Pumpkins with purpose

I've never been a big one for Halloween decorations, much to my kids' chagrin. They're always lobbying for jack-o-lanterns on the steps and skeletons on the lawn, and I'm lucky if I can just manage to get their school Halloween artwork tacked up on the fridge. I'm not particularly proud of the fact that we've never carved a pumpkin together, but given the amount of mess I'm pretty sure my son could make of the seeds and such, I'd probably just go with my own parents' tradition of drawing a face on the thing with a Magic Marker and leaving it at that. This year, in a variation on that theme, my daughter has an extra credit assignment from middle school that involves turning a pumpkin in a globe, complete with latitude and longitude lines and cut-out drawings of the continents to paste on. That's a much better use for the big orange veggie than making a scary face, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm happy to see that her teachers are thinking in creative and hands-on ways. ... In other pumpkin-related news, Ken Swarner's newest Family Man column describes a far more ignoble end to put a pumpkin to than a bumpy, misshapen globe. Maybe next year, if he's serious about keeping his carving knives under of lock and key, he ought to consider turning jack-o-lantern season into an excuse for a good old-fashioned social studies lesson.

Something new

I'm trying a little something new this week: a Web log listing news articles that mention Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. There's been one or two a day so far, and all fairly interesting to me, anyway. (I'm particularly taken with the baton-twirling Washington Miss America wannabe who's taken FAS prevention as her platform.) If this is a topic that interests you, stop by every day or so and take a look. If it proves easily do-able, I'll probably switch Adoption Watch to blog format, too, since I'm the only one who ever seems to post on that message board; and possibly set up e-mail subscription lists to both. 'Cause, you know, with a full-time job and two time-and-a-half kids, I don't have enough to do.

Turn off that cough

Yahoo! Health News today features an article from KidsHealth.org on "Your Child's Cough," and not a moment too soon. I was poised to call my daughter's pediatrician today to ask about her two-week-old, shallow, barking, not-obviously-health-threatening-but highly-annoying cough, but now maybe I'll hold off. KidsHealth seems to advise that if your kid's not wheezing, feverish, or coughing up blood, you can wait a month or so before calling an M.D. And that, of course, follows my time-honored family wisdom that if you don't have a fever, you're not sick. But my daughter's already reporting that teachers are telling her she should see a doctor for that cough, and kids are teasing her for not seeing a doctor for that cough, and man, the peer pressure on a parent to run to the doctor and demand relief is fierce. If I can hold off 'til the weekend, maybe the dreaded throat tickle will disappear before I get my picture put up in the school nurse's Parent Hall of Shame.

FAS makes the big time

My husband's a big "Law & Order" fan, but I've long shied away from the show for a couple of reasons -- the twists and turns and questionable justice of courtroom scenes make me nervous; and if I want to read something ripped from the headlines, I'll pick up a newspaper. But here's an episode I may have to make an exception for: one that has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome as part of its plotline. The Buffalo News has a nice article about a teen with FAS who was selected to appear in the episode, and it will be interesting to see what spin the show puts on the issue. Since it's tentatively scheduled for the first episode of sweeps, Nov. 4, you can be sure it'll be sensational. Maybe that's a good thing for this swept-under-the-rug syndrome.

Sad news, unreported

I was talking with the mother of one of my son's special-ed classmates the other day, and she asked me, since I'm involved in a lot of things at school and am presumably up on what's going on, whether I had heard anything about a student who was in our kids' class a few years ago. All three kids were still at the same school, but as the whims of self-contained classrooms would have it, all were in different rooms this year. Apparently my son's friend had heard from this girl's sister that the girl had passed away during the summer, and we wondered if it could be true, or maybe just a tall tale facilitated by the girl being transferred to another school. It's not that unusual, after all, for a special-ed child to be at a school one year and just not there the next, with no dire circumstances attached. As the whims of self-contained classrooms would have it.

I hadn't heard anything about it -- not from my son, not from his invisible dog (who is usually my best source for school gossip), and not from any of the mainstream moms through whose circles I pass, along the loop but not quite in it, as I pursue my little on-campus volunteer opportunities, library duty, class parent meetings, book fairs. And I'd like to think that if I hadn't heard, it couldn't be. Surely the death of a 10-year-old child who'd been at the school since first grade, and who had a surviving sibling at the school as well, would arouse some sort of comment among those chattering moms, even if it had happened over the summer. Surely there would be a memo, or a memorial. The death of a fifth-grader's father the year before had prompted a phone-chain effort to make sure her classmates didn't hear it through gossip on the grapevine; wouldn't at least my son and his classmates -- if not the whole student body -- deserve similar respectful information about their friend?

Apparently not. The next time I was at the school I asked around, and indeed, the girl had died over the summer, of causes nobody was quite sure of. The special-ed teachers had taken up a collection in her memory, and the Home and School Association had donated as well, and it was sad but over. And maybe it would have been the same for any student who passed quietly away due to unspecified health reasons during the long school-free summer months. But I tend to think not. I tend to think that you can bus children with special needs into schools, and you can take them to the assemblies and put them in the chorus and mainstream them for a couple of classes and pretend that they're part of the group, but in the long run, if they're not from the neighborhood and not represented in the cliques and the clubs and the coffee klatches and the committees, in some meaningful way they don't really exist.

It's not that unusual, after all, for a special-ed child to be at a school one year and just not there the next.

Survive this

An IEP List for a day off from school, on which I should be spending more time playing with my kids and less time writing about them.

1. I'm all for hands-on science, and anything that gets kids excited about art is a good thing, but really, I think Maggot Art may be going a little too far. We had a maggot problem in our garage a month or so ago, which a week later became a housefly problem of near-Biblical proportions, and I for one would not be that comfortable with hanging colorful maggot trails on my fridge.

2. Since I ranted a bit last week about my similar lack of comfort with my daughter's school's sex-ed video (not sure whether they're using the "birth control is for marriage" or "birth control is for lovers" version, but as a Catholic I'm not particularly comfortable with either one), my attention was immediately grabbed by an article in our local paper on abstinence-only education in a nearby urban school district. Apparently being realistic there has resulted in more teen mothers than they can handle, and so they're going to try being unrealistic for a while. Is it unrealistic for me to hope it spreads to the suburbs before my girl hits Grade 8?

3. While it doesn't specifically mention contraceptive education, the new Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Parenting does offer parents a quick spiel on the birds and the bees. I flipped through this little manual in the bookstore the other day and found it to be surprisingly level-headed for what is basically a humor book, offering sound advice on such tricky topics as disciplining an invisible friend, ridding a bedroom of monsters and bribing for good behavior. It's a pretty good gift for new parents, and more than a few old parents, too.

Social studies

I took my son with me yesterday to run some errands, and at one point we were walking down the sidewalk and passed an older gentleman coming the other way. My boy smiled broadly and said, "Hello, old man!" The man, to his credit, said "hello" back without much chagrin, and I giggled and apologized and loudly told my young man that he'd been rude. He proposed to say, "Hello, man!" in the future, and I suggested, "Hello, sir," and figured the possibility of him remembering that the next time the greeting impulse struck was slight.

We got back in the car and went to our next stop, which was my doctor's office to pick up a referral. My doctor happened to be between appointments and came out to chat, and having never met my son was introduced and said hello. And since he has gray hair, I was bracing myself for another "Hello, old man!" But my guy said "Hello," then paused for a moment, and actually came up with "sir!" The soul of politeness. I was feeling pretty proud of his capacity to master normal civility, but then he had to go and add, as he will, "You're the best man in the whole wide world!" So now we have to work on getting that pendulum to sit squarely between being rude and being absurdly friendly. But one lesson a day's not bad.

Thinking unrealistically

After squirming through a jokey depiction of sex education in school while watching "8 Simple Rules" with my daughter the other night, I got a little look at the real thing while working in her school's library yesterday. Among the videos I was to enter into the library's catalog was one called "Abstinence First!" — and despite the title, the video and its accompanying materials were mostly about alternatives to abstinence, offering information on a variety of birth control options for teens.

The librarian explained that the video had been pulled from the shelf because someone had objected to its depiction of how to put on a condom, and that after being edited for increased discretion it was now once again ready for check-out, albeit labeled FOR 8TH GRADE USE ONLY. So apparently the 11- and 12-year-olds can be spared the contraceptive demos for the moment. And I have a while before my personal 13-year-old sixth-grader will be bringing home questions.

I felt some small measure of relief in that — but should I? As the librarian explained, she doesn't approve of teens and pre-teens having sex, but "realistically, they're going to do it anyway, and they need this information." I huffed and mumbled something about wanting my kids to get that information from me and not from a video called "Abstinence First!" (and apparently subtitled, "And Then, Let's Get It On!"), and she just kept saying yes, but, realistically, the things kids are doing today, and realistically, the problems they're having, and realistically, the information they need to get. And realistically, I felt myself getting older and grayer and more fuddy-duddy-ish with every word she said, and more like an evangelical, right-wing, "take sex education out of the classroom and put prayer back in" zealot than I ever imagined I could.

There was a time — I can still remember it — when I would have applauded this "realistic" approach to giving children the information they needed to navigate the hormone-plagued teen years in a responsible, disease-free and pregnancy-free manner, and scoffed at anyone who unrealistically suggested that these frisky young things be taught to "just say no" to sex. Of course, this was before it was the sex education of my own personal child we were talking about. It's okay, I suppose, for all those other kids to be instructed about condom usage and Pill popping; but the only message I want my daughter to be getting is Thou Shalt Not.

And there will be those who will shake their heads and smile condescendingly and tell me I'm just not being realistic. They will have statistics about sex ed reducing rates of STDs and teen pregnancy, and good for them. But they'll never convince me that telling kids "We think you should abstain, but realistically, we know you won't, so here's lots of info about safe sex" doesn't make them think that teen sex is okay — even put a little pressure on to do this thing that realistically, everybody is expecting. Can't we ever just be black and white about this? I mean, realistically, a lot of kids are going to try drugs, but we don't set up programs in the schools to say, "We think you should just say no, but realistically, we know you'll try them, so here's the right way to shoot up."

But then, you know, I'm a parent. I gave up being realistic a long time ago.

Whatever happened to the "family hour"?

I was watching "8 Simple Rules..." with my daughter tonight, and one of the plotlines involved a dad taking his teen daughter to a foreign-language film only to sit mortified as a graphic sex scene unspooled. And I know just how that dad felt: Although we at home just heard the sound effects of the film tryst, it was still pretty awkward sitting through it with my 13-year-old. The episode's other plot involved the mom having to teach sex education in the other daughter's class, and hoo-boy, didn't that just open the door to lots of jokes about body parts and "urges."

My girl, thankfully, is still at the "ew, gross" stage when it comes to sex, and only a few times turned to ask me if the characters were talking about doing that thing, but man, for an 8 p.m. sitcom ... I hate to be a fuddy-duddy and mourn the demise of the "family hour," but do family shows have to be quite so risqué? I mean, it's not like I'm letting my kid watch "Sex in the City" and then complaining about them doing "that thing." Maybe I'm wrong, and nobody expects kids to be watching "8 Simple Rules..." -- or maybe everybody just expects kids to find sex jokes funny. But I'd sure be a lot happier if plotlines stayed out of the bedroom until my kids were safely sleeping in theirs.

Insecure security

I'm hearing a lot more talk at my kids' schools this year about heightened security and the screening of parent volunteers to guard against potential abuse of our little ones. And that's mostly all it is -- talk. At one school, my "interview" with an administrator prior to acceptance as a library volunteer amounted to a quick friendly chat over a book-fair table, and at the other the principal scanned a room of volunteers, ascertained that he knew us all, and signed off. Whereas teachers and other staff people at both schools have been required to wear photo ID at all times since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, volunteers still wander the halls undocumented -- although at my daughter's school, the librarian did whip us up some nice little non-photo nametags so we won't feel left out.

It appears that appearing to be doing something about security is more important to our school administrators at this point than actually doing something about it, and maybe that should be worrying me. Maybe I should be questioning the school board and attending seminars on abuse prevention and advocating for more rigorous protocols. Certainly we've heard enough stories lately about adults using positions of trust and proximity to harm children, and about terrorists blending in to wreak havoc. And while it's hard to imagine a parent planting a bomb at a book fair or fondling a child behind a library bookcase, unimaginable things have certainly happened before. At the same time, there's one thing I can imagine all too well: The day parents have to drive half an hour and pay $75 to be fingerprinted before volunteering, as was one school-board proposal this year, is the day most home-school activities grind to a halt.

Some of those activities might be banned as part of the look-safer agenda, anyway. It's happened at our church already, where youth group overnights are now a thing of the past. I wasn't looking forward to sending my kid to those overnights, you can be sure, but I'm still not quite so old that I can't remember how fun they sometimes were when I was their age. Lots of youth activities are going to get harder and harder to justify from a risk management perspective, and there may be a feeling that, since we can all agree that no price is too high to pay for our children's safety and that prevention is our primary focus, cutting losses and narrowing opportunities is a good and prudent course. But somehow, I can't help but feel that this is the adult equivalent of punishing the whole class just because a couple of kids made trouble.

Hands-on dads and wanna-be moms

An IEP List of things to read, hear and see:

1. New on Mothers with Attitude: Julie Donner Andersen celebrates the new, hands-on dad in her "Therapeutic Laughing" column, and one of those very dads, Ken Swarner, talks about the way experienced parents like to torture newbies in this week's "Family Man" column.

2. National Public Radio's series on Mental Illness in Children is available for listening on the Web.

3. I've been on the lookout for reviews of "Casa de Los Babys," John Sayles' new film about six prospective adoptive moms waiting for their babies-to-be in a South American country. Here's one from the New York Times, another from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office of Film and Broadcasting, and another from AP. If you've seen this film, stop by Adoption Watch and post your own review.

Back again

Back-to-School Night #2 is tonight, at my son's elementary school. It seems way too late in the school year to be going through this — I've already met with the teacher and worked through a few mini-crises with her, and I've already done enough volunteer work in the library to have spoken informally with most of the folks working with my son — but I guess it's always good to get the official welcome anyway. It's always sad to see how very few parents bother to show up for the big night, especially in special-ed classrooms; last year, we pretty much had a one-on-one conference with my son's teacher. Compared to the year when the classroom was packed with parents so irate that the teacher ended up in tears, that was something of a relief, I guess. But since I live for nights like this — anything to get in the building and talk to folks about my kid — it's hard to understand how parents could stay home, or leave early. They usually have to have the janitor sweep me out at the end of the night with the last of the bake-sale crumbs.

More bloggin' moms

An IEP List to fill all that spare time you have on weekends (yeah, right):

1. A couple of Mom Blogs have come to my attention this week. I found out about "Mom in the Mirror" because it started rising fast on the list of sites who referred visitors to "Mothers with Attitude," and I'm thankful to have my link on such a nicely done and, apparently, well-visited site. Thanks, Julie. Meanwhile, "Parenting Isn't Pretty" reader Tammy Jata wrote to tell me she's started a blog of her own, Dishpan Dribble — and although I strongly and passionately disagree with her views on headlice, I'll go ahead and refer y'all there anyway. I ticked off a few people when I first started Weblogging, too.

2. It's not really a "Dad Blog," but Ken Swarner's "Family Man" column on "Mothers with Attitude" has a new entry, this one a letter from his child's fifth-grade teacher suggesting an ... exciting year ahead.

3. Wonder how your school or your neighborhood measures up? Get lots of nosy statistics from Great Schools.net and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's Geocoding System.

4. There's an excellent documentary on older kids with FAS that can be watched on the Web on the Knowledge Network site. Good stuff.

5. If you subscribe to People or Child magazines, or ever make it out to a newstand to buy them, look for these articles: in People, on the very large family of Mary-Jo Jackson, whose recommendations on Christmas traditions you can read here on "Mothers with Attitude"; and in Child, on being an effective advocate for your kids, which, as a "Parenting Isn't Pretty" reader pointed out, is right up my alley. (Thanks, Christine.)

6. Reader Barbara Bonner's very nice review of "Mothers with Attitude" is finally appearing on our Alexa listing. (Thanks, Barbara.) If anybody else wants to add to it, that would be very nice indeed. The statistics on this listing are still kind of funky — my ranking in the past month has gone from the 80,000s to the 700,000s and back to the 80,000s, and I think my original ranking in the low 2,000,000s was probably the most accurate — but it's nice to pretend.

Officially back to school

Alright, maybe sixth grade isn't so hard. We went to our daughter's back-to-school night last night, and now that I've sat in her classrooms and met her teachers and heard about the work, I'm feeling somewhat less hysterical. Everyone seems to feel she's doing well, the inclusion teachers seem clear as to what their job is, and the questions from the other parents seemed to indicate that they were as clueless or more clueless than I was -- a good sign that my daughter's inability to give me information about what's going on was a sixth-grade thing, not a language-processing thing. When we left (with my husband a little embarrassed by how brazenly I had buttonholed anybody who had anything to do with our girl), I was almost feeling that maybe I didn't have to call meetings to talk with these people about my girl's particular needs. I'm pretty sure that feeling will pass.

And as if on cue, true to my word that any crisis with my son would have to wait until the crisis with his sister had passed, on the very day I woke up feeling good about her school situation, he had his first less-than-satisfactory behavior chart. Hate to think it's his turn now. Next Tuesday is his back-to-school night, and I hope it's as upbeat as the other one.

Why does sixth grade have to be so hard?

Every time I think my daughter has finally gotten this middle school thing down -- every time I'm lulled by the fact that she hasn't cried in a day or two and she's given me a smile and said I was right and it was no big deal -- something happens to put me on guard once more. This morning, she threw up again right before it was time to leave, and again showed no other signs of illness or flu, just of high anxiety. And again, I loaded her in the car right afterwards and delivered to school her anyway. She swore there was nothing really wrong, no teasing or dreadfully hard work or mean teachers or threatened consequences. She doesn't even know why she's feeling so nervous. But obviously, she is. And although I'm pretty sure I'm doing the right thing, that being overprotective and shielding her from all possibility of unpleasantness wouldn't be doing her any favors in the long run, it still breaks my heart.

The funny thing is, I'm spending all this time counseling her to stop worrying about everything and to just take every day as it comes and deal with problems when they occur and not before, and it's impossible for me to follow that advice myself, for either of my kids. I've always assumed that I inherited some sort of worry gene, since my mother was a world-class worrier who believed that if you could think of every possible bad thing that could happen and stew about it in advance, nothing bad would happen in actual fact. I figured I was genetically predisposed to this sort of thing, and that my daughter -- coming from different and hopefully less obsessive genetic stock -- would be immune; but now that I see her falling into the same stomach-churning patterns, I wonder if it's really more a matter of nurture than nature. Which means, as usual, it's all my fault. I'll be worrying on that one a while, you can bet.

Out of the swim

The permission slip came home today for my son's school swimming lessons. They don't start for his class until December, but I'm being asked now to give the go-ahead. And I hate to tell him no, or to make decisions that set him apart as even more different. Hate, too, the thought of where they're going to find to stash him while the rest of his class buses it to the pool. But I just can't get past the conviction that he is not yet ready to be unsupervised in a locker room. His IEP specifies a one-on-one aide because, among other things, he needs constant supervision; removing that support for what will undoubtedly be the most stressful and overstimulating part of his week seems foolhardy at best. So I think I'll just have to be the big mean overprotective mom. A few things that are helping me do what needs to be done: a couple of articles by Theresa Kellerman on the FAS Community Resource Center, one on fetal alcohol affected kids' need for an external brain and another on "FAS and Inappropriate Sexual Behavior"; and an article by frequent reader Stephanie Mullins on the cost to her family of going along with an optimistic "try it and see how it does" policy. In this case, I don't think I need to try it to see.

On a happier note, I had my first volunteer experience at my daughter's middle school today, and it was interesting to settle in and take a look around. For one thing, I'm not going to be concerned anymore about following the letter of the dress code. I feel silly making my daughter give up her nice roomy T-shirts when so many kids are breaking the rules the other way and wearing tight cleavage-bearing tank tops. And never mind the kids -- look what the teachers are wearing. I'm pretty sure a couple of those cute young instructors were wearing skirts whose hems did not extend past their fingertips. I hope when they sit, they do it behind a desk.

Clifford, RIP

Well, here's a really sad way to start the day -- with the news that John Ritter collapsed on the set of his sitcom and died of an undiagnosed heart ailment. Ritter is best-known, of course, as the star of the old "Three's Company" and the new "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter," but in our house he was best-loved as the voice of Clifford, the Big Red Dog on PBS. My daughter and I did enjoy watching "8 Simple Rules" together last season, and whether that show continues without its dad or goes out of production, I'm going to have some explaining to do -- and when Clifford's voice changes, too. I think this may actually be my kids' first celebrity death. Not a happy landmark.

What our schools need now is ... butter?

Today's IEP List:

1. What's the biggest issue facing our schools today? Overcrowded buildings? Funding for special education? Test scores? Curriculum overhauls? Pennsylvania's secretary of agriculture thinks it's what students are spreading on their bread. On behalf of the state's dairy farmers, he's advocating a switch back to butter from margarine in the federal school lunch program, while a nutritionist meekly declares that really, if students would just pour olive oil on their food instead, they'd be ever so much healthier. Good to know this crucial question is getting the legislative attention it deserves.

2. Wonder why autism is more prevalent in males than females? This report fingers a faulty gene on the X chromosome that's linked to the inability to perceive fear, and presumed to be a factor in autism; since males only have one X chromosome, the mutation is more significant for them.

3. If your children are still asking questions or feeling anxiety about 9/11, ParentStages.com has some good stories about how the day has affected kids and how to discuss it as a family.

4. And if you want to feel about 108 years old, check out the Beloit College Mindset List, a pop-culture profile of kids starting college today. Or just talk to my daughter, who regularly asks me questions that indicate she believes I was born in the Stone Age. Some days, I feel like she's right.

High anxiety

I'm having a rocky second week of school here — trying to calm my daughter down about middle school while at the same time trying to keep myself from jumping onto every possible problem with guns blazing and blood pressure skyrocketing. I think I've already established a reputation at two schools as an overreacting, overprotective mama, and the year's barely a week old. We'll all settle in.

My son seems to be doing that already, as a matter of fact. I had a meeting with his teacher, who shows every sign of being as wonderful as I've heard, and she reports that he's having no problems in class. The meeting was entirely heartening ... until we started talking about the swimming class that all 5th graders go to, and how there will be no aide or teacher with him in the locker room because there are no male aides or teachers and no male lifeguards at the pool, and I started going on and on about what a bad idea it is to leave him unsupervised in a room with a lot of boys, and banging locker doors, and the stress of getting dressed, and the overstimulation of having been in the water, and no adult guidance or adult witnesses, and so many more things that make the red lights go off in my head. The teacher and the child study team leader and the behaviorist were of the "try it once and see what happens" opinion -- but we're talking about a kid with FAE here, and once can be enough for major trouble. Or maybe I'm just hysterical. At any rate, the class isn't until December (traditionally the most stressful time of the school year for him, inconveniently enough), so I have time to calm myself down and plead my case again. Calm myself down. Yeah, I can do that. Maybe. Next week.

For a different kind of anxiety attack, check the latest installment of Ken Swarner's "Family Man" column on Mothers with Attitude, as he tells his kids to Just Say No to drugs, and just says "never mind" when they ask too many questions.

The IEP List: In the news

Recent news items of interest to Involved, Educated Parents:

1. Dr. Koop addresses one of the less heralded risks of international adoption: bringing an infectious disease into the family along with a new child.

2. Bad news: A judge says we can't blame McDonald's for making us fat anymore.

3. KidsHealth.org has some interesting special-needs-related articles — "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy May Counteract Psychological Symptoms Caused by Exposure to Violence," "Earlier Rather Than Later Ear Tube Insertion May Not Improve Long-Term Cognitive Development," "Mainstreaming in Classrooms" — as well as one on "Getting Involved at Your Child's School." I need one on "What to Do When Everybody at Your Child's School Wishes You Were Less Involved, and Would Just Go Away and Stop Bugging Them."

4. Think laser eye surgery would reduce your kid's chance of having his glasses broken on the baseball field, or of being branded "four eyes"? You've probably got a while to wait. Although this HealthDay headline — "LASIK for Kids: An Option Whose Time May Be Near" — appears to hold promise for Coke-bottle-lensed children everywhere, the article explains that it's only being used on kids who can't be helped by ordinary means, and that its use as a cosmetic measure for goggled youngsters isn't really that near at all. So they can go back to begging you for contact lenses now.