top of my lungs one early morning in a London hotel when the slugs at the check-out desk kept holding us up until it appeared we would miss our cab to the airport. It was the end of a much-too-long trip to Europe following my sophomore year in college, and I wanted nothing more than to leave foreign soil and go home, and everything I had tried to do to expedite our exit was now being blocked by people who would ... not ... hurry ... up. I behaved badly, although probably in a way they expected from Americans.

Other times it has seemed very clear to me that the bad behavior was on the other side of the counter, and yet I got the blame. Like the time the car-rental agency did a blatant bait-and-switch, delivering a car so much smaller than the one we'd contracted for that our entire party wouldn't even fit in it, but the sarcastic remark an employee made to my husband on the way out indicated that standing up for one's rights as a consumer is the sort of thing that nice people don't do. Two years ago, the time share we visited in Virginia bopped us around from one unit (with a broken bed) to another unit (too far from our co-travelers); when we finally got settled, I realized that we'd left my son's stuffed animals in one of the rejected rooms, and I tried so hard to retrieve them so he wouldn't have a meltdown that I wound up having a meltdown myself. On the one hand, it was clearly a mess-up by the management to have given us so many rooms in the first place; but on the other hand, a friend who accompanied us on that trip hasn't spoken to me since, so my reputation for bad travel behavior has apparently grown.

All of which explains why I sometimes dread going on trips, and my dread increases with each level of bureaucracy: airports and limos and rental cars and hotels and activities. This year, we've kept it about as simple as can be, driving our own car to a resort a couple of hours away. If I can keep my cool through one check-in and one check-out, I should be pretty much home free. I'm certainly dreading it less than I do the trip to Orlando we have planned for next year; but you never know, I may find an opportunity to tick somebody off yet. We leave today. I hope the time-share folk don't already have a picture of me behind the desk, with a circle and a line over my face.

Dinner as defense

Want to look out for your teen's emotional well-being and guard him or her from the temptations of substance abuse? All you have to do is make that young person sit down for a meal with you. That's the advice from researchers at the University of Minnesota, who surveyed more than 4,500 adolescents to glean their family-dinner and risk-taking habits. Among their findings:

"Frequency of family meals was inversely associated with tobacco, alcohol and marijuana use; low grade-point average; depressive symptoms, and suicide involvement," the study authors wrote. "We found family mealtimes to be a potentially protective factor in the lives of adolescents for nearly all of these variables, particularly among adolescent girls."

Now for our particular adolescent girl, family meals seem to be an especially fertile venue for eye-rolling, attitude-throwing, and pained tolerance for the aggressively uncool behavior of parental and brotherly units. More often than not, our cozy family dinners are interrupted by time-outs, by silent treatments, by sarcastic comments or by heavy, heavy sighs.

But who knows. Maybe having a nightly opportunity to express contempt for so much of what her family does releases that particular need to distance herself from us, and so she won't have to find more dangerous ways to do that. I don't know, though. As an adult, I've observed that having meals with my own extended family generally makes me more inclined to drink or to contemplate violent acts. Maybe the University of Minnesota needs to do a follow-up study of folks in their 40s.

Penny projects

We've started a new incentive plan here at home -- like buying a new datebook or a new purse, starting a new motivational strategy with the kids is something I have to do periodically to keep myself organized and interested. This time, instead of tokens or checkmarks or stars, I'm giving my children pennies when I catch them doing something good, whether an assigned chore or a random bit of cooperation. It's a sign of my kids' emotional immaturity that they're at all motivated by pennies, I guess, but we've made little banks from old tennis-ball containers, and that along with a promise to take the pennies to the cash-in machine at the supermarket when the containers are full seems to be enough for them. If they ever do need an extra little boost, I'll have to show them this site so they can see what a few pennies can do. Well, more than a few: the site uses pennies to provide concrete examples of enormous numbers. Hey, kids, why bother with the cash-in machine? Let's collect enough pennies to fill the Empire State Building! Now that's some good behavior.

School pride

I think there needs to be some sort of etiquette guide printed for people who move from one school district to another, to guide them in sharing their enthusiasm for their new educational set-up without trashing the old one in the presence of those who still attend. My daughter's friend moved, mid-school-year, to another town about 15 minutes away, with smaller schools that his parents have been very happy with. Very, very happy. So happy that, every time we see them, they have to tell us that the schools are so much better than the schools in our town, they're so glad they got their kids out of our terrible overcrowded bad-programmed schools. And that's fine -- I'm happy for them, really -- except my kids are still going to those schools, and we're actually pretty happy with those programs, and would sort of rather not have them dissed so resoundingly. It seems like bad etiquette on my part to say, "Hey, I don't know what's wrong with your kids, but my kids are doing just fine in our schools!" -- but at the same time, isn't it bad etiquette for someone to run down the schools my kids are attending without at least first ascertaining that I hate them, too? I can carp about special-ed glitches and short-sighted policies and imperfections with the best of them, but I gripe because I love, you know?

Moving on up

Well, I guess this is something of a milestone: I took my daughter to the bookstore today, and the books she wanted turned out to be in the "Teen" section instead of the children's. Now, of course, she is a teen, so that shouldn't be any big deal; but her reading level has never been up to her chronological speed. She's still into the "Magic Treehouse" series, which is about a second-grade level, and the most recent standardized tests they gave her (and we all know how reliable those are, right?) showed her reading level hovering around fourth grade. She's two years behind in school, and had mixed success with sixth-grade reading materials last year -- good comprehension of stories with strong plots and characterizations, poor comprehension of mood pieces with lots of figurative language. The times we've plucked promising novels with teen themes from her school's Scholastic Book Fairs, they've proven to be way over her head. Yet there we were today, in the Barnes and Noble, being directed back out of the children's room and into the teen shelves. Yee-haw, we're age-appropriate.

Or maybe not. The books she was looking for were "7th Heaven" books, novelizations of the TV series, re-runs of which she watches obsessively on ABC Family. We found one at the library (yes, in the children's room) and she liked it enough that I thought I'd pounce on any small sign of reading enthusiasm by buying her a few more. According to amazon.com, the reading level of these books is in the 9-12-year-old range, which is about right for her. Maybe they're filed in the teen section because the show's first-run episodes are on the WB, and someone thinks that means teens? Maybe the themes are considered too mature for kiddies (although they're certainly less traumatic than the death-themed books my daughter keeps getting assigned, and they're in the children's room)? Whatever the reason, I'm glad for the little morale boost that comes from picking out big-kid books. Now if I can just get her to read the books instead of watching the TV series, we'll be getting somewhere.

The titles she picked today will eventually make their way onto my Summer Reading 2004 page, but for now, for other parents who may want to be taking advantage of TV tie-ins, they are: Sisters Through the Seasons, Secrets, and Nobody's Perfect.

Contact sports

Yesterday was a rough day at camp for my kiddos, with both coming home from their respective programs with injuries. My son ran to show me his wound as soon as I came to pick him up -- "My friend Luke scratched me!" he said, all excited, and apparently none the worse for wear. His teacher came up solemnly and handed me an "Ouch Report," in which the injury received an official write-up:

"Your child received the following injury at day care today: scratched on the left arm by peer. The first aid administered was: soap and water."

I guess this level of reportage is necessary nowadays, and his teacher was clearly concerned that I would be concerned, but here's one of those terrible secrets of being a mom of a kid with impulse-control and personal-space-respecting problems: barring really serious injury, you're always a little relieved to hear that your child was the recipient of aggression and not the perpetrator. I assured the teacher that these things happen when kids play and I wasn't planning on pursuing litigation of any sort, and home we went to show off the scratched arm to Dad.

Although a written report seemed a little over-the-top for a playground scratch, how I would have loved to have one for my daughter's camp injury, since it would have shown that someone in charge was paying attention. She reports that she was playing ball with some kids, and she and one boy went after the ball, and the boy pushed her out of the way. The place he pushed her was her chest, and there may or may not have been some intentional chest-groping. It happened fast and when my daughter realized in what body part the pain was, she mentioned to a girl she'd been friendly with that day that the boy had touched her "private part." The friend then ran off to tell a counselor this juicy piece of news, and the counselor promised to talk to the boy. At about that time my husband came to pick our camper up, and so we won't know until this afternoon whether there are any repercussions. She's pretty much made up her mind that it was just an innocent push, and I've tried to reassure her that she was right to speak up while simultaneously pointing out that sometimes when you're playing with boys stuff is going to happen that isn't deliberately private-part touching. These days, with so much training in schools about good touch and bad touch, kids are drilled to be so hypervigilant, I wonder if things don't sometimes get blown out of proportion. On the other hand, with some of the contact between boys and girls I've read about going on in middle school and high school, I wonder if we've taught girls to be vigilant enough.

It's a narrow line to walk, isn't it? As the mother of a daughter, I want my girl to respect herself and not feel she has to let boys take advantage of her to be popular or loved or just a member of the mainstream. On the other hand, as the mother of a boy, and especially as the mother of a boy with impulse-control and personal-space-respecting problems, I hate to think that we'll get to a place of such zero tolerance that a brush in the hallway or a push on the playing field will automatically become grounds for charges of sexual harrassment. The years ahead in middle school and high school are going to be full of these sorts of quandaries with my daughter, I know. But after this week and our vacation next week, she's going to finish the summer at my son's camp, where they give "Ouch Reports" for minor skirmishes and the teachers have eagle eyes. Allowing me to save up some Mama Bear energy for September.

In the swim

Planning on going swimming in a public pool this summer? Here's a story you don't want to read. Just like those "you're not as clean as you think" commercials, the things that other people's children are putting into those pools may make you want to stay ashore. (And I say "other people's children" here with all due disapproval, because of course I've never put a baby in a pool in a Pamper, nooooooooooo, of course not, never happened, nope, not me.)

Of course, this news comes just as we're preparing to go on vacation next week, and the item on the top of my son's "to do" list is swim, swim, swim. Hotel pools are particularly notorious for contamination; according to a spokesman for the Florida Swimming Pool Association, "We're dealing with a population who are enjoying themselves on vacation; they're not as worried about things as they might be if they're in their own back yard." Tourists aren't used to being around pools, the spokesman said -- and certainly, if you've not been around swimming pools much, you couldn't be expected to know that you shouldn't pee in it, right? Or anything else: one health department in Kansas has had to put out an advisory stating: "Don't swim if you have diarrhea." Glad we're not going to Kansas on vacation.

It's a little worrisome to think that my kids might pick up a bug in the pool, but that's not my biggest concern. Certainly fear of sunburn is bigger, since if my daughter's face gets much redder it's going to explode. And then there's the constant nagging fear that my son, Mr. Impulsive, Mr. No Cause-and-Effect-Thinking, will splash the wrong person or steal somebody's pool toy or spit water at a stranger. He knows not to pee in the pool, but does he know not to jump in the deep end without adult supervision? Not so much.

Bank on it

Here's a fairly horrifying concept that turned up on a postcard from my bank the other day: checking accounts for teenagers. "Has your teenager turned you into a human ATM?" the come-on blares, and then proposes a solution: giving your teen his or her very own debit card. You transfer funds from your checking account to theirs, and they can charge, write checks or pay bills online (what bills, exactly, do teens have to pay online? Maybe for all those cell phones parents seem to be buying them.) Do kids really have so much disposable income now that they need plastic to handle it all? Do we want them to spend that much money without Mom or Dad looking over their shoulders? Could be, I guess. Certainly if a teen has a job, it makes sense to give them a way to manage their funds. And if a teen refuses to be seen with a parent in public, giving them their own account is probably safer than loaning them your credit cards.

Yet it seems to me that a major rite of passage is being lost here. I remember getting my first checking account when I went away to college, and it was a Big Deal -- a tangible sign that I was moving up and out and on my own. Does it pack the same punch when you're still in high school, living at home, and your folks just don't want to have to keep passing you $20s? The bank would say that it's a good way to teach kids how to manage their money and operate in a grown-up financial world ... but then, the bank would think this is a good idea, since it's charging a fee if your kid makes more than five transactions a month, and you can't tell me you can give a teen a debit card and a bunch of checks and they're only going to buy five things. Learning how to manage a checking account may be a good life skill, but so is learning how to pay cash, and I wonder if we're not raising a generation of kids who won't know how to make change. My daughter has huge problems figuring money out -- we have to give her exact change to buy her lunch every day, or she has a panic attack -- and I'm sure she would love to just have an electronic account somewhere and never have to handle actual paper and metal money again. Sadly, however, she does not have parents who believe in checking accounts for teenagers, no matter how much our bank prods us. I'd rather be a human ATM than a human Direct Deposit.

No fun in the sun

My kids have already gotten a couple of whopping sunburns this summer, and we haven't even gone on vacation yet. It always happens because Mom either forgot to put on the sunscreen or forgot one very sun-exposed spot. So my daughter came home from camp the other day with safely pale arms and legs but a face that looked like a stoplight. We've been slathering that poor red nose and cheeks with aloe and sunscreening it up now (after the horse is out of the barn, of course), and even bought her a new cap to wear (since none of the ones we had were cute enough), but even with all those relief efforts, there are glitches. When my husband went to pick her up later in the week, for example, he found that she was wearing the cap backward, thereby saving her hair from sunstroke but not doing much for her face. Although she huffs that we just don't understand, I do: She's a teen, she's required to do what every other idiot her age is doing. But if she doesn't get some shade on her face during those long days outdoors, she's going to be able to use her nose for a flashlight.

I think if I were a camp counselor, I would carry with me at all times a tube of extra-strong sunblock, and if I saw a kid starting to glow I'd go put some on them. But these are litigious times, and I suppose people who work with kids have been warned not to touch them or apply anything to them to which the little ones could be allergic, lest they be accused of doing harm. So they just watch as skin turns redder and redder, and probably pull their own caps a little further down their faces. Leaving the responsibility where it probably belongs, with old mom, rushing around in the morning trying to get kids to camp and at the same time slather them sufficiently to ward off peeling today and skin cancer tomorrow, grabbing at wiggly boys with slippery hands and then trying to wash the stuff off before making lunches or packing cars. And according to this quiz from the American Cancer Society, none of that is really going to help my kiddos unless I drive over to their camps every two hours and put on more sunscreen, make them wear sunglasses with their caps, and then insist that they sit in the shade through the middle of the day. So, I think we have some more sunburn in our future. But myself, I'm staying inside.

... and one more new thing

April Cain's latest entry in her Thinking It Over column looks at the years and the changes that have passed since she traveled to Russia to adopt her son. I've been thinking about that this summer, too; it's hard to ignore how much my son has grown, since over the past year he has really started to grow. I don't mean developmentally or intellectually, though there's certainly been some of that. I mean that my little peanut, who used to wear the same size in clothes for years on end, who hung off the bottom of the growth chart for most of his life, who could never keep his pants up, so nonexistent were his hips and belly ... that tiny guy, who I used to tuck under my arm, is suddenly almost as tall as me, and is busting out of the shorts I bought him just a couple of months ago. He's a peanut no more. I'm proud, of course, and relieved to seem him so sturdy and healthy, but ... it's hard to switch tracks from looking for smaller sizes and serving bigger portions of food to recognizing that he needs bigger and bigger clothes and maybe ought to stop at seconds at dinnertime. Do you suppose those parasites he brought home from our trip to Russia 10 years ago, the ones we had to battle the pediatrician to test for and were never sure we really defeated, finally just died out on their own?

New on Mothers with Attitude

Julie Donner Andersen's Therapeutic Laughing column takes a turn for the inspirational with a lovely piece about appreciating the little things in life. Meanwhile, Family Man Ken Swarner doesn't appreciate the way the names of perfectly good clothing items get stolen and changed into something that embarrasses you in front of your preteen. Over on the message boards I moderate for Child.com, readers are talking about sensory integration and Asperger's Syndrome. If you have something to share about those diagnoses, come on over. I'd appreciate it.

Trombone it is

I'm happy to report that, after a surprisingly brief struggle, the contest between the trumpet and the trombone for my daughter's musical attention has been resolved, and she's decided that she really does want to be a trombonist after all. This is pretty much what I suspected would happen -- the trumpet looked cool when somebody else was playing it, and those keys seemed so much easier than that darn slide, but when it came to actually reading notes in a different clef and learning fingerings and playing instead of noodling, the appeal dimmed. We both felt bad firing the cute young trumpet teacher after only three lessons, and we do still have a rented trumpet for three more months, but in the end, I'm glad the battle was brief, if only because the beginnings of learning an instrument are always fairly agonizing for the listeners, and she's tortured that poor horn enough. The best part of all this, I think, is that the trombone lessons she had to agree to to get the trumpet lessons are ongoing, missy, and will help her feel more confident and competent in her chosen instrument. Chosen as of now, anyway. Let's hope the onset of band in the fall doesn't find her coveting the clarinet, or the drums. At least if she'd fixate on the flute, she could use my old band instrument.

Creative motivation

Managing the behavior of a developmentally quirky kid like my son requires a gratifying degree of creativity. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that conventional parenting techniques don't work, but you're often surprised and charmed by the little things that do. My son doesn't like big consequences, either positive -- too much pressure -- or negative -- too much stress. Yet he'll often do our bidding just for a look at our keys, or to beat a count of 10. Recently, I've hit on another motivator for him that's entirely too silly to work, and yet it does: that old kiddie game of "Got your nose!" He's really old enough, both chronologically and developmentally, to know that that thumb tucked between my fingers is not his actual nose. You can see him thinking it over, sometimes touching his nose or whatever other external organ I've claimed to snatch, and knowing it's not real; and yet, he wants it back. He can't rest easy until I pretend to return what I've taken. And to get it, he'll do things he normally takes great pains to avoid, like telling me what he did in camp, or writing in his journal, or settling down to read, or even keeping his fingers out of his mouth for a short time. He'll do what I ask, if I'll just give him back his nose or his ear or his big toe. I'd love to tell his teacher about this in September, so she can add it to his list of motivators ... but I have a feeling she'd look at me funny. Besides, a mother's gotta have a few extra tricks up her sleeve. And maybe a nose or two, too.

She wants her MTV

And here's another sign that my little girl is growing up: Sometimes, when I think she's out there in the living room peacefully watching "Zoom" or "Arthur" or "Full House" or some other parent-approved TV show, she's actually sneaking over to MTV, checking it regularly to see if a song she likes is on. I caught her a time or two and sternly (and wishfully) said she was too young for that stuff; it didn't stop her, of course, but it did put her little brother on alert to squeal every time she surfed to that channel. I finally put a "parental block" on it, but told her that if she really wanted to watch, I would sit sometime and watch it with her. We did that for a while last night, and ... whew, I think I may be too young for that stuff.

I'm not an MTV newbie or anything. Back when the channel was just starting out, I was working from my apartment as a freelance writer and, needing some form of procrastination, took to watching videos on a pretty much constant basis. Videos were pretty new then (yes, dear, when mommy was a little girl, there was NO CABLE TV), and there was a lot of goofiness and a lot of over-the-top storytelling and a lot of what amounted to videotaped stage performances. I haven't watched videos regularly for a couple of decades now, though, and from what I'd heard and read about MTV, it was sounding less and less like something I want my middle-schooler to be watching. Knowing, however, that the best way to get kids interested in something is to forbid them to watch it -- and knowing, too, that we get some good conversations going based on what we watch together, good or bad -- I figured the best thing to do would be to let her watch it, but only if I'm there too.

As it happens, the MTV she wanted to watch was the "MTV Hits" channel, which is apparently for the younger end of the MTV demographic, with some teen hits, some rap and R&B, and no commercials. There was some of the same goofiness and storytelling I remembered, and a lot more nakedness and sexuality than I'm comfortable watching with my child. I took the opportunity to point out to her that, while the men in these videos are usually wearing shirts and jackets and long pants, the women are usually wearing as little as possible -- mini skirts, tiny tops, string bikinis. What did she think about that? Did she think that a girl had to dress like that and move like that to get a boy to like her? Her answer was "yes." Yikes. Lots to talk about there.

One other good thing to come from our mutual viewing: In Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, I'd read about a type of dancing that's apparently popular amonst older middle-schoolers that I wanted to tell my daughter she was forbidden from doing ever, ever, ever. But how to describe it, exactly? Watching MTV, no problem -- there it was, demonstrated by an oversexed clump of dancers in a video for a song called, appropriately, "Turn Me On." My girl professed to love that song, particularly the voice of the singer, and to have no real idea what it was about, or why I'd want to turn that particular video off. So apparently, she's not that grown-up yet. And I aim to keep it that way.

Obsessing over OCD

As if we didn't have enough alphabet soup to contend with: A new study indicates that the disorder formerly known as OCD may in fact be three different syndromes, one each for hand-washing, checking and hoarding. That may be good news for researchers trying to find a cure, and to those who might benefit from such -- but to parents who have been given a fistful of diagnoses for their challenging children, finding out that some of those diagnoses have sub-diagnoses is sure to bring on HIPD (Had It with Professionals Disorder). Not to mention that the producers of "Monk" will have to develop three different commercials.

Middle school research

It was with some trepidation that I plucked "Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers" off the library shelf. Would it be like the movie "Thirteen," filled with possibilities that would terrify me for my daughter? Would it be like some of the nonfiction books on the cult of aggression in girls, causing me to think seriously about homeschooling? I'm eager to know what other kids in this stage of development are going through so I can reassure her when she's having scary but normal feelings. I've assured her that she could ask most any adult and they would agree that middle school was one of the worst times in their lives. But am I really up for reading about how that "worst" manifests itself now?

As it turns out, I am. The book is well-written and entertaining as well as insightful, and it has reassured me that much of what my daughter's dealing with is normal, so I can continue to reassure her. There are stages here she hasn't reached; she's not as hostile and withdrawn from her parents as some of the kids in the book, and if there's as much overt sexual aggression going on in her school as in the one in the book, she doesn't understand it as such yet. Although she's two years older than her classmates, her emotional and social (though not physical, alas) development still lags behind. But there are signs that she's starting to get with the adolescent agenda. For years, she was adament that baggy T-shirts and shorts or sweats were "her style," and refused to consider anything more stylish. But this summer, she's started commenting on the cute clothes the kids in Disney Channel movies wear, and admitting that she'd like to dress like that. She's starting to feel bad about looking different, which is kind of a sad transition but a -- that word again -- normal one. We've agreed that her new stylishness will not include bare midriffs, tight tops or low necklines -- still "not my style" -- but certainly a little more cuteness in her wardrobe would not be a bad idea. That she even wants to shop at all is a radical turn-around.

She's starting to be less interested in boys as buddies and more interested in boys as boys. She's starting to wish she had a friend, not just girls she's friendly with in class but a friend to walk with and talk with and bond with. She's starting to worry about what people think of her, and she's sure that she's the only one people stare at and talk about and reject. Yes indeed, we're in middle school now. And I need to study hard.

Can't remember? Ask your kid.

For a while now, I've realized that my children have better memories than I do. This is particularly unsettling because in so many ways their brains are uncooperative, exhibiting difficulties with learning and language and forms of memory that are useful in a classroom. But in the kind of memory that's useful in finding the car keys or remembering when we went somewhere? They're aces. My daughter, who can't repeat back more than seven words you say to her at any given time, knows the birthdays of everyone in our extended family. My son, who forgets what he's been told to do in the ten or so paces between the kitchen and his bedroom, can repeat whole grocery lists. Now, thanks to some researchers at Ohio State University, I find that this is a normal kid thing -- and that makes it even better, since "normal kid things" are in fairly short supply around here. The study found that small children have better memories than adults because their brains are less cluttered, and they're able to appreciate and retain details that grown-up brains can't be bothered with. Now, of course, my children are no longer so small; at ages 14 and 11, they're older than the kids in the study and should maybe have moved up to less-efficient adult reasoning by now. Maybe their learning problems with advanced work, to some degree, reflect their more childlike approach. But I gotta tell you, I kind of hope they remain immaturely observant a little while longer. 'Cause once they move on, we're going to miss some birthdays.

Oh, never mind

I figured out how to put the old comments back into the new blog design, so ... they're back! Trumpeters and trombonists, rejoice!

What's new?

Well, the design of this blog, for one thing. After years of laziness (and fear of all this Blogger coding), I finally changed the template to one that would accommodate a blogroll of sites that have been nice enough to link to me. The good thing is that we can now have archives on this page (I'm sorting them by month now, to avoid that ridiculously long list) and the color scheme's a little more pleasant. The bad thing is that I was too much of a wimp to try to get the enetation comment code back into the right place, and so I'm now using Blogger's comment system, and comments made before today have vaporized. It's not that I've had so very many comments, but within the last week or so there's been an interesting discussion of trombone and trumpet embrochures, and some sniping against stupid research studies, and I'm sorry to lose them. Thanks to all who've commented in the past and please, comment again -- if only to tell me what you think of the new design.

Meanwhile, over on Mothers with Attitude: There's a new Family Man essay by Ken Swarner, and a page I've set up to record all the books my kids are reading this summer. Everything still looks the same, though. Whether that's good or bad, I'll leave up to you.

My summer reading

I've been on a little bit of a reading jag lately. What started it, I think, was checking out three books from the "new nonfiction" section at our local library and realizing, once I had them home, that they were due in two weeks and not the customary four. So panicked was I about finishing three books in two weeks that I wound up finishing them in one. Two, of course, were books about children with special needs: The Best I Can Be: Living with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome-Effects by Liz Kulp, a teen with FAS, and her mother, Jodee; and Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen, a fascinating peek into a deaf school and deaf culture. Then I took one summer respite book: The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt, an enjoyably meandering look at a Cape Cod summer house and the Boston family that has filled it for more than a century.

It was nice reading something non-child-related for a change, but now I'm back on the job, reading a book I bought before I checked out those others: Reflections from a Different Journey : What Adults with Disabilities Wish All Parents Knew, a collection of essays edited by Stanley D. Klein, Ph.D., and John D. Kemp. And, later this afternoon, I'm back to the library. Apparently, all I need to get some good serious reading done is a due date.

Jared to the rescue

Well, thank goodness! We parents have been struggling to teach our kids good nutrition, limit their TV watching, make them play outside, all to prevent them from joining the growing trend toward kiddie obesity -- and now, at last, we have an ally in that fight: Subway's sendin' in Jared. Yes, the sandwich chain spokesman known for limiting his diet to certain subs and losing 245 pounds has been dispatched to help the youth of America trim down. He'll meet tubby kids at speaking engagements and speak to them in commercials, and really, could we be any more relieved? Because when you're trying to get kids to make healthy food choices, the person you want to lead them is a guy who is famous for eating nothing but sandwiches. Locking onto one safe and trusted food to the exclusion of all others is something kids would never think to do on their own. Better make sure you leave those kids in front of the TV, Mom and Dad -- you wouldn't want them to miss their Subway commericals.

Worried? You should be!

Here's a sort of painfully ironic research finding: It turns out that pregnant women who worry a lot give birth to someone to worry about. According to Belgian psychologists, there was a strong correlation between mothers who experienced high levels of anxiety and stress during pregnancy and children with anxiety disorders and behavior problems. The thought is that the kids were "programmed" in the womb to be anxious, hyperactive or aggressive. So isn't that just a kick in the pants: The reason your kid is stressing you out now may be that you stressed him out then.

These findings are of particular interest to me because my mother was a great believer in the theory that the best way to prevent bad things from happening was to worry about them. She would often lay awake nights casting about for things to worry about, fearing that if she missed something it would inevitably happen. I'd always thought my own anxious nature was some sort of genetic hand-me-down from her, but maybe she worried so much on my behalf while she was pregnant with me that she made me a worryer then and there. Either way -- hey, not my fault! And not my fault if my adopted kids are anxious or hyper or aggressive, right? Birthmother stress did that, hon. And I'll cling to that until the study about adoptive moms worrying their kids into stress overload comes along. You Belgian psychologists, you just take your time, 'kay?

Is there too much non-fiction in children's fiction?

There's an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times today about the extreme seriousness of so much of the required summer reading our kids are being assigned. And I'll admit, it's something I've been wondering about too, since for two years now my daughter's summer reading book has been about dealing with death. Not exactly beach reads here.

The author of the piece, Barbara Feinberg, writes:

"Here are some novels assigned this summer to American sixth-graders, all winners of the highest literary prizes: 'Walk Two Moons,' by Sharon Creech, chronicles a daughter's search for her missing mother, who fled, it turns out, because of a deep depression after a miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy. At the end, the girl discovers that her mother was killed in a bus accident. In 'Belle Prater's Boy,' by Ruth White, a missing father is found to have died because he shot himself in the face; Belle Prater, the errant mother, is never found, although her son remembers her saying that she's in a straitjacket: 'Squeezed to death. I can't move. I can't breathe. I have to get out of here.' A far gentler book, 'Because of Winn-Dixie,' by Kate DiCamillo, is about a girl who finds a friendly dog who in turn helps her rebuild her life. But she must do that because her mother abandoned her; we are told also that the mother 'loved to drink.'"

And she's got a point; this is heavy, heavy stuff. On the other hand, "Because of Winn-Dixie" is a book I love dearly, and the way the girl's relationship with her father evolves as they both come to terms with the loss of her mother was more heart-warming than -chilling. Is "Sarah, Plain and Tall" a downer because the only reason the family needs Sarah is because they lost their mother? Is the "Shiloh" trilogy unnecessarily traumatic because the figure of Judd, a violent alcoholic who abuses dogs and was himself abused as a child, looms over it so menacingly? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do know that my son has felt more strongly about Shiloh than about any number of less threatening books we've passed his way.

I'm not sure that I buy this as something new in children's literature, either, a menacing sign that adults who should be protecting children are forcing them to face life's hardships instead. The books I remember most clearly from my childhood weren't exactly carefree: "Island of the Blue Dolphins" and "A Little Princess" are certainly books that smacked their young protagonists with harsh realities. I recently took a look at "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," a book I remember loving as a kid, and was reminded that it was about a girl who felt so neglected and ignored by her family that she ran away. That's a plot that would be pretty much at home in today's social-studies kid novels (which is probably why, come to think of it, it's still on reading lists).

It's nice to suppose that there was an easygoing time when children were only exposed to things that were innocent and enchanted and life-affirming and freed from the grittiness that may or may not constitute real adult life. But I don't know; am I the only kid who felt permanently scarred by the death of Bambi's mother? Or who still can't watch "The Wizard of Oz" after feeling so frightened as a child for Dorothy, stranded so far from home? A good scare has long been considered an acceptable part of children's entertainment. Maybe it's just that these days, the stuff of "real life" is scarier than any flying monkey.

Nothing's ever easy, part 5,672

This is why parents of special education students can never just relax over the summer.

On Thursday, we received the middle school's "dress code" letter, the one that sent my daughter into such a tizzy last summer when she realized she wasn't going to be able to wear her big baggy T-shirts to school. Getting it this year wasn't such a big deal. What was a big deal was that we also received one for my son, who is indeed the right age to start middle school but who, by unanimous and enthusiastic decision of his Child Study Team, was to be staying in elementary school for another year, with the same teacher. Because of that, he didn't go through his school's graduation ceremony, he didn't go to the orientation at the new school, he got a summer assignment from his teacher, everything's set. And yet, here comes this letter, addressing him as an incoming sixth-grader in need of proper dress.

I tried not to panic; it was probably a computer glitch. But the Special Ed office had messed me up before, and you can never just assume that these things will go away if you ignore them. So I called the middle school office and left a message. And then the next day, when I was at the middle school anyway for my daughter's band-camp concert, I stopped by the office and asked: What's up with this? Is he really in your computer to come here next year?

The secretary checked. And he's really in their computer.

I took it pretty calmly -- after all, I've turned up these sorts of glitches way closer to the start of school, and addressing them in July is kind of a luxury -- and went to listen to my daughter play. During intermission, I happened to see the elementary school principal, and asked him if he'd heard of any special-ed shakeup that would move my boy up against everyone's will; but no, the principal was expecting him, and recommended that I call the Special Ed office right away. It's not only parents, apparently, who realize how easily things can get messed up.

My cell phone was dead (as it always is when I need it), but there happened to be a pay phone by the auditorium, and I dropped my 50 cents and called the Special Ed office and sure enough, their paperwork all said he was staying in elementary school. The computer (oh, those dastardly computers!) had probably just assigned a grade based on his age, and the person who took my call said she would correct the error. A pleasant exchange, and all is well. But I'll tell you, I'm going to stop by the middle school office in a week or two and make sure the computer's right. If the last week of August comes and we get a middle-school class schedule for him, I'm not going to be so pleasant.

Tricking the tooth fairy

It's been said that kids with fetal alcohol exposure have kind of a communal approach to money -- they're as likely to steal from you as to give you everything in their pockets. My son's shown no tendency to petty theft, but he doesn't take very good care of what he's got, either. He has a box into which he's supposed to put the dollar bills he earns through our credit system, but he'll typically just throw them in a drawer or into the mess on his desk instead, sometimes never to be seen again. There are things he wants, and he likes having the money to buy them, but the connection in his brain between that and those little green pieces of paper is pretty frayed.

Recently, he lost a couple of teeth, and most kids would get dollar signs in their eyes at the thought of tooth-fairy bounty. In the past, he's been increasingly reluctant to part with the tooth, money or no, and with the first of these recent teeth he just refused to put anything under his pillow. But with the second one, he got a gleam in his eye. "I'm going to trick the tooth fairy!" he said. The reference was to an "Arthur" episode in which D.W. puts a fake tooth under her pillow to trick the tooth fairy, and Arthur puts money in its place so that the tooth fairy won't get mad and boycott their house. But my son, of course, had a different spin: He was going to put MONEY under his pillow instead of a tooth! Wouldn't that be a good trick! The tooth fairy would came for a tooth and find that somebody already took it! So under the pillow went $2 his grandmother had just given him for helping her, and he couldn't have been more delighted the next morning to find that same $2 under his pillow. He insisted on leaving it for another night, but it got knocked around during bed-making and his afternoon rocking and now he's got $1 crumpled up next to his boom box and $1 who knows where. Losing a tooth has effectively cost him a buck. But he's a happy guy.

We'll find some way to reimburse him for his tooth fairy adventure. And as long as he's not trying to manage a household, and all he's losing are dollar bills, being careless with money is not a disaster. But I think we can cross a couple more things off the list of jobs he can have when he grows up: Banker and Con Man.

What are you reading right now?

I've been fooling around the past couple of days with a very cool Web site for book lovers called All Consuming. Its primary function is to scan Weblogs, find references to books and catalog them, so that if you're interested in a book you can look it up and see what bloggers have been saying about it. But it also allows individuals to sign up and keep online records of the books they're reading, have read or plan to read, and make comments about those books. You can go to my blog's page and see what's on my current reading list; I've also used their javascript feature to put the book I'm currently reading at any given time on this page. And if you have a Weblog on which you mention books, let me know so I can add you to my "friends" list -- All Consuming has automatically given me some friends that I've never heard of, and while friends are always good, it's better if they're not strangers.

Meanwhile, if you're a mean mom like me and have your child doing forced reading over the summer (or hit the jackpot and have a kid who loves to read, lucky you), stop by the Child message boards and tell us what's on your young person's reading list.

Girl with a horn

A recent news story suggests that learning music can increase a child's IQ. And that's good news for us this summer, because at least for the next few weeks, my daughter's playing not one but two instruments. After hearing her whine for months about how much she wishes she played the trumpet instead of the trombone, how much she hates the trombone, how she's really a trumpeter but has to play trombone because that's the instrument I picked out for her -- whining that reached a crescendo over the four weeks of summer music camp that end on Friday -- I finally found a local studio that offers rentals and lessons at reasonable rates, and called that girl's bluff. It took her about one lesson and a practice or two to realize that, gee, you can't pick up a new instrument and play it as well as the old instrument (something I told her, oh, 100 times?), and that she really is indeed a trombonist at heart. The lessons are prepaid until the end of the month, so she'll have a little time to live with that truth; but, just to hedge our bets, I signed her up for trombone lessons, too. Maybe, if nothing else, she'll get a little smarter.

Hot off the presses

Got a heavenly little surprise in my mailbox yesterday: the latest edition of the Brimstone Bulletin, newsletter of the Mothers From Hell, with a humor article from my Mothers with Attitude archives right there on the front page. The editor had asked me for some pieces a while ago, but I'd forgotten about it until the newsletter came blazing along yesterday, and now I'm basking in the glow of fame and slightly increased Web site traffic. To those who are visiting here after seeing my article in the newsletter, welcome! To those who are saying, "Mothers from where now?" check out the Mothers' Web site and enjoy their take-no-prisoners approach to getting education and services for children with special needs. And to those who have no brimstone in their mailbox but would like to read my front-page little essay, it's still in the MWA archives, right here (and my son still won't go near me in the morning until I've showered. If I were really a Mother from Hell, I probably wouldn't take that anymore.)

Does cough syrup help?

When I was a kid, I slept over one night at the home of a friend whose mother was a nurse. I woke up in the wee hours with a terrible cough, but rather than give me some over-the-counter medication, nurse-mom gave me a big spoonful of honey. She claimed that in her experience, honey and pancake syrup were as effective as medicine in quelling coughs, and sure enough, I was soon tucked in my sleeping bag, fast asleep. That same sort of parenting wisdom seems to be reflected in a recent study claiming that cough syrup is an entirely ineffective product; it doesn't stop coughing, it doesn't help a child sleep, and it doesn't help parents sleep. The research from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine claims that OTC products were no more effective than placebos ... yet it seems to me that I've used cough syrup with my kids, and that it's bought us some no-cough time, and certainly allowed them and us to sleep. What's been your experience with cough medicine? If those placebos were as effective as my friend's mom's spoonful of honey, maybe this stuff all works very well indeed.

Super book for special-needs parents

Going to the Department of Motor Vehicles is good for something more than getting your driver's license, it turns out. The four hours I had to wait to renew my license last week (on the morning of my birthday, no less; do I know how to party, or what?) was plenty of time for me to finish reading Paul Collins' excellent "Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism." This is one of those books you read with a magical realization of : "So it wasn't just me! Other parents have felt this way, too!"

So many books turn the parenting of special-needs children into a tragedy and the parents themselves into saints. I don't have much use for those. But "Not Even Wrong" manages to be funny, true, educational and encouraging without ever being falsely inspirational. Good stuff, and not even a four-hour DMV line can dampen my enthusiasm for it. I found lots to relate to: the accounts of dealing with professionals who seem to spitefully overlook all that is unique and delightful about your child in favor of clucking over developmental milestones; the dawning realization that you have entered an alternate universe where your idea of normal parent-child experiences and others' are unreconcilable; even the research the author does into autism, although more journalistic than my own in the early days of trying to figure out what the heck was up with my son, touches on some of my favorites, paticularly the works of Temple Grandin and Oliver Sacks.

I was so excited about this book that I asked the publisher to allow me to post an excerpt on Mothers with Attitude, and am happy to say that that excerpt is now up and ready for viewing. The passage I chose describes young Morgan's first early intervention evaluation, and boy, have I been there, endured that. In my son's case, the video camera was hidden, but its very long, coiled extension cord was in plain sight, and way more interesting than any toys the evaluator could throw his way. Then there was the time a psychologist tried to evaluate him in a house that was packed with more knicknacks than I'd ever seen in one place -- plus a piano, a baby and a cat. The doctor was filled with dire predictions based on the fact that my son would rather look at all the stuff than interact with him, but honestly, he was by far the least interesting thing in the room. Collins' book made me look back on those days with ... well, not fondness, exactly, but certainly fellowship. Read and enjoy the excerpt, and then, I urge you, check out the book as well. We special-needs parents don't have that many opportunities to see our lives in print.

The name game

I remember when we brought our kids home from Russia almost ten years ago now, one of our biggest concerns was giving them "American" names. We imagined that having names outside the normal range of Jennifers and Michaels would cause them to suffer schoolyard ridicule and constant nagging mispronunciation. Fortunately, their Russian names were easy to Americanize -- dropping the first letter for one, changing a last letter for the other -- and so we didn't have to risk confusion by dropping completely new and different-sounding monikers on them.

At any rate, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But in the years since, as I've seen them go through school with children whose names diverged wildly from what I'd considered the norm -- ethnic names, made-up names, everyday names transformed into unique creations by aggressively idiosyncratic spelling -- I've often wondered if we shouldn't have let them keep their slightly exotic Russian names. American birthparents, it seems, are a lot less concerned with giving their offspring fit-in names than parents adopting from overseas.

And here's the perfect piece of evidence: According to recent news reports, not one, not two, but at least three families have named their baby sons ESPN, after the cable channel. (Alright: One family named their child ESPN, one Espn, and one Espen; they're all nuts in my book.) Now that sort of thing might be fine when your child's just a babe in arms, but you just know that when those boys get to be teenagers, they're going to moan to their parents: "Why couldn't you have named me MTV?"

Beware of Spider-Man

Things have been crazy busy at work this month, which is why I've been such an inconsistent blogger (like I need an excuse), but I saw this tag on the New York Times' "Spider-Man 2" review and I just had to share it: After an excellent review which touted the film's emphasis on human relationships over whiz-bang special effects came the advisory "'Spider-Man 2' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some brutally violent scenes, and kissing." Like, "I'm okay with my pre-teen child seeing brutal violence, but kissing! Kissing is where I draw the line." How does kissing find itself on the same parental cautionary plane as not just violence, but brutal violence? Is Peter Parker just that bad a kisser?

Yours Till *&%^$

When I was a kid, back in the Stone Age, I had a small book of autograph verses called Yours Till Niagara Falls, which I note with amazement is still available from amazon.com. The sweet and silly declarations therein were a little too cutesy even back in the '70s when I was signing yearbooks, and I can't imagine kids today even having a clue what the point of those quaint little ditties could possibly be. But an article in this morning's paper makes me think that a copy of my old autograph companion should be issued with every new yearbook, and students should be made to memorize its contents: It seems that book-signers at a local high school used so many obscenities, suggestive come-ons and provocative statements in their yearbook messages that administrators had to seize the books and white-out inappropriate sentiments. There was a predictable amount of squawking about constitutional rights to self-expression and clucking over schools not allowing parents to do their jobs, but really -- if autographs now need to be censored, it's time to get back to "2 Good 2 Be 4 Gotten."

Raiding the Parent's Portfolio

When I first started the Parent's Portfolio on Mothers with Attitude, it was with the hope that people would steal my stuff. I'd been frustrated with the lack of templates for the kinds of things I wanted to write for my kids -- instructions to teachers, additions to IEPs, behavior plans -- that I hoped to provide some for other moms by posting the documents I finally came up with. I'm happy to report that the first case of outright theft reported to me -- a behavior plan for a post-institutionalized child with hearing impairment, written by Marie Lowry and based heavily on my behavior plan for my FASD son -- is now posted to the portfolio as well, for further pilfering. If you've written something useful in advocating for your child and would like to pass it on to other parents, please e-mail it to me and I'll add it to the portfolio. And if you're needing a good list of accommodations or a way to explain your child's disabilities, please feel free to adapt anything in the portfolio to your own use. There's a copyright on most of the pages because I don't want them ending up uncredited on someone else's website, but they're entirely available -- and intended -- for the personal use of parents. Just share your rewrites, 'kay?

Putting words in our mouths

So yesterday I was at my son's school and the nurse came up to me, amused, and said she guessed we were expecting a cold summer this year. When I looked at her blankly, she related a little story my son had told her: "My dad said I could get a new computer when it snows in July." She chuckled and clearly seemed to think it was very clever of my husband to have found such a witty way to turn down our son's technology request.

Couple of problems, though: We already have three computers. My son rarely plays on them. He's never asked for a new one. And my husband has never turned him down, wittily or otherwise. The subject of snow in July has never arisen.

I suspected that this was once again a case of my guy picking up blocks of dialog from TV shows and delivering them with such sincerity, in such appropriate ways, that folks naturally assume he's telling a true tale from his own life. And sure enough, that night, when I was watching an "Arthur" re-run with him, what did Binky Barnes say but, "Are we expecting a cold summer? My dad said I could get a new computer when it snows in July."

Now, there's no real harm done if my son's telling anecdotes and school personnel are believing that his dad and I speak as though we have scriptwriters helping us. But it does make me worry a bit about what else he might be saying. Could he pick up a little block of dialog that would make us look cruel instead of clever? I'd better start screening his screen time more closely. And maybe I should start to doubt the anecdotes he tells me about his teachers.

Famous for burping

I recently signed up with Statcounter to get some better and broader statistics on who's coming to my sites and why. Among the information I'm getting is a list of key words people use to find the site, and it is through that particular service that I am able to make this surprising declaration: If you do a Google search for "burping aloud," you'll find Mothers with Attitude among the top 10 entries, courtesy of an essay I wrote about my son and his table manners. We're number 5, as a matter of fact. Such a proud moment.

Dinner with Spidey

My family had dinner with Spiderman last night. The web-slinger came to our table, crawled atop it, affixed his web to my husband's shoulder, walked up my daughter's leg, and generally made himself at home. If he hadn't been five inches high, we would have had to call the waitress to throw him out.

But in fact, this particular Spidey was the plastic action figure variety, wielded by a four-year-old whose awfully laid-back parents were at a table across the aisle. Maybe because I talked nice to him when he first visited our table (after all, since I wasn't sitting on the aisle, I wasn't the one being crawled on), he visited again and again, becoming more and more full-contact. And because he was four, and cute, and fairly oblivious to anything but his cool toy, it was okay. But I marveled at how nonchalantly his parents took the sight of their small son working the room. I mean, in this day and age, don't we try to discourage our children from talking to strangers, much less touching them? The kid just kept affixing his Spiderman's web to my husband's shoulders and chest while Mom and Dad chatted amiably with the couple at the next table, whose own Spiderman-shirt-wearing three-year-old was at our table too, looking like he couldn't have been more excited if it was Spiderman in the flesh.

So maybe we give out some sort of friendly, child-tolerant vibe. And maybe the parents were just so relieved to have the kid no longer crawling Spiderman all over them that they were willing to overlook his relentlessly forward behavior. I certainly did recognize their tone when they, very periodically, called to their child to come back and not bother the nice people. It was that sort of, "We have to call him because people will think badly of us if we don't, but we really hope they'll keep entertaining him" tone. I may have used that tone a time or two. When my son was reaching into people's pockets to look at their keys, say. And when he was well past four years old. Yesterday, maybe.

Introducing the "So Much for Sainthood..." Award

I've been thinking a lot lately about how my conception of myself -- as a mom who's pretty on top of her children's needs and issues and tries hard to get them what they need -- and other people's conception of me -- too often, as some kind of saint who gives her all for these challenged children -- is often at odds with the nitty gritty of my daily life, which all too often involves losing my temper unecessarily, spending more time playing on the computer than playing with my kids, and choosing the most expedient path over the most enriching one. I think about this on mornings when I send my son to school in clothes stained with whatever he had for breakfast, because I don't have the time or energy or will to go through dressing him again; or when I do my daughter's homework for her because I don't have the smarts and the stamina to reteach and rehearse and remind her to learn it on her own.

I do my best, just as I tell my children to do, but for sure I'm no saint, and a lot of the time I'm barely competent. In the hope that other folks feel this same way, I hereby institute the "So Much for Sainthood..." Award, and invite anyone who wants to share their own embarrassing or silly stories to do so on the Mothers with Attitude Sounding Board. I haven't figured out what prize might be offered periodically to the saddest sack amongst us, but particularly amusing or mortifying examples of motherly bungling will, with the permission of the transgressors (and their names disguised), be featured on the Mothers with Attitude home page. Anyone game?

New on Mothers with Attitude

Ken Swarner's latest entry in his Family Man column deals with those summertime marauders, the "Pirates of the Cabinet." If your kids and their friends have ever moved through your kitchen like locusts, eating everything in their path, then you can relate. We've not had too much problem in this area yet, although my daughter did have one friend I had to keep an eye on. She would help herself to whatever was in the refrigerator, and a few times I had to convince her that really, those leftovers had been in there a long time, they probably were no longer good to eat. I will say, though, she was useful when it came to getting rid of Halloween candy that had overstayed its welcome. You could usually count on her to sneak into the living room and fill up her pockets when she thought nobody was looking. I finally started giving her a bag. If this was an episode of "Full House" or "7th Heaven," my daughter's favorite shows at the moment, this girl would turn out to have a family that was homeless or so poverty stricken they could not afford bad leftovers and Halloween candy themselves. I thought for a while that her parents had her on a diet and maybe I should be telling them that she was treating our home as her personal smorgasbord. But since we're not in a sensitive family sitcom or drama, I think she was probably just an omniverous growing girl. And we should invest in fridge locks.

Bad book behavior

My daughter did something today that absolutely stunned me. And I guess I should be glad that it didn't involve sex or drugs or violence or cheating on schoolwork or other typically adolescent forms of stunning behavior. In fact, I suppose in the greater scheme of things, it was positively un-stun-worthy. It was just this: She tore the cover off a book. A new paperback, one she had begged me to give her money for at her school's book fair last month. It's not like it was particularly pricey, but it was more expensive than most of the little novels -- a Ripley's almanac with a sort of spangly cover. I'd hemmed and hawed a little bit about giving her the money for that particular book because I figured it would just sit in her desk and she'd never look at it, which appears to have been the case, except that the cover got a little bit bent, and so -- well, why not? -- she ripped it off and threw it away.

And it's not that I'm some keeper of pristine books, carefully dustjacketed and bookcased, with no little fingers allowed to touch. I tote books around in my purse until the covers are frayed, I jam them onto shelves, I let sticky-fingered toddlers or finger-sucking boys turn the pages without wet-wiping first. We've worn through multiple copies of childhood favorites, and proud to do it. But you don't just tear the cover off of a book for no good reason, especially if that's about the only thing you're planning to do with it. I suppose it's a sign of how easy we have it with this particular child that this is all I have to get mad at her about. I'm happy about that. But dang, take care of your books, girl.

Broadway on a budget

My mother loved the theater. She started taking me to plays when I was a very small girl (well, okay, I was a very small girl pretty much right up to the time when I became a very small woman; let's say, a very young girl), and was always excited about seeing the new plays that made it from Broadway to theaters in Los Angeles. When I moved to the east coast, we always had to see a show when she visited; and in between, watching the Tony Awards was a way to keep tabs on what we wanted to see and what was probably not worth the skyrocketing ticket prices.

Those ticket prices eventually dampened my enthusiasm for trekking into NYC and catching a show. I think the breaking point for this was an evening in which play tickets, dinner, and the parking ticket we got for putting our car somewhere we shouldn't have ran my husband and I about $250. When we realized we could have bought a TV for the amount of money it had cost us for one evening out, we stopped wanting those sorts of evenings out very much. It's a lot to ask of a show to make you forget how much you had to pay to watch it. Very few shows can do it.

But I still love watching the Tony Awards, and will be in front of my TV tonight to see what I've been missing. I haven't been bringing my daughter to plays like my mom did for me, but I'll at least have her sit and watch some production numbers before bedtime. If anyone else out there is enjoying the theater vicariously through its annual awards, stop by the chat room at the Mothers with Attitude Sounding Board tonight during the show and let's pick the winners, mourn the losers, and say snippy things about what people are wearing.

Bad day, good year

I had a conference with my son's teacher yesterday, and she started with the fairly dreadful phrase, "What do you want first, the good news or the bad news?" Before I could panic much, she explained that the "good news" was that my son had had a great year, and the "bad news" was that he was having a difficult day. Alright, maybe a difficult week. Not the best month, either. But it's the end of the year, with a lot of disruptions and general overstimulation, and she was a lot happier about the great year than the bad ending. Me, too.

We agreed that my son has made a lot of progress this year, both behaviorally and academically; and we also agreed that we were each doing a wonderful job with him. All that mutual admiration is a good thing, because we're all due to be together again next year. It's the first time since preschool that my guy's had the same teacher two years in a row, and once again it's a cheerful and unflappable woman who works well with him and seems generally unfazed by his, shall we say, behavioral challenges. It's a relief to know that he'll be in good hands next year, that I won't have to go in and explain him to a stranger, that he won't have to get to know a new person with new expectations. They'll both be up to speed, first thing. Having the same teacher two years in a row is something I've been wanting for him since he started elementary school, and now we'll see whether it really makes a difference.

Funeral for a friend

This week, the excerpts-in-your-inbox book club I subscribe to is reading The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die by Katherine Ashenburg. It's an appropriate choice for a week during which I actually attended a wake and a funeral. But the book's suggestion that the traditions surrounding death and grieving are passed down in ways we aren't always aware of, so that even members of society who seem unaware or uninterested find themselves observing the same rituals, put me in mind of a second "funeral," one I was the sole witness to last Friday.

I've mentioned here that it's a springtime tradition for the high school next door to us to place a crashed-up car on its lawn to warn kids against driving drunk on prom night; and that my son, who's car-obsessed, visits the car daily, names it, talks to it, gets his picture taken with it, and generally treats it like a bosom buddy. I should also mention that he goes into mourning on the day the tow truck finally hauls it away. That day came last Friday for this year's wreck, a Lincoln Town Car he christened "Linc." When all that was left of Linc was a muddy gash in the ground strewn with bits of broken glass, my son cried and yelled at me for not coming home earlier from work so he could have seen his friend one last time. We found a few plastic pieces from the turn signal light that weren't too sharp to keep as a souvenir, and started to walk back home ... but then my guy paused, and said, "We have to have a funeral."

He ran over to a little bed of flowers by the high school sign and picked up a small chunk of dirt, then walked back to the hole in the ground where the car had been and started to say a few words. You couldn't ask for a better eulogy than the one he gave (although I could have skipped the part about "If my mom had come home earlier I could have seen you again"), and when he had finished his kind words of remembrance he tossed the little chunk of dirt into the "grave." Then he ran back to the flower bed, got another chunk of dirt, and gave another eulogy in the voice of his imaginary dog. When Invisible Scooby was through, I picked a dandelion, said a few words myself, and put the flower beside the chunks of dirt. And we went home, feeling that our work was done and our grieving well-respected.

How did he know to do that? I think he's only been to one funeral, and I don't think we threw dirt in the grave. Surely he was too young to remember, anyway. Was there a funeral on "Arthur" or "Dragontales" or something? Or is it just some sort of human imperative, coded into our genes? Whatever it is, that Town Car got a nice send-off. Too bad I got home too late for a wake.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Check out the latest entries from two of our columnists: Ken Swarner takes on tee ball in his Family Man column, and on a more serious note, April Cain tells a family's tale of abuse and healing in this month's Thinking It Over. And maybe this week, my daughter will have less homework and I'll have more time to think and there will be a few new entries in "Parenting Isn't Pretty," too. It's a nice dream.

More school board treachery

The latest in our school district's desperate (even the newspaper headlines are calling them "desperate" now) attempt to find a place to plop a big ol' 8th and 9th grade school is a proposal to tear down a perfectly good elementary school and build the new monster mega school in its place. This sort of idea leads me to believe that the school board is so annoyed at all the objections they've been getting so far that now they're just deliberately trying to tick people off. We've moved from "We'd like to put a new school in your neighborhood" to "We're going to tear down your neighborhood school, send your little kids somewhere else, and bring a whole bunch of adolescents in to take their place." If that's not purposely provocative, I don't know what is.

So we're sure to have another big protest movement on our hands. I'm waiting for fighting between the different protest factions to start breaking out in the streets. Tempers are high. And all of it makes me realize how glad I am that I've never been the kind of person who feels a need to run for the school board or the city council. I mean, God bless folks who want to be public servants, but talk about a thankless job. Clearly, we need some sort of school overcrowding relief. They're about ready to start holding high school classes in the parking lot, the building's so packed (come to think of it, maybe that's why the marching band practices so much). But it's hard to imagine a place or a plan for building extra school space that's not going to make someone mad enough to bring a ton of fliers down on the head of any local politician who supports it. Let others lead; I'll just sit and whine.

The school due to be razed is actually one my kids have attended; it was never our neighborhood school, but it was the site of their particular special-ed programs for a number of years. It's a perfectly serviceable school, albeit a small building on a big piece of land. I would be sad to see it go, though, and sad to think of all those special-ed kids being disrupted. Not that they can't be moved around on the whim of a special-ed administrator anyway, but still. My kids had some happy years in pre-K in a cozy little trailer out back of the building, and I wonder where all those little ones will be booted off to now. Not that I really believe this proposal will fly any farther than any of the other ones have. But sooner or later, somebody's petition's bound to come up short.

Toothless insults

Don't ask me why, but the ultimate sibling insult in our house right now is "You have no teeth." My son lobs this one at my daughter at dinnertime with maximum gleeful gloating, and it does have the advantage of inviting no zippy comeback. "Yes, I do," lacks some zing. She tries to ignore it, I try to ignore it, but after a while even an absurd insult rankles. Tonight he moved on to "You have no gums," and I guess I should at least be impressed that his knowledge of dental body parts is growing. "You have no tongue" has been sneaking in, too. Where this comes from, I have not a clue. Usually I can figure out what cartoon introduced what meanness into his vocabulary -- he has an uncanny knack of picking up the one negative statement in even the most positive PBS offering -- but I don't remember ever hearing anyone picking on anyone else's dentition. Has anybody heard a similar phrase in a TV show, movie or video game? Or is this the beginning of some sort of dentistry fixation? Never a dull moment, hereabouts.

School fatigue

Is summer vacation here yet? I'm as eager for time off as any schoolkid. Mostly because I feel like a schoolkid with the amount of homework help I'm having to provide lately. My daughter's coming home with so much stuff to do each evening that I've abandoned the pretense of having her try it herself first and am just giving her answers, lest homework time stretch past midnight. It's starting to seem as though her teachers are realizing they didn't get quite far enough through the curriculum, and so they're going to do a few months' worth in the last weeks of school. And I say, enough! Bring on the break! Even though summer brings with it changes in routine that can make my son misbehave; changes in drop-offs and pick-ups that play havoc with my work schedule; costly camps and new people to indoctrinate into our behavior management schemes; even with all the upheaval, it's going to be better than having to lead a learning disabled girl through fifteen questions on three hard short stories in one evening. Plus studying for three tests. Plus filling out two study guides and a few worksheets for good measure. Enough, I say! I already graduated sixth grade once; it's time to be done with it again.

My hero

I've been struck down by allergies over the past week or so, just feeling drippy and droopy and coughy and itchy and generally full of gunk. Today I lost my voice, which always makes a big impression on the kids, especially when I try to yell and wind up squeaking instead. My son, noble lad that he is, declared this morning that he would make the supreme sacrifice and stay home from school to take care of me. To my protestations he put up a hand and said, no no, I shouldn't try to talk him out of it, he wouldn't hear of it, he was happy to do this for me. I finally prevailed upon him to not give up his educational opportunities of the day just for poor old me, and he agreed to compromise: When he got home from school, he'd take care of me. No playing with his cousin, no doing his homework, no, not a thought of it -- he would be my nursemaid. Such a selfless guy. I'll have to schedule a nice long nap so that he can get that homework done after all.

School-free zones

The political hot potato in our town these days is the location of a new junior high school, which most folks seem to acknowledge is necessary as long as it's nowhere near them. I personally wouldn't mind having it in my backyard -- better than having to schlep my kids across town for grades 8-9 -- but my backyard already has a high school in it. The original proposal was to put it in the one part of town that didn't have a school already; there's a park the school board had specifically bought with the possibility of turning it into a school in mind. But folks in that neighborhood would rather have a park than a school, and they put up enough of a complaint that the plan changed to put it on the other end of town. But that neighborhood already had a middle school and an elementary school less than a mile apart on the same busy street, and the new school would be right in between. So their backyards are full also. And now there are rival angry citizen groups yelling at the school board and city council, demanding that those other angry citizens just shut up and put up.

Our town's really not that small -- it's really a decent-size city -- but at times like this it's sure got that small-town feel. Reading through the local giveway paper, seeing names I know in the lists of petition-signers and letter-writers, hearing of plans to storm the city council, catching impassioned discussions at school events ... people take this stuff so seriously. Probably I should be taking it seriously, too. Our schools are overcrowded, to be sure, and underfunded, and that doesn't help my service-needing kids. But on the other hand, I would be really happy to see this debate turn and turn and turn, argued endlessly without resolution, until the deadline for building the new school moves beyond the point at which my kids will be affected by it. Crowded schools may be bad for my two, but brand-new schools without solid routines and time-tested teachers and administrative policies are probably worse. It's bad enough that they have to switch from elementary to middle, and then middle to high school. I'm not nuts about adding an additional transition in there, especially if it's far from my backyard.

Maybe if it becomes impossible enough to find a place to build this big new school, they'll ditch the idea of having our kids go from a K-5 school to a 6-7 school to a 8-9 school to a 10-12 school and keep the configuration as is -- K-5, 6-8 and 9-12. Three schools during early adolescence, when we most want teachers and administrators to get to know our kids and keep an eye of them, seems kind of ridiculous. Which leads me to wonder: Are any other towns trotting their kids around that much? What's the grade configuration like in your schools? Post your answer on the Child.com Education and Reading message board, or use our comments feature below. With enough information about how other districts do it, maybe I'll be able to start a petition, write a letter to the editor, and rouse a little rabble.

Cicadas don't hurt people -- people hurt people

One of my most unpleasant memories from childhood involves cicadas, those noisy, absurdly large and generally sluggish insects that seem to have no other real function than to freak people out. They certainly gave me pause when I went off for my first really long session at sleepaway camp and found the campsite infested with them. The steady, unsettling sound of their chirping was the soundtrack for camp life, and swatting aside their heavy bodies or crunching them underfoot was a major activity. Not one I'd signed up for, alas, and so although I had ambitiously begged my parents to let me stay at camp for two whole weeks, I begged with equal desperation for them to let me come home after four days. The main reason may have been that I wanted to avoid a weekend hike with only egg salad sandwiches for sustenance, but the cicadas didn't help make me feel more like roughing it. Maybe my parents had been creeped out by the bugs, too, because they let me quit the place without too many "I told you so's."

So when I saw a headline on Yahoo! News that read Pediatrician Warns Parents About Cicadas, I felt somehow vindicated -- it wasn't just the unreasonable panic of a spoiled and sheltered camp-o-phobe that sent me running; those bugs really are dangerous! But no; what the headline should have said was, "Pediatricians Warn Parents That Their Children Are Stupid." Swarms of cicadas, as we may be seeing this summer, do up the number of emergency-room calls for little ones, but it's not the bugs that are doing the damage, it's panicked reactions to the bugs -- kids running away from them and into brick walls, kids trying to swat them while riding bikes and losing control, kids trying to stab the bugs and missing and hitting a friends' arm instead, or a head with a baseball bat. It's like "The Darwin Awards: Junior Edition." Parents, tell your children: Cicadas won't hurt you. Just ignore them. Go about your business. Don't try to hit them or stab them or shoot them. But if you want to come home from camp, honey, that's okay.

Church and children with special needs

A subject popped up on the Child.com message boards today that is a constant concern of mine: the challenges of church and religious education for kids with special needs. It's something I've written about a lot on Mothers with Attitude, and something I grapple with every Sunday morning. My son's gotten a lot better at tolerating Mass, but we're still a long way from him being able to sit quietly in the sanctuary like so many other kids I see. And although we've found ways to help him participate successfully in our church's elementary religious-ed program, I don't see a real clear path through the junior high, high school and confirmation programs. Like the poster, I'm curious to find out how others are dealing with these problems. If you've got a story, please post it on the Child board. And if you'd like to read more of our story, here are some links to articles I've written on the subject:

* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/2002/08_12_16.html (scroll down to August 16)
* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/2002/03_18_22.html (scroll down to March 19)
* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/053101.html
* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/062601.html
* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/2002/04_08_12.html (scroll down to April 12)
* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/2002/04_15_19.html
* www.motherswithattitude.com/rants/2002/07_01_05.html

What, her worry?

We've had some real crash-bang-boom thunderstorms here the last couple of nights, and my daughter has not freaked out. This is a major accomplishment, because thunder has long been a major fear factor for her. She's become hysterical, crying and panicking, over much softer thunderclaps and lightening flashes in the past. But last night, when I suggested she come to my room to wait out the noise, she said she thought she could make it through on her own. And tonight, she said that just listening to music and being cozy in her bed had been enough to keep her calm, even though she was still afraid. I'm hoping this is the beginning of an overall mastery of fear and anxiety for her. That would be a major, major thing. We've been talking a lot about the "worry brain" and how it does not give reliable information, and what the "smart brain" can do to counteract those scary and undependable messages. Maybe some of it is sinking in.

Beat-Up Car Day

Today marks the annual observance of one of my son's big-three favorite events. You've got Christmas, you've got birthday, and you've got the day a tow truck brings a beat-up old car to the high school next door and dumps it on the grass by the parking lot. The purpose of this car is to show high-school kids what will happen if they drink and drive, but I doubt it has as much of an impact on those jaded teens as it does on my boy. He's beside himself with glee when that car turns up. He visits it two or three times a day. He gives it a name. He has conversations with it. He makes me take Polaroid pictures of him standing beside each side of the smashed up vehicle, and he tapes them to his wall. He waits and wonders which day he'll come home from school and find that the car has been painted over with graffiti messages like "Think, don't drink!" He worries about the car at night, and for good reason, because oftentimes a bunch of high school boys (probably drunk, ironically enough) come and flip the car over for fun. He can tell you what car has been on the lawn for every year we've lived next to the school. Last year, it was an Oldsmobile named "Fred." This year, it's a Lincoln Town Car christened "Linc." The car usually hangs out on the lawn for about a month, through prom season and on toward graduation, which beats the 12 days of Christmas for sure. You just have a happy Beat-Up Car Day, you hear?

Book club's a blast

I've been moderating a sixth-grade book club group at my daughter's school this year (though not one with my daughter in it, of course; the only thing more traumatic for her than doing extra reading would be having to interact with her mother at school), and it's given me a really good perspective on the reading habits of girls vs. boys. Mine was one of the few groups in the club that was more or less even -- three boys and two girls, out of a club that had maybe five boys in it altogether -- and if you think that sixth-grade boys who would consent to be in a book club are somehow more sensitive or poetic or in touch with their feminine side than the normal run of rowdy preadolescents, well, think again.

Let me offer but one small illustration: When I asked the kids, in a recent discussion, what they would change about the classic "Black Beauty," the girls wished there had been a fairy godmother to sprinkle magic dust on the horse and free him from bad people. The boys wished there had been more bloodshed, preferably a person or two killed every chapter. They then proceeded to act out their plot changes with maximum booms and bangs. I think they ended up with The Terminator in there.

Said one boy, somewhat admiringly, of his friend, "He watches too many cartoons!"

Indeed. The boys were openly disdainful of most of the books chosen, which were in fact picked by women and not surprisingly appealed to girls. "Ella Enchanted," for example, while certainly a spirited read, is not a big draw for male readers. Ditto "Sing Down the Moon." All the kids liked "Because of Winn-Dixie" (amazingly, since it had a female narrator and low body count), and the boys tolerated "Skinnybones," which at least was about a boy. But although "Black Beauty" was intended as a change from girly fare, it was not sufficiently action packed for the cartoon fans. Perhaps it was because the author was a woman, and chose to make her points through gentle and reasoned dialog and not, say, the business end of a .45.

Kids' blood pressure is rising, but not mine

For a while there, my daughter was in the forefront of medical research. When I saw a news story titled "U.S. Kids Suffer Blood Pressure Rises, Study Finds," I thought, well, there you go. I'd been surprised when my daughter tested with high blood pressure, and when a second measure a week later had it even higher. But apparently it's not such a surprising thing. Of course, the rise the researchers are talking about is just a trend of a few points. But why shouldn't my girl be an overacheiver in something? It's just an extreme expression of an overall national health crisis. Trendy, that's us!

Or not. She went back to the doctor today for the third, if-it's-still-high-it's-off-to-the-cardiologist test, and darned if her blood pressure wasn't nice and beautifully normal. No need for specialists. No need for additional pumping up. No need to keep worrying. And thank God for that. Don't know what problem those other kids are having, but we're way healthy here. We're all about trend-busting, as it turns out.

Hating testing

My son has standardized testing at his school this week. I hate standardized testing -- it's needlessly disruptive to his calm special-ed routine, and isn't going to tell us anything we don't already know. I'm sure the teachers hate it, too; in fact, while I was volunteering in the library today, a teacher walked by, stopped in the door and announced, apropos of nothing, "I hate standardized testing." I've gotten notes the past couple of days that my guy's behavior was lacking in the afternoon, and although there could be a number of reasons, I'm pretty quick to lay it on the testing he endured in the morning. Oh, hated testing! Is so much of it really so necessary? I'm all for accountability and everything, and keeping up standards, and making sure our students are learning things they need to know. But I've also seen sample pages of some of these tests, and I'm not sure I could pass them. I fear we've come to the point at which these tests have undergone so much editing-by-committee that they've lost any particular connection to a useful body of student knowledge. Couldn't we just go by grades, and hope for the best? Seems the only people who don't hate testing are the ones who keep foisting it upon us.

Thank a teacher

Do you have anything nice to say about your kids' teachers? Those of us who spend so much time in armor, lance in hand, battling the forces of Special Education don't often feel we can let our guard down long enough to appreciate the good stuff, and some years there's not much good stuff to appreciate -- but when you get one of those educators that gets it, it's nice now and then to say so. This week is Teacher Appreciation Week (so let me get this straight -- they get a week, and moms only get a day?), and if there's a teacher you'd like to thank, whether one of yours or one of your kids', stop by the Child message boards and show your gratitude. And all you homeschooling moms? Come by and thank yourselves!

"Friends" and family

It's been interesting to watch all the hoopla over the last episode of "Friends" (did you hear? It's going off the air!) and realize that the show started just a couple of months before we went to Russia to adopt our kids. I can barely remember those heady days when I used to actually watch what I wanted when I wanted, and had shows I considered "appointment TV." I was enthusiastic over the first few episodes of "Friends" and another new show that season, "My So-Called Life" (equally worthy of a long run but sadly getting only a very very short one), and probably felt disappointed to think I was going to have to miss episodes while on our mission to Moscow. I may even have set the VCR to tape them, but it wouldn't have mattered because we wound up being overseas for nearly a month instead of two weeks, and by the time I got home with two kids and four weeks of backlogged sleep I was more eager to watch kiddie shows that would buy me a nap -- maybe "Sesame Street" or the dreaded "Barney" -- than something intended for adults. So I never really got into "Friends," and while I've followed the toothsome sixsome's antics through magazine articles and "TV Guide" listings, I can't say I have any particular emotional investment in how they all end up. Ironic, though, isn't it, that adoption is part of the final plotline?

Spring cleaning

My big accomplishment this weekend was cleaning out my son's room -- and if you have a kid who's a packrat, you know what a challenge that can be. I'm a bit of a packrat myself, so I'm sympathetic to his desire to want to hang on to, for example, every piece of paper that passes through his hands, but when it gets to the point that you need snowshoes to make it from one end of his room to another, something's gotta give. My plan was to put each group of items -- toy cars, receipts, multi-piece activity sets, pajamas, car magazines, play food, miscellaneous unidentifiable pieces of "treasure" -- in its own box, so that end-of-day clean-up would be streamlined. And I mostly managed, although now instead of toy upon toy we have box upon box. To up the degree of difficulty, we decided to rearrange furniture as part of this particular clean-up, and though it's the same furniture in the same room, we seem to have ended up with less floor-space for piling things. At any rate, there's now a place for everything, and at least this evening, at the end of Day One of clean-room-time, everything went back to its place. Anybody want to make a bet as to how long that good habit will last? Guess low.