MARCH 25, 2002
Stayed up (yawn) until all hours (yawn) watching the Oscars last night, and feeling a little nostalgic for my younger days -- pre-kids, pre-move to the East Coast -- when Oscar evening was such a big deal for me. Back when I could have a big party because the show didn't last until, well, all hours. Back when I could clear a whole evening to do nothing but watch TV. Back when I still went to the movies. I used to get a bunch of friends together every year, and we'd dress up to dress down the stars and their wardrobes. Ah, those were the days.
This year, I watched the first hour or so of the ceremony with my daughter, doing flashcards with her during the commercials and hitting the "mute" button during boring speeches and reading segments from her literature book. After she went off to sleep, I struggled hard not to do the same. I'd at least seen one movie that was up for an award -- "Kate & Leopold," up for Sting's best song -- but other than that, watching the little scenes that played with each nomination is about as close as I'll get to any of these flicks. And that's okay; normally, my kids are plenty entertaining enough to make me forget that I'm not getting my full ration of theater seats and popcorn. But on nights like last night, I can't help feeling nostalgic anyway. Or falling asleep, either.
+ + +
MARCH 26, 2002
My son's teacher made a point of telling me today, when I picked him up, that he is now standing up straight, with his head high, when he walks down the school hallways. This is in contrast to his former hall-walking posture, which was bent over, with his head down. That posture didn't bother me so much because I knew he was getting some sensory integration benefits from it. But it bothered the folks at school. It's bothered them for years. And so they have made a big project out of it, and now they're successful. People have been commenting, she said, as he walks by their classroom, how much better he's walking. Recognition from the community for improving one's behavior is good, surely, even if the improvement is otherwise pretty meaningless.
But that's just me. I would have thought there were more important goals to tackle with such consistency and enthusiasm, but maybe not. When his speech therapist talked proudly about how she kept making him go back to the classroom and do it again until he walked straight and tall for her, all I could think of was, "You're spending your speech therapy time on this?" But I try to keep in mind that I'm not there at the school, and I don't entirely understand what goes on there, and I have to trust educators who I believe are good at what they do and sincere in their desire to help my son. So he's standing up straight now. That's great. It's good for him, to be showing some self-control. It's good for the school, to have him not thumping through the hallways not quite looking where he's going. And it's good for me, because now I can imagine everybody's attention finally turning toward something else.
+ + +
MARCH 27, 2002
Any parent who's had plans ruined by a child's illness has to be at least a little heartwarmed by the news reports coming out about Will Smith's mysterious disappearance from the Oscar ceremonies Sunday night. He and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, were there at the start of the ceremony, when Whoopi Goldberg made a joke about them sitting next to Maggie Smith. But by the time his big moment came -- the category for which he was nominated, Best Actor -- Mr. Smith was nowhere to be found.
What happened? Was he in the bathroom? At the bar? Brawling backstage? As it turns out, security had informed the couple that their 1.5-year-old daughter had been taken to the hospital with a high fever and ear infection, and they had rushed off to be with her. Now, I like the idea of celebs being sufficiently wrapped up in their kids that they'd flee the entertainment industry's biggest night to be with their baby. But what I like even more is the image of Jada Pinkett rushing into the ER in that ball gown she was wearing. Surely they didn't stop to change? I've been caught on emergency runs in ratty sweatclothes I didn't expect anybody to see me in, but never formalwear. Will Smith may have lost the Oscar to Denzel Washington, but he was a lock for Best Dressed Dad at the hospital.
+ + +
MARCH 28, 2002
Another milestone for my son (this seems to be the season for them) -- as of his pediatrician visit yesterday, and at the ripe old age of 9, he is now, finally, for the first time, officially on the height and weight charts. He's been off the bottom of them for so long, following the curve but not getting any closer to it. But now, big boy that he is, he's at about the fifth percentile for height and the seventh percentile for weight. Woo-hoo! For a little guy with FAE who we thought would always be below the bottom, this is a red-letter day.
I always said that if he ever hit the charts, I'd have a party. Next month, in another milestone event, he's making his first Holy Communion, so maybe we'll make the party for that a dual spiritual/physical growth celebration. Proud accomplishments, both. But what I really want to know about his newfound size is: If he's now taller than five percent of 9-year-olds, and heavier than seven, does this mean I'll now be able to buy pants that fit him? Talk about dreams coming true.
+ + +
MARCH 29, 2002
As soon as the couple with the son who had been nearly drowned in the bathtub and the doctor-who's-not-that-kind-of-doctor in tow made it to an examining room on "ER" last night, I knew what was going on. "They were doing some sort of rebirthing exercise with the kid," I told my husband. And then, "And he's going to turn out to have been adopted from eastern Europe." And I could have added, knowing the way parenting storylines have been going on this show lately, "And they're going to do a gloss on RAD that's going to make the parents look like irresponsible twits." I was right on all three counts.
I've complained before about how black and white this show has gotten about medical issues involving children; didn't they used to be more interested in shades of gray? I know George Clooney's Dr. Ross used to get on his high horse with parents quite a lot, but it seems he got knocked off a time or two, too. But no more. The doctor is always right, and the parents are always ridiculous and irresponsible. And since the show is done from the doctors' point of view, I guess that's the way it should be -- I know I'm not the only parent of a child with special needs who's pretty sure the doctors feel they're always right, and I'm ridiculous and irresponsible.
But still, with the audience they have and the interest in telling good stories, couldn't they at least put a responsible argument in the parents' mouths before condeming them? Last night, when Peter Scolari as the dad (and right there, you lose any chance of dramatic gravitas) started twitting about how they adopted Victor in Prague and it was just taking him so darn long to bond and it was affecting their marriage and this therapist had a lot of success, I wanted to scream. Post-institutionalized children have real problems that real families struggle with every day; kids with attatchment disorders show far more severe and frightening and complex behavior than just not bonding fast enough for a parent's taste. And the lack of respect, support and recognition these families receive from more traditional medical professionals has got to be a contributing factor as to why practitioners of extreme therapies -- legitimate or no -- come to weild such power. Physicians, examine yourselves.
Monday, March 25, 2002
Monday, March 18, 2002
March 18-22, 2002
MARCH 18, 2002
It's Monday again, and again I'm going to urge you to watch "Once and Again." The show airs tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC. Last week, it got a good ratings bump and some good publicity from a storyline that involved two teen-age girls kissing. The episode even got pulled by an affiliate in Virginia, and as we all know you can't buy that kind of press. Interesting that the great outrage seemed to center around the teen lesbian storyline and not the other major plot thread of the episode, which involved a teen-age girl's intense relationship with her English teacher, which almost but not quite ended with a kiss between the two. I guess as long as the teacher's a guy, that's okay.
Tonight, as is this show's often frustrating habit, those plots will be on the back burner, if they're mentioned at all, and completely different characters will be in the spotlight. This week, it's Judy, sister of Sela Ward's character; her off-again, on-again boyfriend, Sam; and Sam's son, who has some sort of non-specified neurological/psychological/behavioral impairment. On the only other episode he's been on, his father said only that they'd been to lots of doctors and tried lots of medications, and nothing works. Whether this means that the writers are lazy and haven't researched these problems, or the father is so self-absorbed he's taken in only enough information about his son's challenges to make him feel sorry for himself, remains to be seen. However, these writers have handled storylines on anorexia and schizophrenia with impressive accuracy and verisimilitude, and this character has never shown himself to be anything other than a self-centered lout, so I'm thinking it's the latter. Tune in tonight to see where they're going with this kid.
+ + +
MARCH 19, 2002
On Sunday, I did something I've been imagining myself doing for years: I chewed out somebody who shushed my son in church.
All those times people would give us the look -- the "why can't you control that child" look, the "what a bad boy you are" look -- I would dream of them coming over after services to reprimand us and me going into all the reasons my son can't be quiet and all the reasons they should be ashamed to call themselves Christians. Oh, I've run through those delicious conversations in my head again and again. But nobody ever actually said anything. And neither, of course, did I.
But this past Sunday... To start out, I was sick, dragging myself to Mass with about my last ounce of energy. For another, I was on my own; although we almost always attend church as a family, this weekend work schedules and illness schedules had made it most expedient for me to take my son to our church in the morning and my husband to take our daughter to another, less-kid-friendly church in the evening. I figured we'd sit in the back, in the "cry room," so my coughing and his acting up would disturb no one. When we arrived, there was no one in the room but one woman, sans children. We picked a pew, my son said something to me, and the woman turned around and gave him a stern "Shush!"
Blame it on the codein cough syrup, but I gave her what for.
I told her that this room is specifically for children who can't stay quiet. She walked over and said, sternly, "It's for crying babies, not for little boys who want to talk." And I started babbling. I don't remember what I said, but it included stating that we come back here specifically so he could make noise without bothering anybody, and what was she doing there, anyway? She said defiantly that she was sick. And I said that I was sick, too, and that this child (putting my hand on my son's head) had neurological impairments that made it hard for him to stay quiet and that's why we sit back there and just let me shush him and leave us alone and mind your own business and whatever all else. She went back to her seat, and my son, my sweet boy, started stroking my face and smiling because he knew I was upset.
And maybe that tipped this gal off, because she came back over to explain why she had taken it upon herself to shush in the first place and admonish me so: She thought I was a boy, too. She thought we were two boys. And so she was teaching us a lesson about being quiet in church. I admitted to being a mom, and not a boy; and she admitted to being kukoo, and that was that.
I don't know what I feel worse about, here: getting into a quarrel with a fellow churchgoer during Mass, or being mistaken -- a 42-year-old mother of two -- for a boy. At least now I know that, if I ever get those brochures printed up that explain all the reasons why my son behaves the way he does, I'll have to add at the end: "And by the way, the person giving this to you is his MOTHER."
+ + +
MARCH 20, 2002
And once again, we have famous adopters in the news. Newlyweds Liza Minelli and David Gest have proclaimed their desire to adopt four children, "of all races." And, well, golly, good for them. Raises the profile of adoption, you know. Nice for kids to get homes. Nice especially for kids "of all races." Good for celebs to share their bounty. Good, good, good.
And yet... ack! I'm trying to be a person of good will unto all prospective adoptive parents, but... geez, have you seen these two? They look like they just escaped from Madame Tussaud's. She's 56, on her fourth marriage; he's 48, and marrying for the first time. How easily do you suppose most regular folks with her particular history would be able to score a homestudy? And hey -- Michael Jackson was their best man. Suppose they'll ask him to write one of their letters of reference?
But really, really, you never know about these things, it will probably be perfectly okay, I'm sure they're upstanding and good-hearted people, and adoption is good, it's good for adoption to be in the news as something fabulous people do, it's good for kids to get homes, it's good, good, good. Good?
+ + +
MARCH 21, 2002
Today is my son’s ninth birthday. It’s hard to believe he’s 9 -- partially because he’s still such a little peanut, 45 pounds and 4 feet tall. If you saw him a store, and he asked you for your keys and proceeded to tell you what kind of car you have, you’d take him maybe for a precocious kindergartner. You’d be shocked to hear he’s 9. But 9 he is, and todays’ the day.
It’s also hard to believe he’s 9 because I’m a mom, and “Sunrise, Sunset” automatically plays in my head on my children’s birthdays, and I remember how we brought him home when he was 21 months old, not walking or talking, thinking the metal piece that went back and forth on top of a swing in his orphanage room was the most fascinating thing in the world. To say he’s come a long way is like saying cars have gotten a little fancier since the Model T.
Now, I work at the library at my kids’ school, and I see what 9-year-olds look and act like, and I know my boy’s not there. But when I think about how much he’s learned and grown and shown in the past seven years, and what a delightful fellow he is, I gotta tell you, I think he’s about the most wonderful 9-year-old there is.
Happy birthday to him.
+ + +
MARCH 22, 2002
My daughter, as I may have mentioned, is a Disney Channel fanatic. She'd watch it from morning to bedtime, and, come to think of it, has on a couple of vacation occasions. She begs to do her homework in front of "Even Stevens" and reruns of "Boy Meets World" (and speaking of the latter show, who knew there were so very many many many episodes to re-run? I've watched Corey and Topanga go from grade-schoolers to newlyweds back to grade-schoolers again the next day. It's sort of surreal to pass through the TV room and see what age they are on any given afternoon.)
She of course HAS to watch the Disney movies -- HAS to, because the desperate need has been programmed into her brain by the endless commercials the channel runs pumping its product. We've watched the movie where "Malcolm in the Middle" is a sick kid who only wants to race in a soapbox derby. We've watched the movies about the boy who finds out he's a leprechaun and the boy who finds out he's a mermaid and the girl who finds out her stepsister is an alien. We've watched the one about the twin basketball stars played by non-twins and the one that's like a junior-high "Private Benjamin." My desire to not even see these films once is thwarted by the fact that they are on pretty much every five minutes.
Next month, though, there's one I might actually want her to watch. Called "Tru Confessions," it's about the way a young girl comes to terms with having a developmentally disabled brother. Maybe it will give my girl some insight into her own brother and why he does the things he does. At the very least, it stars Mare Winningham as the mom, so there will be at least somebody on screen who I can watch without wincing. At any rate, since I haven't yet seen five million commercials for this one, here's a description from a Disney Channel press release for those who might be interested:
"Tru Confessions tells the story of Trudy "Tru" Walker (Clara Bryant of Disney Channel's "Under Wraps"), a precocious teenager who dreams of becoming an investigative reporter. When a local public access station has a "Win Your Own TV Show" contest, Tru jumps at the chance to show her stuff by putting together a video documentary about her twin brother, Eddie (Shia LaBeouf of Disney Channel's "Even Stevens"). After Eddie was deprived of oxygen in the womb, he was left developmentally disabled. Although she loves her brother dearly, Tru is constantly guilty that she is healthy and growing up normally while Eddie is not. However, she has no one with whom to discuss her feelings; her father has become a workaholic to keep from having to face his son's disabilities, and Tru doesn't feel as though she can open up to her mother (Mare Winningham). The documentary, then, becomes a perfect outlet for Tru to express herself. Through the process of making her film, Tru comes to appreciate Eddie for who he is and to understand that his situation is not her fault. Further, Tru's film helps her father come to terms with his son's disabilities and, ultimately, becomes the instrument that brings the family closer together."
Monday, March 11, 2002
March 11-15, 2002
MARCH 11, 2002
Big news for our family last week: My son, who will be nine next week, learned how to tie his shoes! At least, I think he did. His teacher said so. She came rushing into the library where I was working on Wednesday to tell me that he paid attention for a very long time and tied a bow a bunch of times and what an exciting thing that is. I was excited, too, but could I get him to show me his new skill at home? No way. Not even the promise of Scooby Doo lace-up sneakers could get him to give me a demonstration.
And that's okay. We've been here before. With many of his major milestones -- walking, talking, potty training -- he's refused to perform until he could do it perfectly. So I'll let him practice and practice with the teacher, get all those frustrations out, in the knowledge that eventually, he'll tie me some bows in person. Sometime, I hope, before he turns ten. Or his feet get too big for Scooby shoes.
+ + +
MARCH 12, 2002
I didn't set out to watch the "9/11" documentary on CBS Sunday night, but I was flipping through channels and stopped there for a moment and got hooked. There was something mesmerizing about the "you are there" style of the thing, waiting for the bad stuff you knew was going to happen to happen. It was a striking piece of filmmaking in many ways, but I'm a little ashamed to say that the thing that struck me the most -- more than the depictions of disaster, more than the heroic actions of firefighters -- was the uncensored use of the "F" word on prime-time network TV. The camera was running through scenes of real-life trauma and tragedy and reunion and firefighters talked the way firefighters undoubtedly talk, the way any of us might talk in such an unimaginable situation, and CBS showed it all, bleep-free.
As they should have, certainly. Certainly the death and destruction of that day were far more obscene than any language could be, and there was no bleeping that. It didn't seem exploitive or intentionally boundary-breaking, just entirely incidental to the scenes being filmed. And yet, there was something jarring about it. Intentionally or not, a boundary was broken. You gotta believe TV writers and producers all over Hollywood are going to be eying the phenomenal ratings the documentary garnered and using them as proof that if you're telling a sufficiently dramatic story, people don't mind about bad language. I'd be surprised if that "NYPD Blue" squad room doesn't start sounding like that "9/11" firehouse any old episode now.
What I want to know is, how long until Lizzie McGuire and SpongeBob SquarePants start spouting undeleted expletives? As long as the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon hold out, my kids' ears will be safe.
+ + +
MARCH 13, 2002
Well, add two more names to the list of celebrity adoptive parents. Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton have made their twosome a threesome with the addition of seven-and-a-half-month-old Maddox, who hails from Cambodia. According to a report on Yahoo News, the couple met their future son while visiting a Cambodian orphanage in November, underwent all that nasty paperwork over the course of four months and officially took custody of him on Sunday in Africa, where the new mom is working on a movie. They plan to raise the child both in the U.S. and in Cambodia, where they are shopping for property.
Now part of me feels all snarky when I read news like this. Celeb couple swoops in, picks a baby, flies through paperwork and has the kid wrapped and delivered to the locale of their choice. And how do people with such carefully cultivated reputations for bizarre behavior pass a homestudy, anyway? But I'm trying to keep a positive outlook in the New Year, and not speak negatively of people, so instead I'll reflect that it's always nice to see a positive adoption story. It's always good when a child finds a home. Even if celeb adoptions raise eyebrows, they do give adoption a certain cachet, and that can't be bad. And you know, if there's ever been a Mother with Attitude, it's going to be Angelina Jolie.
So I'm taking deep breaths, and wishing the new family nothing but happiness in their new homes. But hey, mom and dad? Wait for a while before giving the kid a tattoo, okay?
+ + +
MARCH 14, 2002
I've always been a little concerned about my daughter's taste in TV. And no, I don't mean the Disney channel sit-coms she spaces out in front of in the evenings; those are at least age appropriate. I'm talking about the fact that, at age 11 and in 4th grade, she's perfectly happy watching "Barney" after school, or taking in the entire baby-friendly Nick Jr. line-up on a day off from class. Should she really be able to sit through "Bob the Builder" and "Oswald" at her advanced age? It doesn't seem right, somehow, and sometimes I've felt a little embarrassed for her.
And yet... I have to admit, there are times when I see some value to her regressive viewing habits. Last night, for example, she had to memorize the order of the planets in our solar system for a quiz this morning, and we both broke into the song from "Blue's Clues" in which Steve names them all. (Oh, come on, join in with me, you toddler moms: "The sun's a hot star, and Mercury's hot too, Venus is the brightest planet, Earth's home to me and you, Mars is the red one, and Jupiter's most wide, Saturn's got those icy rings, and Uranus spins on its side, Neptune's really windy, and Pluto's really small, Well, we wanted to name the planets, and now we've named them all. Again!") My sometimes-memory-impaired girl can rattle off those rocks without a hitch now, and it's all thanks to Steve and Blue. Who's to say she won't one day have an assignment that will hinge on some long-lost "Barney" episode? It's pretty scary to think of, but you never know.
+ + +
MARCH 15, 2002
Lately, I've just been the best little mom in the world, serving my kids a hot breakfast of eggs, bacon and hash-browns every morning before carting them off to school. Of course, they're the microwave variety, the kind you usually get served on airplanes, but the kids scarf them down and they're hot, all right. I'm usually dashing around like a crazy person trying to get these columns posted and get myself dressed and get backpacks filled and snacks made; the kids may eat alone, and I may eat a breakfast bar at my desk hours later, but I feel good knowing that they've had something that at least resembles real food.
And for lunch? Who knows what they eat. We pay for "hot lunch," but do they eat it? They say they do. They say they eat both the entree and the miscellaneous fruits and vegetables that go with. They say this, even though my daughter comes home so hungry she could eat a half a bag of cookies. My lunch responsibility is fulfilled by filling out the order form and writing out the check. Getting them to eat it should be someone else's responsibility. I don't know whose. But I've got breakfast covered.
Dinner is my husband's job, and it gets on the table eventually. Definitely before bedtime, sometimes just. My son is a pig at dinner, making up for any lack of appetite he's shown during the day. My daughter is exactly as picky as any other 11-year-old, contemptuous of peas and broccoli and anything not exactly like something she's eaten and enjoyed in the past. It often seems to take her hours to eat, and since I was young once, many centuries ago, I certainly recognize the "maybe if I eat my food one molecule at a time my parents will eventually get tired or bored and let me go away from here" strategy. It doesn't work, but I respect the effort. And I feel a secret satisfaction that however much she fights eating dinner, in the morning, she's always ready for eggs. I have a mean way with a microwave.
Big news for our family last week: My son, who will be nine next week, learned how to tie his shoes! At least, I think he did. His teacher said so. She came rushing into the library where I was working on Wednesday to tell me that he paid attention for a very long time and tied a bow a bunch of times and what an exciting thing that is. I was excited, too, but could I get him to show me his new skill at home? No way. Not even the promise of Scooby Doo lace-up sneakers could get him to give me a demonstration.
And that's okay. We've been here before. With many of his major milestones -- walking, talking, potty training -- he's refused to perform until he could do it perfectly. So I'll let him practice and practice with the teacher, get all those frustrations out, in the knowledge that eventually, he'll tie me some bows in person. Sometime, I hope, before he turns ten. Or his feet get too big for Scooby shoes.
+ + +
MARCH 12, 2002
I didn't set out to watch the "9/11" documentary on CBS Sunday night, but I was flipping through channels and stopped there for a moment and got hooked. There was something mesmerizing about the "you are there" style of the thing, waiting for the bad stuff you knew was going to happen to happen. It was a striking piece of filmmaking in many ways, but I'm a little ashamed to say that the thing that struck me the most -- more than the depictions of disaster, more than the heroic actions of firefighters -- was the uncensored use of the "F" word on prime-time network TV. The camera was running through scenes of real-life trauma and tragedy and reunion and firefighters talked the way firefighters undoubtedly talk, the way any of us might talk in such an unimaginable situation, and CBS showed it all, bleep-free.
As they should have, certainly. Certainly the death and destruction of that day were far more obscene than any language could be, and there was no bleeping that. It didn't seem exploitive or intentionally boundary-breaking, just entirely incidental to the scenes being filmed. And yet, there was something jarring about it. Intentionally or not, a boundary was broken. You gotta believe TV writers and producers all over Hollywood are going to be eying the phenomenal ratings the documentary garnered and using them as proof that if you're telling a sufficiently dramatic story, people don't mind about bad language. I'd be surprised if that "NYPD Blue" squad room doesn't start sounding like that "9/11" firehouse any old episode now.
What I want to know is, how long until Lizzie McGuire and SpongeBob SquarePants start spouting undeleted expletives? As long as the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon hold out, my kids' ears will be safe.
+ + +
MARCH 13, 2002
Well, add two more names to the list of celebrity adoptive parents. Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton have made their twosome a threesome with the addition of seven-and-a-half-month-old Maddox, who hails from Cambodia. According to a report on Yahoo News, the couple met their future son while visiting a Cambodian orphanage in November, underwent all that nasty paperwork over the course of four months and officially took custody of him on Sunday in Africa, where the new mom is working on a movie. They plan to raise the child both in the U.S. and in Cambodia, where they are shopping for property.
Now part of me feels all snarky when I read news like this. Celeb couple swoops in, picks a baby, flies through paperwork and has the kid wrapped and delivered to the locale of their choice. And how do people with such carefully cultivated reputations for bizarre behavior pass a homestudy, anyway? But I'm trying to keep a positive outlook in the New Year, and not speak negatively of people, so instead I'll reflect that it's always nice to see a positive adoption story. It's always good when a child finds a home. Even if celeb adoptions raise eyebrows, they do give adoption a certain cachet, and that can't be bad. And you know, if there's ever been a Mother with Attitude, it's going to be Angelina Jolie.
So I'm taking deep breaths, and wishing the new family nothing but happiness in their new homes. But hey, mom and dad? Wait for a while before giving the kid a tattoo, okay?
+ + +
MARCH 14, 2002
I've always been a little concerned about my daughter's taste in TV. And no, I don't mean the Disney channel sit-coms she spaces out in front of in the evenings; those are at least age appropriate. I'm talking about the fact that, at age 11 and in 4th grade, she's perfectly happy watching "Barney" after school, or taking in the entire baby-friendly Nick Jr. line-up on a day off from class. Should she really be able to sit through "Bob the Builder" and "Oswald" at her advanced age? It doesn't seem right, somehow, and sometimes I've felt a little embarrassed for her.
And yet... I have to admit, there are times when I see some value to her regressive viewing habits. Last night, for example, she had to memorize the order of the planets in our solar system for a quiz this morning, and we both broke into the song from "Blue's Clues" in which Steve names them all. (Oh, come on, join in with me, you toddler moms: "The sun's a hot star, and Mercury's hot too, Venus is the brightest planet, Earth's home to me and you, Mars is the red one, and Jupiter's most wide, Saturn's got those icy rings, and Uranus spins on its side, Neptune's really windy, and Pluto's really small, Well, we wanted to name the planets, and now we've named them all. Again!") My sometimes-memory-impaired girl can rattle off those rocks without a hitch now, and it's all thanks to Steve and Blue. Who's to say she won't one day have an assignment that will hinge on some long-lost "Barney" episode? It's pretty scary to think of, but you never know.
+ + +
MARCH 15, 2002
Lately, I've just been the best little mom in the world, serving my kids a hot breakfast of eggs, bacon and hash-browns every morning before carting them off to school. Of course, they're the microwave variety, the kind you usually get served on airplanes, but the kids scarf them down and they're hot, all right. I'm usually dashing around like a crazy person trying to get these columns posted and get myself dressed and get backpacks filled and snacks made; the kids may eat alone, and I may eat a breakfast bar at my desk hours later, but I feel good knowing that they've had something that at least resembles real food.
And for lunch? Who knows what they eat. We pay for "hot lunch," but do they eat it? They say they do. They say they eat both the entree and the miscellaneous fruits and vegetables that go with. They say this, even though my daughter comes home so hungry she could eat a half a bag of cookies. My lunch responsibility is fulfilled by filling out the order form and writing out the check. Getting them to eat it should be someone else's responsibility. I don't know whose. But I've got breakfast covered.
Dinner is my husband's job, and it gets on the table eventually. Definitely before bedtime, sometimes just. My son is a pig at dinner, making up for any lack of appetite he's shown during the day. My daughter is exactly as picky as any other 11-year-old, contemptuous of peas and broccoli and anything not exactly like something she's eaten and enjoyed in the past. It often seems to take her hours to eat, and since I was young once, many centuries ago, I certainly recognize the "maybe if I eat my food one molecule at a time my parents will eventually get tired or bored and let me go away from here" strategy. It doesn't work, but I respect the effort. And I feel a secret satisfaction that however much she fights eating dinner, in the morning, she's always ready for eggs. I have a mean way with a microwave.
Monday, March 04, 2002
March 4-8, 2002
MARCH 4, 2002
Tonight, one of the few TV shows I make it a point to watch comes back on the air, finally, after a long seven weeks. That show is "Once and Again," the life-after-divorce drama starring Sela Ward and Billy Campbell, and it's moved from Fridays to Mondays for a last-ditch attempt at finishing its third season, much less starting its fourth. If you're not already watching this show (and judging by the ratings, you're not), here are five reasons why you may want to start:
5. In the last new episode, a major character was hit by a car and ended up with a shattered pelvis. Tonight's episode (and future ones, no doubt) will involve a lot of physical therapy. Something we know about!
4. The show has one of those dream psychiatrists who's smart, funny, perceptive, caring, and not actually existant in real life. He's helping one of the show's central teen-agers deal with her anorexia, and now with her mother's injuries as well. The fact that he's played by one of the show's producers means there's probably some wish-fulfillment going on for them as well.
3. In addition to anorexia, the show features ongoing story lines on schizophrenia, depression and learning disabilities without suggesting that these things can be resolved with warm family hugs all around.
2. There's a blended family, but it ain't exactly the Brady Bunch, with jealousy among stepsisters and romantic attraction between a stepsister and stepbrother. Particularly interesting, for those of us dealing with children with special needs and siblings without, is the way one stepsister feels the other gets special treatment because of her eating disorder.
1. Hey, you have to fall asleep in front of something at 10 p.m. Billy Campbell's not exactly the worst thing to be looking at at the time.
+ + +
MARCH 5, 2002
Do kids with ADHD really just need more sleep? That's the conclusion suggested by a recent study by a University of Michigan neurologist and sleep researcher. Out of 866 children studied, those who snored were significantly more likely to be diagnosed as ADHD. This appears to contribute to theories that sleep disorders can create hyperactive behavior, since (as we all know from years of bad bedtimes) young children often react to tiredness with wiredness. It may also explain why stimulants like Ritalin sooth kids who appear overstimulated -- gives them a nice wake-up call.
It's an interesting thought, anyway. The researcher suggests that the removal of tonsils may improve ADHD behavior in some cases, and I'm always happy to hear of any solution that doesn't involve medication (beyond anesthesia, I suppose.) My son doesn't snore, but his sleep habits are something of a mystery because since he came to us at age 2, he's never cried at night while awake, just laid in his crib or bed rocking and singing and talking to himself. Could be that he doesn't get enough sleep. When he actually does sit still and stay quiet during the day, he often gets sleepy, and I've always thought that his hyperactive behavior was really an attempt to keep himself awake and alert. So it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this latest study. Though, the way research seems to work these days, the next study coming out will undoubtedly refute it.
+ + +
MARCH 6, 2002
My daughter, age almost-12, is making the big step up this cold-and-flu season from liquid medications to those in pill form. No more measuring antibiotics by the teaspoonful; this time, for her ongoing, never-ending, hair-raising cough, she has a neat little vial of blue pills. It's a grown-up thing, and she couldn't be prouder. There's only one problem: Getting them down her.
She's had some success swallowing Advils for menstrual cramps, but those of course have that neat candy coating that make them melt in your mouth a little slower. The antibiotics, on the other hand, are just pure, raw, naked medication, horrible-tasting from the moment it hits your tongue. The first night we tried having her take it with vigorous gulps of water, but it was a disaster. She started gagging as soon as the thing was in her mouth, kept spitting it out and putting it back in in various stages of dissolve and making faces and gagging. Finally she went ahead and threw up the pill and her dinner and that was that.
She was pretty much convinced, understandably enough, that she'd never, ever, ever be able to swallow that awful pill, but moms don't give up that easy. The next morning, we tried again with juice instead of water, in the hope that it would block the taste at least for a moment, and to both of our amazement, she downed the pill on the first swallow. At dinnertime, it took two swallows. I hate to say anything to jinx this, but it appears she's got this pill-swallowing thing down. Which means she really IS growing up. Dang.
+ + +
MARCH 7, 2002
You hear from time to time that antibiotics are becoming less effective, and one of the culprits listed is always the fact that parents demand them for their children, and thus they are overprescribed. There's an image of pediatricians as not being able to bend the will of overbearing parents with mere medical explanations of why antibiotics will not be effective in any particular situation. I gave my opinion of how utterly ridiculous that scenario was in the very first dispatch on this Web site, and I still think it's bunk. Consider three recent doctor visits in our family, two for my daughter and one for me.
The first time my daughter went to the pediatrician, she'd had a cough for about a week. No fever, no congestion, no symptoms of sickness other than a periodic hard, barking cough that left her red-faced and light-headed. The pediatrician checked her ears, her throat, her chest, and said that although there were no obvious signs of anything, there were probably some bacteria involved, and so my girl should take a one-week course of antibiotics. Two weeks later, antibiotics long gone, the girl is still coughing. So back to the pediatrician. Again, not much to find, but another antibiotic prescription. In neither case did I demand meds, unless the simple act of bringing your child to the doctor is considered a demand for drugs. In neither case was there a raging example of bacterial infection (although on visit two the doctor did notice some "white tenacious mucous" when examining my daughter for post-nasal drip; maybe I've been reading too much Dave Barry, but all I could think of was that "White Tenacious Mucous" would be a good name for a rock band). And in both cases, the antibiotics were given freely. They might as well have had a bowl of them out in the waiting room.
Now, I'm not saying the pediatrician was wrong, or prescribing too loosely. I trust my kids' doctor and if she feels they need antibiotics, antibiotics they shall have. But I did find it somewhat curious that when I finally caught my daughter's cough and went to my own physician, I was told it was a viral thing and antibiotics wouldn't help me out. I left with a prescription for cough syrup, a handful of decongestant samples, and get-well wishes. Maybe he missed something, or maybe pediatricians are more cautious with children -- but at any rate, somebody should stop blaming pushy parents for all those pills. I would only have been pushy had I said no.
+ + +
MARCH 8, 2002
I had another one of those "Jekyll-and-Hyde" experiences with my eight-year-old son yesterday, where I see him at his best and worst within a short period of time. The best occurred when we were walking down the sidewalk to the car after school and saw a grandma and mom pushing a baby carriage walking toward us. My son walked right up to them, said "What a cute baby! Hi, baby!" and asked, "What's his name?" He then introduced himself to the baby by name, cood to it for a bit, helped the mom put a hat on the baby's little head, and said a very polite farewell. "What a nice boy!" the grandma said to me. And I thought, she'll probably tell her friends she saw the best-behaved little boy during their walk.
Whereas in fact, behavior is the area in which he's generally considered least likely to succeed.
A little while later, we had a similar meeting with a small dog. Things started out the same; he politely inquired as to the name of the little dog, and then properly introduced himself. He petted gently and talked to the pooch. But it was like one of those movies where you keep cutting to a gauge that's showing something getting hotter and hotter and hotter, until the needle's twitching away in the red zone. By degrees, my boy got more and more excited. First he was petting quietly. Then he was kneeling with his face on the ground so the dog could sniff his hair. That must have made him feel like another dog, because then he started barking a friendly sort of bark. Then he started barking not-so-friendly and lunging at the pup, who must have been completely panicked by that point. Our sweet little dog-petting episode ended up with me holding him in a bear hug from behind and urging him to calm down, calm down, calm down.
He's getting better with modulating his level of excitement, better and better every day, but doggone it, we're not there yet.
Tonight, one of the few TV shows I make it a point to watch comes back on the air, finally, after a long seven weeks. That show is "Once and Again," the life-after-divorce drama starring Sela Ward and Billy Campbell, and it's moved from Fridays to Mondays for a last-ditch attempt at finishing its third season, much less starting its fourth. If you're not already watching this show (and judging by the ratings, you're not), here are five reasons why you may want to start:
5. In the last new episode, a major character was hit by a car and ended up with a shattered pelvis. Tonight's episode (and future ones, no doubt) will involve a lot of physical therapy. Something we know about!
4. The show has one of those dream psychiatrists who's smart, funny, perceptive, caring, and not actually existant in real life. He's helping one of the show's central teen-agers deal with her anorexia, and now with her mother's injuries as well. The fact that he's played by one of the show's producers means there's probably some wish-fulfillment going on for them as well.
3. In addition to anorexia, the show features ongoing story lines on schizophrenia, depression and learning disabilities without suggesting that these things can be resolved with warm family hugs all around.
2. There's a blended family, but it ain't exactly the Brady Bunch, with jealousy among stepsisters and romantic attraction between a stepsister and stepbrother. Particularly interesting, for those of us dealing with children with special needs and siblings without, is the way one stepsister feels the other gets special treatment because of her eating disorder.
1. Hey, you have to fall asleep in front of something at 10 p.m. Billy Campbell's not exactly the worst thing to be looking at at the time.
+ + +
MARCH 5, 2002
Do kids with ADHD really just need more sleep? That's the conclusion suggested by a recent study by a University of Michigan neurologist and sleep researcher. Out of 866 children studied, those who snored were significantly more likely to be diagnosed as ADHD. This appears to contribute to theories that sleep disorders can create hyperactive behavior, since (as we all know from years of bad bedtimes) young children often react to tiredness with wiredness. It may also explain why stimulants like Ritalin sooth kids who appear overstimulated -- gives them a nice wake-up call.
It's an interesting thought, anyway. The researcher suggests that the removal of tonsils may improve ADHD behavior in some cases, and I'm always happy to hear of any solution that doesn't involve medication (beyond anesthesia, I suppose.) My son doesn't snore, but his sleep habits are something of a mystery because since he came to us at age 2, he's never cried at night while awake, just laid in his crib or bed rocking and singing and talking to himself. Could be that he doesn't get enough sleep. When he actually does sit still and stay quiet during the day, he often gets sleepy, and I've always thought that his hyperactive behavior was really an attempt to keep himself awake and alert. So it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this latest study. Though, the way research seems to work these days, the next study coming out will undoubtedly refute it.
+ + +
MARCH 6, 2002
My daughter, age almost-12, is making the big step up this cold-and-flu season from liquid medications to those in pill form. No more measuring antibiotics by the teaspoonful; this time, for her ongoing, never-ending, hair-raising cough, she has a neat little vial of blue pills. It's a grown-up thing, and she couldn't be prouder. There's only one problem: Getting them down her.
She's had some success swallowing Advils for menstrual cramps, but those of course have that neat candy coating that make them melt in your mouth a little slower. The antibiotics, on the other hand, are just pure, raw, naked medication, horrible-tasting from the moment it hits your tongue. The first night we tried having her take it with vigorous gulps of water, but it was a disaster. She started gagging as soon as the thing was in her mouth, kept spitting it out and putting it back in in various stages of dissolve and making faces and gagging. Finally she went ahead and threw up the pill and her dinner and that was that.
She was pretty much convinced, understandably enough, that she'd never, ever, ever be able to swallow that awful pill, but moms don't give up that easy. The next morning, we tried again with juice instead of water, in the hope that it would block the taste at least for a moment, and to both of our amazement, she downed the pill on the first swallow. At dinnertime, it took two swallows. I hate to say anything to jinx this, but it appears she's got this pill-swallowing thing down. Which means she really IS growing up. Dang.
+ + +
MARCH 7, 2002
You hear from time to time that antibiotics are becoming less effective, and one of the culprits listed is always the fact that parents demand them for their children, and thus they are overprescribed. There's an image of pediatricians as not being able to bend the will of overbearing parents with mere medical explanations of why antibiotics will not be effective in any particular situation. I gave my opinion of how utterly ridiculous that scenario was in the very first dispatch on this Web site, and I still think it's bunk. Consider three recent doctor visits in our family, two for my daughter and one for me.
The first time my daughter went to the pediatrician, she'd had a cough for about a week. No fever, no congestion, no symptoms of sickness other than a periodic hard, barking cough that left her red-faced and light-headed. The pediatrician checked her ears, her throat, her chest, and said that although there were no obvious signs of anything, there were probably some bacteria involved, and so my girl should take a one-week course of antibiotics. Two weeks later, antibiotics long gone, the girl is still coughing. So back to the pediatrician. Again, not much to find, but another antibiotic prescription. In neither case did I demand meds, unless the simple act of bringing your child to the doctor is considered a demand for drugs. In neither case was there a raging example of bacterial infection (although on visit two the doctor did notice some "white tenacious mucous" when examining my daughter for post-nasal drip; maybe I've been reading too much Dave Barry, but all I could think of was that "White Tenacious Mucous" would be a good name for a rock band). And in both cases, the antibiotics were given freely. They might as well have had a bowl of them out in the waiting room.
Now, I'm not saying the pediatrician was wrong, or prescribing too loosely. I trust my kids' doctor and if she feels they need antibiotics, antibiotics they shall have. But I did find it somewhat curious that when I finally caught my daughter's cough and went to my own physician, I was told it was a viral thing and antibiotics wouldn't help me out. I left with a prescription for cough syrup, a handful of decongestant samples, and get-well wishes. Maybe he missed something, or maybe pediatricians are more cautious with children -- but at any rate, somebody should stop blaming pushy parents for all those pills. I would only have been pushy had I said no.
+ + +
MARCH 8, 2002
I had another one of those "Jekyll-and-Hyde" experiences with my eight-year-old son yesterday, where I see him at his best and worst within a short period of time. The best occurred when we were walking down the sidewalk to the car after school and saw a grandma and mom pushing a baby carriage walking toward us. My son walked right up to them, said "What a cute baby! Hi, baby!" and asked, "What's his name?" He then introduced himself to the baby by name, cood to it for a bit, helped the mom put a hat on the baby's little head, and said a very polite farewell. "What a nice boy!" the grandma said to me. And I thought, she'll probably tell her friends she saw the best-behaved little boy during their walk.
Whereas in fact, behavior is the area in which he's generally considered least likely to succeed.
A little while later, we had a similar meeting with a small dog. Things started out the same; he politely inquired as to the name of the little dog, and then properly introduced himself. He petted gently and talked to the pooch. But it was like one of those movies where you keep cutting to a gauge that's showing something getting hotter and hotter and hotter, until the needle's twitching away in the red zone. By degrees, my boy got more and more excited. First he was petting quietly. Then he was kneeling with his face on the ground so the dog could sniff his hair. That must have made him feel like another dog, because then he started barking a friendly sort of bark. Then he started barking not-so-friendly and lunging at the pup, who must have been completely panicked by that point. Our sweet little dog-petting episode ended up with me holding him in a bear hug from behind and urging him to calm down, calm down, calm down.
He's getting better with modulating his level of excitement, better and better every day, but doggone it, we're not there yet.
Monday, February 25, 2002
February 25-March 1, 2002
FEBRUARY 25, 2002
Things I meant to do with my kids this past week while they were off for Winter Vacation: Read books. Play games. Go to a museum. Do art projects. Get ahead on schoolwork. Write stories. Practice book reports. Take walks. Read magazines. Go to a movie. Do puzzles. Invite friends over. Investigate some child-friendly Web sites. Clean rooms. Memorize chorus music. Take pictures. Celebrate bountiful together-time.
Things I did: Read a couple of books with my son. Read two chapters of a school-assigned novel with my daughter. Played one game of Trouble.
School vacations always seem like such vast fields of opportunity, endless days to be filled with enriching experiences and familial bonding. Yet in our house, they usually wind up being endless days filled with the Disney channel. This week, at least, my kids played on the computer a lot, and if I work hard I can probably paint that as an enrichment activity. My daughter and I did bond over the Olympics, falling asleep within minutes of each other on the sofa. And I did get them both started with an auditory training program that involves listening to classical music for 15 minutes twice a day, and that's gotta be enriching, right? (My pop-music-loving daughter begs to differ, that's for sure.) Still, if the beginning of vacation feels like a vast opportunity, the end always feels like opportunity wasted. But hey, there's another vacation in a couple of months. Spring Break! That's the ticket. Think of all the wonderful things I'll do with my kids that week!
+ + +
FEBRUARY 26, 2002
My daughter has now had a cough for over two weeks. It's not a constant cough; it's not a cough accompanied by fever or obvious sickness; it's not a cough that hurts, or brings up disgusting goop from the lower depths. It's a cough that comes and goes, in multiple-minute-long fits, and never quite goes away. We've been to the pediatrician, who couldn't find much of anything wrong but prescribed an antibiotic anyway. The antibiotic's gone now; the cough, not so much.
This kind of ongoing, disruptive but not serious illness presents a real quandary in terms of sending a child to school. When I was a kid, the rule was always: If you have a fever, you stay home; if you don't, get your butt out of bed. I've always accepted a fever as the certifiable seal of sickness, and have carried over this philosophy in my own parenting. But there are plenty of times when a child may not be feverish, but may still be a biohazard. I remember a couple of winters when my son had a sneezy, runny nose pretty much from November through February. The teacher suggested keeping him home, but for how long? I'm not looking to homeschool. With my daughter, I'm not so concerned with her being infectious as being distracting. Woe to the teacher who has to talk over ten minutes of hacking from my darling girl.
Sometimes I wonder what they must think of me, sending a kid with such a nasty sounding cough into the classroom each day. But I've felt a lot better since talking to another mom while we were volunteering in the library a couple of weeks ago. We were discussing the fact that there had been a lot of sickness in the school, and she mentioned that her boy, too, had been unwell for a while. Why, the very night before, he had thrown up three times between 3 and 5 a.m. But when it came time to go to school, he didn't have a fever, so he was in his seat. It's our rule, and we're sticking to it.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 27, 2002
Over the years, I've wondered what kind of job my son might find his way into as a grown-up. He likes to jump, always, all the time, so maybe he'll be a track star, or a circus performer. He can look at a key and tell which kind of car it goes to, so maybe he'll be a valet parking attendant, or a car thief. He can talk like Scooby Doo, so maybe he'll be an animation voice-over artist, or an entertainer at children's parties. In all my pondering, I've never thought about the legal profession for my definitely-not-desk-job-material guy. But after the story his teacher told me at a conference last night, I'm thinking again.
Apparently one of my son's classmates -- we'll call him Sam -- was trying the teacher's patience something fierce. She sent him to the time-out chair once and told him to come back when he had calmed down. She sent him there another time and told him to sit there for two minutes. Finally, a third time, she sent him there to sit indefinitely. Apparently, my son was watching the time, because at about three minutes he went up to the teacher and said, "Do you know that my friend Sam is still sitting in the time-out chair? He's my friend, and it hurts my heart to see him sitting there." At this point, the teacher felt about two inches tall, and gave Sam a reprieve. I don't know what kind of fee my boy charged for his services, but I'm told the plaintiff and his council did hug after the verdict.
If he can talk a kid out of time-out, maybe there's hope for him in the field of litigation. As long as the judge doesn't mind attorneys who jump all the time and suck their fingers.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 28, 2002
I saw half of a child-abuse-prevention program at my kids' school the other morning. I meant to see all of it, but it overlapped with my husband's tooth-extraction appointment and I needed to give him a ride. Felt bad sneaking out -- would people think that something the speaker said had caused me to bolt? I wound up missing the part in which they showed videotapes of the kind of workshop my kids will be taking part in sometime in the coming weeks. But the description I did hear was interesting, and I hope the information will sink in enough with my kiddos to keep them at least a little safer than they were before.
One of the interesting things that the speaker advocated was teaching kids that it's okay to say "no" to adults. And boy, isn't that just something from which parents instinctively recoil? From the time our kids learn to talk, we spend multiple developmental stages trying to get them to stop saying the "n" word. We teach them to respect grown-ups, be polite, do what you're told, don't talk back. We tell them to do what the teacher or the priest or the scoutmaster or the baby-sitter says or they'll be in big trouble. We let them know that adults know better than they do what's right, and that just because they don't feel like doing something is no excuse for not doing it. And this speaker suggested that in convincing them of all this, we're making our kids sitting ducks for pedophiles.
So in a week or two, she will be teaching my kids to say "no" to things that make them feel uncomfortable, things that seem wrong. Not peas for dinner or making their beds or doing their homework, but things that take away their right to be "safe, strong and free." That's a heck of a distinction for kids to make, though, isn't it? The sad thing is, in most situations, they are better off listening to adults. Most adults do want to keep them safe. But now we need to put them on their guard, question grown-ups' judgments, defend themselves verbally and physically. I wish we didn't live in a world where that was necessary. You only have to pick up a paper these days, though, to see how far we are from there.
+ + +
MARCH 1, 2002
Yesterday we added another activity to the list of things my almost-9-year-old son's still not ready for: Karate. He's been bugging me for months about wanting to try it, and I finally found a place that would take on kids with special needs. The teacher and I discussed his hyperactivity, impulsivity, attention problems, low muscle tone. I explained that he had FAE and that I didn't know if he would be able to follow along. The teacher had had one student with fetal alcohol exposure in the past and admitted that it was tough. But he said we were welcome to give it a try.
And so, last night, we did. And he didn't. Out of the hour class, he tried on and off for the first 20 minutes -- not getting the movements right, but at least moving -- then just laid on the floor for about ten minutes, then started going over to the door and playing with the wind chime, coming to where I was sitting and complaining about being hungry, and finally flat-out asking to go home. He liked the parts where the kids yell as they count their jumping jacks or karate chops or kicks. He did the yelling part really, really well. He liked when the class took turns running laps around the room. But the actual karate part? Not so much.
Still, he did better than he would have done a year ago. He didn't melt down or freak out. He followed along for a while, and that's big. And at the end, he made me laugh, which always earns consolation points. As his class concluded, the next class -- a group of older students -- filed into the room and lined up against the back wall, right behind my guy. They stood solemnly, seriously, as the little kids bowed to them and then to their teacher in the ritualistic ending to the earlier class. But my guy's not into ritual. He saw all those solemn, serious older kids and decided they needed a warm-up. "So," he said, "Who wants to kick? Who wants to hit? Who wants to chop? Who wants to scratch their butts?" By the end, at least half of the big kids were cracking up. A little blonde haired girl from the younger class wasn't impressed; she walked by my son on the way out and said, "You're not funny."
"Yes, I am," was my boy's reply. And frankly, I'd have to agree. But definitely not martial arts material.
Things I meant to do with my kids this past week while they were off for Winter Vacation: Read books. Play games. Go to a museum. Do art projects. Get ahead on schoolwork. Write stories. Practice book reports. Take walks. Read magazines. Go to a movie. Do puzzles. Invite friends over. Investigate some child-friendly Web sites. Clean rooms. Memorize chorus music. Take pictures. Celebrate bountiful together-time.
Things I did: Read a couple of books with my son. Read two chapters of a school-assigned novel with my daughter. Played one game of Trouble.
School vacations always seem like such vast fields of opportunity, endless days to be filled with enriching experiences and familial bonding. Yet in our house, they usually wind up being endless days filled with the Disney channel. This week, at least, my kids played on the computer a lot, and if I work hard I can probably paint that as an enrichment activity. My daughter and I did bond over the Olympics, falling asleep within minutes of each other on the sofa. And I did get them both started with an auditory training program that involves listening to classical music for 15 minutes twice a day, and that's gotta be enriching, right? (My pop-music-loving daughter begs to differ, that's for sure.) Still, if the beginning of vacation feels like a vast opportunity, the end always feels like opportunity wasted. But hey, there's another vacation in a couple of months. Spring Break! That's the ticket. Think of all the wonderful things I'll do with my kids that week!
+ + +
FEBRUARY 26, 2002
My daughter has now had a cough for over two weeks. It's not a constant cough; it's not a cough accompanied by fever or obvious sickness; it's not a cough that hurts, or brings up disgusting goop from the lower depths. It's a cough that comes and goes, in multiple-minute-long fits, and never quite goes away. We've been to the pediatrician, who couldn't find much of anything wrong but prescribed an antibiotic anyway. The antibiotic's gone now; the cough, not so much.
This kind of ongoing, disruptive but not serious illness presents a real quandary in terms of sending a child to school. When I was a kid, the rule was always: If you have a fever, you stay home; if you don't, get your butt out of bed. I've always accepted a fever as the certifiable seal of sickness, and have carried over this philosophy in my own parenting. But there are plenty of times when a child may not be feverish, but may still be a biohazard. I remember a couple of winters when my son had a sneezy, runny nose pretty much from November through February. The teacher suggested keeping him home, but for how long? I'm not looking to homeschool. With my daughter, I'm not so concerned with her being infectious as being distracting. Woe to the teacher who has to talk over ten minutes of hacking from my darling girl.
Sometimes I wonder what they must think of me, sending a kid with such a nasty sounding cough into the classroom each day. But I've felt a lot better since talking to another mom while we were volunteering in the library a couple of weeks ago. We were discussing the fact that there had been a lot of sickness in the school, and she mentioned that her boy, too, had been unwell for a while. Why, the very night before, he had thrown up three times between 3 and 5 a.m. But when it came time to go to school, he didn't have a fever, so he was in his seat. It's our rule, and we're sticking to it.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 27, 2002
Over the years, I've wondered what kind of job my son might find his way into as a grown-up. He likes to jump, always, all the time, so maybe he'll be a track star, or a circus performer. He can look at a key and tell which kind of car it goes to, so maybe he'll be a valet parking attendant, or a car thief. He can talk like Scooby Doo, so maybe he'll be an animation voice-over artist, or an entertainer at children's parties. In all my pondering, I've never thought about the legal profession for my definitely-not-desk-job-material guy. But after the story his teacher told me at a conference last night, I'm thinking again.
Apparently one of my son's classmates -- we'll call him Sam -- was trying the teacher's patience something fierce. She sent him to the time-out chair once and told him to come back when he had calmed down. She sent him there another time and told him to sit there for two minutes. Finally, a third time, she sent him there to sit indefinitely. Apparently, my son was watching the time, because at about three minutes he went up to the teacher and said, "Do you know that my friend Sam is still sitting in the time-out chair? He's my friend, and it hurts my heart to see him sitting there." At this point, the teacher felt about two inches tall, and gave Sam a reprieve. I don't know what kind of fee my boy charged for his services, but I'm told the plaintiff and his council did hug after the verdict.
If he can talk a kid out of time-out, maybe there's hope for him in the field of litigation. As long as the judge doesn't mind attorneys who jump all the time and suck their fingers.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 28, 2002
I saw half of a child-abuse-prevention program at my kids' school the other morning. I meant to see all of it, but it overlapped with my husband's tooth-extraction appointment and I needed to give him a ride. Felt bad sneaking out -- would people think that something the speaker said had caused me to bolt? I wound up missing the part in which they showed videotapes of the kind of workshop my kids will be taking part in sometime in the coming weeks. But the description I did hear was interesting, and I hope the information will sink in enough with my kiddos to keep them at least a little safer than they were before.
One of the interesting things that the speaker advocated was teaching kids that it's okay to say "no" to adults. And boy, isn't that just something from which parents instinctively recoil? From the time our kids learn to talk, we spend multiple developmental stages trying to get them to stop saying the "n" word. We teach them to respect grown-ups, be polite, do what you're told, don't talk back. We tell them to do what the teacher or the priest or the scoutmaster or the baby-sitter says or they'll be in big trouble. We let them know that adults know better than they do what's right, and that just because they don't feel like doing something is no excuse for not doing it. And this speaker suggested that in convincing them of all this, we're making our kids sitting ducks for pedophiles.
So in a week or two, she will be teaching my kids to say "no" to things that make them feel uncomfortable, things that seem wrong. Not peas for dinner or making their beds or doing their homework, but things that take away their right to be "safe, strong and free." That's a heck of a distinction for kids to make, though, isn't it? The sad thing is, in most situations, they are better off listening to adults. Most adults do want to keep them safe. But now we need to put them on their guard, question grown-ups' judgments, defend themselves verbally and physically. I wish we didn't live in a world where that was necessary. You only have to pick up a paper these days, though, to see how far we are from there.
+ + +
MARCH 1, 2002
Yesterday we added another activity to the list of things my almost-9-year-old son's still not ready for: Karate. He's been bugging me for months about wanting to try it, and I finally found a place that would take on kids with special needs. The teacher and I discussed his hyperactivity, impulsivity, attention problems, low muscle tone. I explained that he had FAE and that I didn't know if he would be able to follow along. The teacher had had one student with fetal alcohol exposure in the past and admitted that it was tough. But he said we were welcome to give it a try.
And so, last night, we did. And he didn't. Out of the hour class, he tried on and off for the first 20 minutes -- not getting the movements right, but at least moving -- then just laid on the floor for about ten minutes, then started going over to the door and playing with the wind chime, coming to where I was sitting and complaining about being hungry, and finally flat-out asking to go home. He liked the parts where the kids yell as they count their jumping jacks or karate chops or kicks. He did the yelling part really, really well. He liked when the class took turns running laps around the room. But the actual karate part? Not so much.
Still, he did better than he would have done a year ago. He didn't melt down or freak out. He followed along for a while, and that's big. And at the end, he made me laugh, which always earns consolation points. As his class concluded, the next class -- a group of older students -- filed into the room and lined up against the back wall, right behind my guy. They stood solemnly, seriously, as the little kids bowed to them and then to their teacher in the ritualistic ending to the earlier class. But my guy's not into ritual. He saw all those solemn, serious older kids and decided they needed a warm-up. "So," he said, "Who wants to kick? Who wants to hit? Who wants to chop? Who wants to scratch their butts?" By the end, at least half of the big kids were cracking up. A little blonde haired girl from the younger class wasn't impressed; she walked by my son on the way out and said, "You're not funny."
"Yes, I am," was my boy's reply. And frankly, I'd have to agree. But definitely not martial arts material.
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
February 19-23, 2002
FEBRUARY 19, 2002
Tomorrow, I'm taking my son to a therapist to investigate the possibility of starting auditory integration training. I'm excited at the possibility of doing something to help my boy with his hyperactive behavior. I've heard good stories about this therapy helping kids just like him. It always feels good to be doing something positive, finding therapies and pursuing them.
And yet... I also felt excited about therapeutic horseback riding. And sensory integration therapy. And nutritional supplements. And FastForward for my daughter. And various other helpful strategies that I researched and pursued and pushed for but never quite got the full fruits of. FastForward may have helped my daughter a little, but not a lot. The therapeutic riding was great for my son, but the stable decided to limit each student to 16 weeks and then we had to hit the dusty trail. Sensory integration therapy is, I think, vital to my son's neurological well-being, but therapists seem to run out of steam with him. And the nutritional supplements? Despite guarantees by the manufacturers and happy users that the cod liver oil inside those gel caps tasted just like strawberries, my son bit down once, declared the contents disgusting, and wouldn't go near them again.
I can't complain, really; both my kids are making steady forward progress, steady, steady, slow and steady. Not for us the magical forward surges. I've run out of steam a bit myself lately, content to float along with the slow current and stop trying to ride the rapids. But tomorrow, I'll get it together for another attempt at dramatic improvement. And after that, maybe I'll start a Therapies Anonymous group for parents who can't stop looking for that magic key.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 20, 2002
Of all the commercials that play constantly during the Olympics, I'm really loving the one for Allstate featuring the parents of Olympian Eric Bergoust. Through old home movies, it tells the story of a little boy who loved to jump off things, and a mom and dad who thought that was just fine. There are pictures of him jumping off chairs through the years with increasingly fine form. There's a shot of him jumping off the chimney of his house with his parents waiting happily below with a stack of mattresses. There's mention of the fact that the boy grew up to be a freestyle aerial skier -- the kind who launch off ski jumps flipping and twisting -- and won an Olympic gold medal four years ago in Nagano. And finally, a giggling acknowledgment by his parents that they were the only ones who didn't think the kid was absolutely nuts.
I'll bet there were more than a few people who thought the parents were absolutely nuts, too. I mean, jumping off the chimney? But what I love about this ad is the depiction of parents who, with love, enthusiasm and unjudgmental support, help their child accomplish his dream. And I wonder: Would I be able to offer that kind of support? If my kid was jumping off chairs, would I ever try to find a way to help him do it better? If he was laying on his back on a skateboard and rocketing down the steep streets of our cul de sac, would I think to find a way to help him learn to luge? I think I've done a pretty good job about finding something positive in parts of my son's behavior that others have felt was wild or unproductive or absolutely nuts. Will I be justified one day when he finds a way to turn that "bad behavior" into something good? Better start taking home movies.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 21, 2002
My daughter is finally showing some interest in watching the Olympics, I'm happy to say. Every night we're sitting together, watching together, falling asleep over figure skating together. It's a mother-daughter thing. As nice as it is to have company, I will say that watching some of these sports with the Queen of the Literal can sometimes be a challenge. After each competitor finishes his or her ski run or ski jump or bobsled slide or speed-skating pairing, she'll say, "Did he win?" "Did she win?" And I'll try to explain, again and again, that we have to wait until everybody gets a turn to know who won. And sometimes we have to wait for everybody to get a turn twice. And sometimes they have to take turns again on a different day. You'd have thought NBC had already cut out all extraneous races to the point of ludicrousness, but my girl would be happy if they'd just show the winners winning and be done with it. Let's hope she never becomes a network exec.
One of the sports we watched last night was Skeleton, and why exactly don't they slap a parental advisory on this thing anyway? Luge was bad enough, but do you really want your child to get the idea that hurtling down an icy slope with his or her chin an inch off the ice would be a good way to go for Olympic glory? I felt like putting my hand over my daughter's eyes. In the end, though, I don't know what was more scary about that sport: the fact that, as one commentator commented, it's like leaning out of a car, face thisclose to the pavement, while it's going 80 miles an hour on the highway; or the fact that the silver medalist, that guy with the funny-colored spiky hair and extreme-sports demeanor, makes a living as an air traffic controller. Yeah, that's the guy I want landing my plane.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 22, 2002
So there are all these stinkin' teenagers on the TV winning gold medals, making me feel about 106. And there are their parents in the stands, looking all thrilled and basking in their offspring's accomplishments. Part of me feels a little sad, because it doesn't look like my kiddos will ever be doing anything to make sports commentators gush over them; my daughter at 11 is pretty much over-the-hill for beginning a sport, apparently, and my son ... well, if they ever come up with a sport that requires no motor planning ability, muscle tone or impulse control, he's there. But you know, it doesn't really matter, because we parents of children with special needs don't need the big things to be proud as all get-out. Little things are big. The first word at age 3, the potty training at age 5, the belated but welcome onset of pretend play or ball catching or even simple whining -- it's all gold medal material.
Sometimes it's something as simple as telling a riddle right. At dinner the other night, my deeply language delayed daughter upped the degree of difficulty on her dinner table conversation with this sentence-sentence combination: "Dad, I have a challenge for you. Do you see a pattern in the glasses on the table?" Her dad picked up pretty quickly that the boys had grape juice and the girls had apple juice, but I was too busy doing my victory dance to notice. I mean, she used the words "challenge" and "pattern" in a sentence absolutely correctly. That's hard for her. She understood the concept of "pattern" enough to actually pick one out on her own. That's harder. And she used language to turn her observation into a riddle. That's a 6.0, ladies and gentleman. The family looked at me a little funny when I started humming the national anthem, but hey, I'll take victory where I can find it.
Tomorrow, I'm taking my son to a therapist to investigate the possibility of starting auditory integration training. I'm excited at the possibility of doing something to help my boy with his hyperactive behavior. I've heard good stories about this therapy helping kids just like him. It always feels good to be doing something positive, finding therapies and pursuing them.
And yet... I also felt excited about therapeutic horseback riding. And sensory integration therapy. And nutritional supplements. And FastForward for my daughter. And various other helpful strategies that I researched and pursued and pushed for but never quite got the full fruits of. FastForward may have helped my daughter a little, but not a lot. The therapeutic riding was great for my son, but the stable decided to limit each student to 16 weeks and then we had to hit the dusty trail. Sensory integration therapy is, I think, vital to my son's neurological well-being, but therapists seem to run out of steam with him. And the nutritional supplements? Despite guarantees by the manufacturers and happy users that the cod liver oil inside those gel caps tasted just like strawberries, my son bit down once, declared the contents disgusting, and wouldn't go near them again.
I can't complain, really; both my kids are making steady forward progress, steady, steady, slow and steady. Not for us the magical forward surges. I've run out of steam a bit myself lately, content to float along with the slow current and stop trying to ride the rapids. But tomorrow, I'll get it together for another attempt at dramatic improvement. And after that, maybe I'll start a Therapies Anonymous group for parents who can't stop looking for that magic key.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 20, 2002
Of all the commercials that play constantly during the Olympics, I'm really loving the one for Allstate featuring the parents of Olympian Eric Bergoust. Through old home movies, it tells the story of a little boy who loved to jump off things, and a mom and dad who thought that was just fine. There are pictures of him jumping off chairs through the years with increasingly fine form. There's a shot of him jumping off the chimney of his house with his parents waiting happily below with a stack of mattresses. There's mention of the fact that the boy grew up to be a freestyle aerial skier -- the kind who launch off ski jumps flipping and twisting -- and won an Olympic gold medal four years ago in Nagano. And finally, a giggling acknowledgment by his parents that they were the only ones who didn't think the kid was absolutely nuts.
I'll bet there were more than a few people who thought the parents were absolutely nuts, too. I mean, jumping off the chimney? But what I love about this ad is the depiction of parents who, with love, enthusiasm and unjudgmental support, help their child accomplish his dream. And I wonder: Would I be able to offer that kind of support? If my kid was jumping off chairs, would I ever try to find a way to help him do it better? If he was laying on his back on a skateboard and rocketing down the steep streets of our cul de sac, would I think to find a way to help him learn to luge? I think I've done a pretty good job about finding something positive in parts of my son's behavior that others have felt was wild or unproductive or absolutely nuts. Will I be justified one day when he finds a way to turn that "bad behavior" into something good? Better start taking home movies.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 21, 2002
My daughter is finally showing some interest in watching the Olympics, I'm happy to say. Every night we're sitting together, watching together, falling asleep over figure skating together. It's a mother-daughter thing. As nice as it is to have company, I will say that watching some of these sports with the Queen of the Literal can sometimes be a challenge. After each competitor finishes his or her ski run or ski jump or bobsled slide or speed-skating pairing, she'll say, "Did he win?" "Did she win?" And I'll try to explain, again and again, that we have to wait until everybody gets a turn to know who won. And sometimes we have to wait for everybody to get a turn twice. And sometimes they have to take turns again on a different day. You'd have thought NBC had already cut out all extraneous races to the point of ludicrousness, but my girl would be happy if they'd just show the winners winning and be done with it. Let's hope she never becomes a network exec.
One of the sports we watched last night was Skeleton, and why exactly don't they slap a parental advisory on this thing anyway? Luge was bad enough, but do you really want your child to get the idea that hurtling down an icy slope with his or her chin an inch off the ice would be a good way to go for Olympic glory? I felt like putting my hand over my daughter's eyes. In the end, though, I don't know what was more scary about that sport: the fact that, as one commentator commented, it's like leaning out of a car, face thisclose to the pavement, while it's going 80 miles an hour on the highway; or the fact that the silver medalist, that guy with the funny-colored spiky hair and extreme-sports demeanor, makes a living as an air traffic controller. Yeah, that's the guy I want landing my plane.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 22, 2002
So there are all these stinkin' teenagers on the TV winning gold medals, making me feel about 106. And there are their parents in the stands, looking all thrilled and basking in their offspring's accomplishments. Part of me feels a little sad, because it doesn't look like my kiddos will ever be doing anything to make sports commentators gush over them; my daughter at 11 is pretty much over-the-hill for beginning a sport, apparently, and my son ... well, if they ever come up with a sport that requires no motor planning ability, muscle tone or impulse control, he's there. But you know, it doesn't really matter, because we parents of children with special needs don't need the big things to be proud as all get-out. Little things are big. The first word at age 3, the potty training at age 5, the belated but welcome onset of pretend play or ball catching or even simple whining -- it's all gold medal material.
Sometimes it's something as simple as telling a riddle right. At dinner the other night, my deeply language delayed daughter upped the degree of difficulty on her dinner table conversation with this sentence-sentence combination: "Dad, I have a challenge for you. Do you see a pattern in the glasses on the table?" Her dad picked up pretty quickly that the boys had grape juice and the girls had apple juice, but I was too busy doing my victory dance to notice. I mean, she used the words "challenge" and "pattern" in a sentence absolutely correctly. That's hard for her. She understood the concept of "pattern" enough to actually pick one out on her own. That's harder. And she used language to turn her observation into a riddle. That's a 6.0, ladies and gentleman. The family looked at me a little funny when I started humming the national anthem, but hey, I'll take victory where I can find it.
Monday, February 11, 2002
February 11-15, 2002
FEBRUARY 11, 2002
I thought watching the Winter Olympics would be something my kids and I could do together. I have nice memories of watching them with my mom when I was growing up, and now my kids have the added incentive of seeing athletes from their native land competing with those from their adopted one. I thought my daughter would love watching the graceful figure skaters and my son would love all the speed-demon skiing and we'd all love having something on TV that didn't bore one of us to tears. But no: Bored is exactly what they are. Never mind the Russian competitors with the same name as my daughter or the folks hurtling down hills faster than we'd hurtle down the highway or the snowboarding that's just like the skateboarding on "Rocket Power." Unless Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and SpongeBob SquarePants turn up to do commentary soon, my kids could not be less interested in these games.
Which means I'm viewing on my own, since my husband thinks the events are either monotonous (anything that involves athletes going down the same slope or around the same course over and over) or silly (anything that involves men wearing spandex and sequins). But me, I could have that stuff on morning, noon and night. I'm ticked off at NBC for not having the games playing constantly somewhere on one of their cable networks, at least. If they're going to preempt my favorite prime time shows, the least they could do is give me something to watch at 10:30 on a Saturday morning in return. Let the kids squabble about who gets to watch the Disney channel and who gets to watch Nick; for the next two weeks, anyway, one of these TVs is mine. Loser gets to watch curling with mom.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 12, 2002
Watching the Winter Olympics this year, I am once again struck by what a bad example these athletes are setting for our young people. I'm not talking about steroids or bad sportsmanship here; I'm talking about how flat-out unsafe most of this stuff is. Maybe it's a good thing that my kids don't want to watch the games with me -- they might get the idea that, say, laying on your back on a small piece of metal and flying down an icy, slippery track is something they'd like to try. Which would have to in some way involve my dead body, Olympic glory or no Olympic glory.
The Olympics didn't need snowboarding to say they're into extreme sports; you can't get much more extreme than what some of those downhill skiers are doing, careening down nearly perpendicular slopes at speeds that would get you pulled over on the turnpike. Even so delicate a sport as figure skating now involves so many elaborate and risky jumps and throws that I have a hard time watching. I guess they're trying to make it more athletic and that's after all the point of this whole endeavor, but I liked it better when it was just pretty.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 13, 2002
I don't think I've ever been so happy to have children who have no prodigious talents yet apparent as when I heard Jim McKay's "Up Close and Personal" profile of figure skater Todd Eldridge last night. The story revealed how Eldridge had left home at the age of 10 to pursue his skating dreams. The age of 10! Do kids get to leave home at the age of 10? I mean, I know he wasn't standing at the side of the road with a sign reading "Olympics or Bust" or anything, but that seems such a tender age to devote one's life so completely to something. At age 10, my daughter devoted her life to watching the Disney Channel, but at least she didn't need to leave home to do it.
I suppose if your child does have an overwhelming talent and ability at something, be it ice skating or gymnastics or whatever other practice-intensive discipline comes to mind, it would be hard to deny them the absolute best shot at excellence, even if it meant moving away to train. I suppose it would be hard to say no; but how on earth could you say yes, knowing what sort of insane pressure these activities put on young people, knowing that any semblance of a real life is out of the question, knowing that your son might devote 20 years of his life to a sport and still fall down at every blasted Olympics. Knowing all that, wouldn't you just want to tell that 10-year-old to take the skates off, sit his butt down and watch some TV already? Come to think of it, maybe it's not a coincidence that my children are showing no prodigious talents...
+ + +
FEBRUARY 14, 2002
Between helping my daughter do a science report on dingos, helping my son make Valentine cupcakes for his class, watching a little "Star Trek" just to have some contact with my husband, and falling asleep where I sat, I didn't get to watch any of the Olympics last night. My only peek at the games was in the early evening when my daughter and I watched a little curling. Yes, it was curling that brought her to the TV at last. To ask, "What are they doing?" And, "Why?" If this were prime time on NBC, we'd get a detailed little documentary on the sport complete with bios of its main players and stirring theme music. But since it's 5:30 on MSNBC, we just got guys pushing rocks and sweeping. Do those guys sweep up around the house as part of their training? Just wondering.
Don't know if I missed any figure skating, but I'm not sure if I can handle the stress of that sport anyhow. The judging factor has become a problem, hasn't it? It's hard enough, as the sport has added so many complicated jumps and twists and throws, to watch the routines through parted fingers, silently willing the skaters to please, please stay upright; to then have them receive a figurative crow bar to the kneecaps in the scoring is too much. Were the judges wrong? How the heck do I know? I believe what Scott Hamilton tells me. I do have a pretty good idea, though, that if the Canadians had bobbled and won based on funny numbers and the Russians complained, we would not be still be hearing about it. There's something to be said, and to be taught to children, about being a good loser, even in the face of perceived injustice. Otherwise, parents across the land are going to be hearing about kids' grades being low because the teacher has a fix in.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 15, 2002
It seems like the news is full of cheaters these days, from duplicitous Enron execs to influenced Olympics judges to Web-surfing high school students. The first two I have no use for, but those high school kids ... the story goes that about a fifth of the sophomores in biology class in Piper, Kansas, copied material from the Web and used it in a leaf-describing project that formed half of their course grade. When the teacher failed them for plagiarizing, their parents protested, and the school board eventually ordered the teacher to change the grades. The teacher resigned, the town is up in arms, and pundits everywhere are using it as an example of the decline of American schools and American character. Cheating is cheating, plagiarism is theft, and condoning it in any way is saying that no one needs to do honest work anymore. There's always an excuse, a loophole, an irrational parent to get you out of it.
And I wonder: Did none of these people foaming at the mouth about the awfulness of copying work off the internet and getting away with it ever use something in their school days without rewriting it? I mean, I was a good writer in high school, and mostly did my own work, but there were more than a few times when a careful comparison between my research and the World Book Encyclopedia would have resulted in a mighty embarrassing similarity. It's hard, for a kid, to see something written clearly and then find a way to rewrite it, especially if it says pretty much exactly what they want to say. Goodness knows, it's hard for adults sometimes.
Parents of the offenders have been quoted as saying that their children worked hard on their projects -- which involved gathering leaves over a long period, studying them and making a nice presentation of them, in addition to looking up material on the Web and writing about them -- and don't deserve zeroes. They say their children did not understand to what degree they were expected to rewrite their research. The teacher counters that she made everybody sign a contract at the beginning of the project that there would be no plagiarism. But I wonder how many kids connect plagiarism -- the deliberate stealing of another's work and passing it off as your own, as in copying someone's report or downloading a term paper off the internet -- with putting research found on the Web word for word in one's own report. Did the teacher give them lessons in rewriting research? Did she explain that you're supposed to find several sources, distill them in your head, and mix them into a new presentation of thought? Are her students able to do that? Or were they just pointed toward the Web and expected to know what to do with it?
I think it's too bad that the teacher took the hard line she did here, rather than conferring with the students and families before giving the zeroes. And once she did give them, I think it's too bad that the school board didn't back her 100 percent. As in Olympic competitions, sometimes the decision of the judges just has to be final, like it or not; otherwise the whole system, and any respect for it, falls apart. That's what appeared to have happened in Piper, where students stopped listening to the teacher because they knew they could appeal any decision she made to the school board. I blame the kids for that attitude, and their parents if they condone it, but the cheating? Man, I've had my fourth-grade daughter copy sentences out of her textbook to answer social studies questions; is that plagiarism? She brought home research printed off the internet for a report on dingos the other day, with the parts she needed helpfully highlighted by her aide, and let me tell you, just getting her to understand what fit where was a big chore. Did I have her rewrite sufficiently? There are only so many ways you can describe the coat of a dingo. And, I'll bet, a leaf.
I thought watching the Winter Olympics would be something my kids and I could do together. I have nice memories of watching them with my mom when I was growing up, and now my kids have the added incentive of seeing athletes from their native land competing with those from their adopted one. I thought my daughter would love watching the graceful figure skaters and my son would love all the speed-demon skiing and we'd all love having something on TV that didn't bore one of us to tears. But no: Bored is exactly what they are. Never mind the Russian competitors with the same name as my daughter or the folks hurtling down hills faster than we'd hurtle down the highway or the snowboarding that's just like the skateboarding on "Rocket Power." Unless Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and SpongeBob SquarePants turn up to do commentary soon, my kids could not be less interested in these games.
Which means I'm viewing on my own, since my husband thinks the events are either monotonous (anything that involves athletes going down the same slope or around the same course over and over) or silly (anything that involves men wearing spandex and sequins). But me, I could have that stuff on morning, noon and night. I'm ticked off at NBC for not having the games playing constantly somewhere on one of their cable networks, at least. If they're going to preempt my favorite prime time shows, the least they could do is give me something to watch at 10:30 on a Saturday morning in return. Let the kids squabble about who gets to watch the Disney channel and who gets to watch Nick; for the next two weeks, anyway, one of these TVs is mine. Loser gets to watch curling with mom.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 12, 2002
Watching the Winter Olympics this year, I am once again struck by what a bad example these athletes are setting for our young people. I'm not talking about steroids or bad sportsmanship here; I'm talking about how flat-out unsafe most of this stuff is. Maybe it's a good thing that my kids don't want to watch the games with me -- they might get the idea that, say, laying on your back on a small piece of metal and flying down an icy, slippery track is something they'd like to try. Which would have to in some way involve my dead body, Olympic glory or no Olympic glory.
The Olympics didn't need snowboarding to say they're into extreme sports; you can't get much more extreme than what some of those downhill skiers are doing, careening down nearly perpendicular slopes at speeds that would get you pulled over on the turnpike. Even so delicate a sport as figure skating now involves so many elaborate and risky jumps and throws that I have a hard time watching. I guess they're trying to make it more athletic and that's after all the point of this whole endeavor, but I liked it better when it was just pretty.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 13, 2002
I don't think I've ever been so happy to have children who have no prodigious talents yet apparent as when I heard Jim McKay's "Up Close and Personal" profile of figure skater Todd Eldridge last night. The story revealed how Eldridge had left home at the age of 10 to pursue his skating dreams. The age of 10! Do kids get to leave home at the age of 10? I mean, I know he wasn't standing at the side of the road with a sign reading "Olympics or Bust" or anything, but that seems such a tender age to devote one's life so completely to something. At age 10, my daughter devoted her life to watching the Disney Channel, but at least she didn't need to leave home to do it.
I suppose if your child does have an overwhelming talent and ability at something, be it ice skating or gymnastics or whatever other practice-intensive discipline comes to mind, it would be hard to deny them the absolute best shot at excellence, even if it meant moving away to train. I suppose it would be hard to say no; but how on earth could you say yes, knowing what sort of insane pressure these activities put on young people, knowing that any semblance of a real life is out of the question, knowing that your son might devote 20 years of his life to a sport and still fall down at every blasted Olympics. Knowing all that, wouldn't you just want to tell that 10-year-old to take the skates off, sit his butt down and watch some TV already? Come to think of it, maybe it's not a coincidence that my children are showing no prodigious talents...
+ + +
FEBRUARY 14, 2002
Between helping my daughter do a science report on dingos, helping my son make Valentine cupcakes for his class, watching a little "Star Trek" just to have some contact with my husband, and falling asleep where I sat, I didn't get to watch any of the Olympics last night. My only peek at the games was in the early evening when my daughter and I watched a little curling. Yes, it was curling that brought her to the TV at last. To ask, "What are they doing?" And, "Why?" If this were prime time on NBC, we'd get a detailed little documentary on the sport complete with bios of its main players and stirring theme music. But since it's 5:30 on MSNBC, we just got guys pushing rocks and sweeping. Do those guys sweep up around the house as part of their training? Just wondering.
Don't know if I missed any figure skating, but I'm not sure if I can handle the stress of that sport anyhow. The judging factor has become a problem, hasn't it? It's hard enough, as the sport has added so many complicated jumps and twists and throws, to watch the routines through parted fingers, silently willing the skaters to please, please stay upright; to then have them receive a figurative crow bar to the kneecaps in the scoring is too much. Were the judges wrong? How the heck do I know? I believe what Scott Hamilton tells me. I do have a pretty good idea, though, that if the Canadians had bobbled and won based on funny numbers and the Russians complained, we would not be still be hearing about it. There's something to be said, and to be taught to children, about being a good loser, even in the face of perceived injustice. Otherwise, parents across the land are going to be hearing about kids' grades being low because the teacher has a fix in.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 15, 2002
It seems like the news is full of cheaters these days, from duplicitous Enron execs to influenced Olympics judges to Web-surfing high school students. The first two I have no use for, but those high school kids ... the story goes that about a fifth of the sophomores in biology class in Piper, Kansas, copied material from the Web and used it in a leaf-describing project that formed half of their course grade. When the teacher failed them for plagiarizing, their parents protested, and the school board eventually ordered the teacher to change the grades. The teacher resigned, the town is up in arms, and pundits everywhere are using it as an example of the decline of American schools and American character. Cheating is cheating, plagiarism is theft, and condoning it in any way is saying that no one needs to do honest work anymore. There's always an excuse, a loophole, an irrational parent to get you out of it.
And I wonder: Did none of these people foaming at the mouth about the awfulness of copying work off the internet and getting away with it ever use something in their school days without rewriting it? I mean, I was a good writer in high school, and mostly did my own work, but there were more than a few times when a careful comparison between my research and the World Book Encyclopedia would have resulted in a mighty embarrassing similarity. It's hard, for a kid, to see something written clearly and then find a way to rewrite it, especially if it says pretty much exactly what they want to say. Goodness knows, it's hard for adults sometimes.
Parents of the offenders have been quoted as saying that their children worked hard on their projects -- which involved gathering leaves over a long period, studying them and making a nice presentation of them, in addition to looking up material on the Web and writing about them -- and don't deserve zeroes. They say their children did not understand to what degree they were expected to rewrite their research. The teacher counters that she made everybody sign a contract at the beginning of the project that there would be no plagiarism. But I wonder how many kids connect plagiarism -- the deliberate stealing of another's work and passing it off as your own, as in copying someone's report or downloading a term paper off the internet -- with putting research found on the Web word for word in one's own report. Did the teacher give them lessons in rewriting research? Did she explain that you're supposed to find several sources, distill them in your head, and mix them into a new presentation of thought? Are her students able to do that? Or were they just pointed toward the Web and expected to know what to do with it?
I think it's too bad that the teacher took the hard line she did here, rather than conferring with the students and families before giving the zeroes. And once she did give them, I think it's too bad that the school board didn't back her 100 percent. As in Olympic competitions, sometimes the decision of the judges just has to be final, like it or not; otherwise the whole system, and any respect for it, falls apart. That's what appeared to have happened in Piper, where students stopped listening to the teacher because they knew they could appeal any decision she made to the school board. I blame the kids for that attitude, and their parents if they condone it, but the cheating? Man, I've had my fourth-grade daughter copy sentences out of her textbook to answer social studies questions; is that plagiarism? She brought home research printed off the internet for a report on dingos the other day, with the parts she needed helpfully highlighted by her aide, and let me tell you, just getting her to understand what fit where was a big chore. Did I have her rewrite sufficiently? There are only so many ways you can describe the coat of a dingo. And, I'll bet, a leaf.
Monday, February 04, 2002
February 4-8, 2002
FEBRUARY 4, 2002
Well, once again, our household does not exactly have its finger on the pulse of popular culture. Maybe we're somewhere near the shoulder of popular culture. Or the right ear. At any rate, on Super Bowl Sunday, the day when a nation turns its attention to sports and snack foods, our television was tuned to the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen marathon on the ABC Family channel. Morning (the early twin movie "To Grandmother's House We Go," a longtime favorite in our VCR), noon (re-runs of one of the girls' forgettable post-Full House TV series) and night (the teen twins make mischief in Paris), we were all Olsens, all the time. Now, of course, we do have more than one TV; the other was devoted to the "Hey, Arnold!" marathon on Nickelodeon. My husband did get to watch the tail end of the Big Game after the kids went to bed, but by then all the good commercials -- certainly the only reason I have any interest in the game -- were gone.
It's interesting that the non-Super Bowl-carrying channels have broadened the strategy of counterprogramming with shows aimed at women to counterprogramming with shows aimed at kids. Probably a smart one, too: Moms are likely more willing to humor Dads and let them watch the game than the kids are. Heck, you know, I've already seen "Sabrina," and a Lifetime movie about Brooke Shields being stalked by Richard Thomas does not appeal, and there are, after all, those commercials; but my daughter, well, you do not wrest my daughter away from Mary-Kate and Ashley programming without a crowbar. Not even with all the Britney Spears Pepsi ads in the world.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 5, 2002
It's sort of one of the perks of parenthood to be able to complain that everything was so much harder when you were a kid. Five miles barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, and all that. So it always throws me when my daughter brings home tests marked "D" or "F," and I realize that in my day -- you know, back when things were really tough -- those would have been "C"s and "D"s. I distinctly remember that we were graded on a strict 10-percent system: 90 A, 80 B, 70 C, 60 D, and anything under 60 was an F. It seemed fair; if you knew seven out of 10 answers, you were about average; if you barely knew half, you weren't.
But now -- and whether it's a sign of the times or just a sign of a crotchety school district, I don't know -- the percentages have been tightened up. For my girl, it's 90 A, 80 B, 75 C, 70 D, and anything under 70 is an F. That's a full 10-point difference from my good old days, and it means it's impossible to get a C on a 10-question test. Not right, somehow. So I've made a deal with my daughter: Her teacher might call a 74 a D and a 69 an F, but in my book, they're a letter-grade higher. You can't blame the old folks sometimes for having their heads caught in the past.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 6, 2002
It's come to this: I've actually purchased a "SpongeBob SquarePants" chapter book to yank my son into reading. The line between TV viewing and reading hereabouts just gets blurrier and blurrier. It all seemed harmless enough when it was "Arthur" and "Clifford" and "Franklin" and "Little Bear" books, because those were all literature before they were televised. But now the reverse trend is in full swing, and there are "Scooby-Doo" books and "Blue's Clues" books and "Rugrats" books overstuffing our bookcase. And now, of all things, a "SpongeBob SquarePants" book. That surrealistic series seems the last thing you'd expect to find in the relatively harmless confines of a simple chapter book.
The story is straightforward by SpongeBob standards, involving Patrick the starfish's destructive behavior when SpongeBob's valentine for him is unexpectedly detained. My son has in fact been interested in reading it with me -- his first chapter book -- and I've found, somewhat alarmingly, that I do the voices of Patrick and the squirrel Sandy pretty darn well. Don't know where this tube-to-tome trend is going to lead for us, but if Emeril Lagasse ever does novelizations of his Food Network adventures for the 7-10 set, we're there.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 7, 2002
I'm obsessed right now with my son's calcium intake. There's not enough of it. The boy steadfastly refuses to drink milk, and I'm okay with that; but now he's being finicky about yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, all those milk alternates I've been pumping into him, and I'm getting worried. The one true thing about my son has always been that you can't really get him to do something he doesn't want to do. He's self-determining. You can make him want to do it, if you're lucky, but especially in terms of eating, he eats what he eats.
I've been frantically dashing about the Web, then, looking for other calcium ideas. Collard greens! Canned shrimp! Tofu! Sardines are a possibility, since he likes fish and he likes salty things and he likes things that most kids think are disgusting. Broccoli is good; he likes broccoli. Perhaps a healthy breakfast of broccoli and sardines will do his bones good? Because he's sure not eating cereal with milk. He does eat waffles, which according to the package, offer 10% of our daily calcium needs. He also eats cream cheese, which according to the package offers 0%. How can that be? Guess they're whipping all the good stuff out of cream cheese and injecting it into Eggos. But heck, I'll take the calcium where I can get it. Or he can, anyway.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 8, 2002
My son's teacher sent home one of those notices last week that strikes fear in the hearts of adoptive parents: a request for a baby picture. I've always figured that, if the question came up, we could use one of his pictures from the orphanage. He was 21 months old, but he was about the size of a healthy infant. But as it turns out, it wasn't necessary. The fine print on the notice actually specified a picture of age three and under. I thought it was nice of the teacher to be so vague, and told her so. Her answer was, "You think your son's the only one in the class who's adopted?" And actually, I do know of at least one other child who is, and it turns out she was adopted at age three, and thus the age cut-off.
I guess it's one of the perks of being in a small, self-contained special-ed class, in which the teacher gets lots of detailed information on her students' backgrounds. When you've only got eight students, you can do some thinking about how to make things appropriate for everybody. So although we had those baby-looking pictures available, my son was able to pick a picture of himself on his second birthday. Another boy -- not to my knowledge adopted -- showed me the picture he brought, and it was of about the same age. No one standing out here for lack of infant photography. Would that all adopted kids would get the same inclusive assignments.
Well, once again, our household does not exactly have its finger on the pulse of popular culture. Maybe we're somewhere near the shoulder of popular culture. Or the right ear. At any rate, on Super Bowl Sunday, the day when a nation turns its attention to sports and snack foods, our television was tuned to the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen marathon on the ABC Family channel. Morning (the early twin movie "To Grandmother's House We Go," a longtime favorite in our VCR), noon (re-runs of one of the girls' forgettable post-Full House TV series) and night (the teen twins make mischief in Paris), we were all Olsens, all the time. Now, of course, we do have more than one TV; the other was devoted to the "Hey, Arnold!" marathon on Nickelodeon. My husband did get to watch the tail end of the Big Game after the kids went to bed, but by then all the good commercials -- certainly the only reason I have any interest in the game -- were gone.
It's interesting that the non-Super Bowl-carrying channels have broadened the strategy of counterprogramming with shows aimed at women to counterprogramming with shows aimed at kids. Probably a smart one, too: Moms are likely more willing to humor Dads and let them watch the game than the kids are. Heck, you know, I've already seen "Sabrina," and a Lifetime movie about Brooke Shields being stalked by Richard Thomas does not appeal, and there are, after all, those commercials; but my daughter, well, you do not wrest my daughter away from Mary-Kate and Ashley programming without a crowbar. Not even with all the Britney Spears Pepsi ads in the world.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 5, 2002
It's sort of one of the perks of parenthood to be able to complain that everything was so much harder when you were a kid. Five miles barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, and all that. So it always throws me when my daughter brings home tests marked "D" or "F," and I realize that in my day -- you know, back when things were really tough -- those would have been "C"s and "D"s. I distinctly remember that we were graded on a strict 10-percent system: 90 A, 80 B, 70 C, 60 D, and anything under 60 was an F. It seemed fair; if you knew seven out of 10 answers, you were about average; if you barely knew half, you weren't.
But now -- and whether it's a sign of the times or just a sign of a crotchety school district, I don't know -- the percentages have been tightened up. For my girl, it's 90 A, 80 B, 75 C, 70 D, and anything under 70 is an F. That's a full 10-point difference from my good old days, and it means it's impossible to get a C on a 10-question test. Not right, somehow. So I've made a deal with my daughter: Her teacher might call a 74 a D and a 69 an F, but in my book, they're a letter-grade higher. You can't blame the old folks sometimes for having their heads caught in the past.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 6, 2002
It's come to this: I've actually purchased a "SpongeBob SquarePants" chapter book to yank my son into reading. The line between TV viewing and reading hereabouts just gets blurrier and blurrier. It all seemed harmless enough when it was "Arthur" and "Clifford" and "Franklin" and "Little Bear" books, because those were all literature before they were televised. But now the reverse trend is in full swing, and there are "Scooby-Doo" books and "Blue's Clues" books and "Rugrats" books overstuffing our bookcase. And now, of all things, a "SpongeBob SquarePants" book. That surrealistic series seems the last thing you'd expect to find in the relatively harmless confines of a simple chapter book.
The story is straightforward by SpongeBob standards, involving Patrick the starfish's destructive behavior when SpongeBob's valentine for him is unexpectedly detained. My son has in fact been interested in reading it with me -- his first chapter book -- and I've found, somewhat alarmingly, that I do the voices of Patrick and the squirrel Sandy pretty darn well. Don't know where this tube-to-tome trend is going to lead for us, but if Emeril Lagasse ever does novelizations of his Food Network adventures for the 7-10 set, we're there.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 7, 2002
I'm obsessed right now with my son's calcium intake. There's not enough of it. The boy steadfastly refuses to drink milk, and I'm okay with that; but now he's being finicky about yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, all those milk alternates I've been pumping into him, and I'm getting worried. The one true thing about my son has always been that you can't really get him to do something he doesn't want to do. He's self-determining. You can make him want to do it, if you're lucky, but especially in terms of eating, he eats what he eats.
I've been frantically dashing about the Web, then, looking for other calcium ideas. Collard greens! Canned shrimp! Tofu! Sardines are a possibility, since he likes fish and he likes salty things and he likes things that most kids think are disgusting. Broccoli is good; he likes broccoli. Perhaps a healthy breakfast of broccoli and sardines will do his bones good? Because he's sure not eating cereal with milk. He does eat waffles, which according to the package, offer 10% of our daily calcium needs. He also eats cream cheese, which according to the package offers 0%. How can that be? Guess they're whipping all the good stuff out of cream cheese and injecting it into Eggos. But heck, I'll take the calcium where I can get it. Or he can, anyway.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 8, 2002
My son's teacher sent home one of those notices last week that strikes fear in the hearts of adoptive parents: a request for a baby picture. I've always figured that, if the question came up, we could use one of his pictures from the orphanage. He was 21 months old, but he was about the size of a healthy infant. But as it turns out, it wasn't necessary. The fine print on the notice actually specified a picture of age three and under. I thought it was nice of the teacher to be so vague, and told her so. Her answer was, "You think your son's the only one in the class who's adopted?" And actually, I do know of at least one other child who is, and it turns out she was adopted at age three, and thus the age cut-off.
I guess it's one of the perks of being in a small, self-contained special-ed class, in which the teacher gets lots of detailed information on her students' backgrounds. When you've only got eight students, you can do some thinking about how to make things appropriate for everybody. So although we had those baby-looking pictures available, my son was able to pick a picture of himself on his second birthday. Another boy -- not to my knowledge adopted -- showed me the picture he brought, and it was of about the same age. No one standing out here for lack of infant photography. Would that all adopted kids would get the same inclusive assignments.
Monday, January 28, 2002
January 28-February 1, 2002
JANUARY 28, 2002
Hoo-boy, Harry Potter. My daughter's class is finally finishing up with this contemporary classic, and although I know it's enchanted and enthralled many a young reader, my girl is most definitely not one of them. She hated the book. Hated it because it was make-believe and not nice concrete real life; hated it because it was long; hated it because it was wordy; hated it because it flew higher over her head than Harry on a broomstick. She didn't get it. And that made helping her with her end-of-book homework a pretty darn impossible quest.
The work that came home to be finished this weekend included long lists of vocabulary words for each chapter, to be matched with their meanings. My personal feeling on vocabulary for my very language-delayed girl is that if it's not in our Children's Dictionary, she shouldn't have to know it; of the Harry Potter words listed, at least half weren't in the dictionary at all, and often the ones that were weren't listed with the particular usage the author employed. The Harry Potter books use great creativity of language, and that's great. Maybe they get kids interested in those unusual words, and that's great, too. But getting my girl to figure out meanings of things like "oddment" and "treacle" and "quaver" for an assignment? Hey, at least they could have sent home a magic wand to help.
+ + +
JANUARY 29, 2002
It is with the pride of the mother of a genius that I take this opportunity to publish my son's very first book report. His teacher was awfully proud of it, especially since he started out saying "I can't do it" and then settled into writing (by fine-motor-delayed hand) three pages of insightful summary and critique. She said he read it to most of the other special-ed classes, and he's read it to various members of his family, so why should you miss out? The author is 8 years old and in a 2nd-grade-ish self-contained special-ed class. (And alright, I have a cold and don't feel like writing anything today. If it's good enough for that "Family Circus" guy, it's good enough for me.)
The Great Ball Game
I read "The Great Ball Game" by Joseph Bruchac. The story takes place in a field. The characters are the deer, the fox, the bird, the hawk, bat, bear, and crane. I love all the characters.
The story took place in a field. The problem was that crane and hawk were at war. Crane and hawk stole the ball from the animals. The animals said "Let's play ball." The bat solved the problem by getting in the game. He could see in the dark to get the ball. The bat got the ball and won. The animals made the birds go south.
I liked this story. I liked how the story ended.
Sheer brilliance, don'tcha think?
+ + +
JANUARY 30, 2002
Well, now, here's an embarrassing thing: Here I am, the big library volunteer mom, checking in those books, making a list of transgressors who haven't turned theirs in and turning it over to the school librarian. I'm the enforcer of the overdues, and yet, here I am, the night before my son goes to the library with me behind the desk, and I can't find his book. I know I've seen it around here recently -- "Curious George Takes the Cake," it is -- but I don't see it around here now. I've checked all the big sloppy piles o' junk where I usually put the library books, but there are no library books to be found. No school library books, anyway; there's a bunch of city library books on the end table in the living room, and actually there is a school library book that I checked out as a volunteer buried in a box in my room, but Curious George? I'm curious as to where he might be.
The problem here is that we cleaned off the dining room table on Saturday, and that's always a fatal thing to do in terms of finding what needs finding. Something always disappears into limbo when all the sloppy piles on that table are put into orderly places. Last time it was a $100 gift certificate. This time, it's a library book. Or maybe not. Maybe I took the book off the dining room table and put it in my son's backpack, and maybe he brought it to school on Monday two days early. Maybe the teacher's lost it! Yes, that must be it. And if not, at least my library mom status gives me a few minutes to pay for the book before my boy comes in so he can still check something out. Volunteering has its priveleges.
+ + +
JANUARY 31, 2002
The cold that has so far made its way through my daughter and me seems today to have settled on my son. I'm feeling much better, just as my girl felt much better as soon as I was stricken, but the little guy feels feverish and is coughing and acting subdued, at least for him. He was able to work himself up into a little bit of a frenzy around bedtime, but it was a pale imitation of his usual 9:30 wild boy act. He's a sickie, and if he's still under the weather tomorrow, we both get to take a sick day. I am not necessarily hoping for an overnight recovery.
Illness has been blowing through our town these past weeks, probably due at least in part to the fact that the weather has been snowing one day, 60 degrees the next. You hear whispers of various viruses settling in at the different elementary schools around town. Judging from what I heard in the halls while working at the library this week, our school has the "coughing like a seal" cold running rampant. This is loud and a little scary but preferable to the "throwing up" virus at my co-worker's kids' school. Let's hope that one keeps to its own campus.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 1, 2002
I had a meeting with my son's teacher the other day, and she told me this story: My boy had been reading a story in his reading book about brothers and sisters, and it included a passage about adoption -- something about siblings who did not have the same birthparents but nonetheless shared a forever bond. And my son looked up at his teacher with his big blue eyes, and said that was like him and his sister -- "We have different mommies and daddies, but she's my sister and I'll love her forever." Major aww moment there. My son's good at those. He's a regular walking Hallmark commercial.
Even so, I was particularly impressed by this piece of sentiment, because he and his sister are usually at each other's throats. He enjoys hitting her, hugging her when she clearly does not wish to be hugged, and making rude noises in her direction. She enjoys making sarcastic remarks in his direction, pushing him away, and putting a cereal box between them during breakfast so that she does not have to see his face. It's impressive that he would nonetheless declare his love for her in such a spontaneous manner. It's more impressive that he's actually been listening when I've talked about adoption, and about the fact that the two of them have different birthparents. I'm actually stunned that he's picked that up. It's further evidence that he hears and processes everything, whether he shows any signs of being in the same dimension when you're talking or not.
Because I enjoy pushing my luck, I told my daughter about what her brother had said. She rolled her eyes at that, and said, as she so often does. "But he's crazy!" Then, she thought about it for a moment, and said in a most exasperated fashion, "I mean, I love him. But he's crazy!" I tell you, it's these tender emotional moments that keep a mom going.
Hoo-boy, Harry Potter. My daughter's class is finally finishing up with this contemporary classic, and although I know it's enchanted and enthralled many a young reader, my girl is most definitely not one of them. She hated the book. Hated it because it was make-believe and not nice concrete real life; hated it because it was long; hated it because it was wordy; hated it because it flew higher over her head than Harry on a broomstick. She didn't get it. And that made helping her with her end-of-book homework a pretty darn impossible quest.
The work that came home to be finished this weekend included long lists of vocabulary words for each chapter, to be matched with their meanings. My personal feeling on vocabulary for my very language-delayed girl is that if it's not in our Children's Dictionary, she shouldn't have to know it; of the Harry Potter words listed, at least half weren't in the dictionary at all, and often the ones that were weren't listed with the particular usage the author employed. The Harry Potter books use great creativity of language, and that's great. Maybe they get kids interested in those unusual words, and that's great, too. But getting my girl to figure out meanings of things like "oddment" and "treacle" and "quaver" for an assignment? Hey, at least they could have sent home a magic wand to help.
+ + +
JANUARY 29, 2002
It is with the pride of the mother of a genius that I take this opportunity to publish my son's very first book report. His teacher was awfully proud of it, especially since he started out saying "I can't do it" and then settled into writing (by fine-motor-delayed hand) three pages of insightful summary and critique. She said he read it to most of the other special-ed classes, and he's read it to various members of his family, so why should you miss out? The author is 8 years old and in a 2nd-grade-ish self-contained special-ed class. (And alright, I have a cold and don't feel like writing anything today. If it's good enough for that "Family Circus" guy, it's good enough for me.)
The Great Ball Game
I read "The Great Ball Game" by Joseph Bruchac. The story takes place in a field. The characters are the deer, the fox, the bird, the hawk, bat, bear, and crane. I love all the characters.
The story took place in a field. The problem was that crane and hawk were at war. Crane and hawk stole the ball from the animals. The animals said "Let's play ball." The bat solved the problem by getting in the game. He could see in the dark to get the ball. The bat got the ball and won. The animals made the birds go south.
I liked this story. I liked how the story ended.
Sheer brilliance, don'tcha think?
+ + +
JANUARY 30, 2002
Well, now, here's an embarrassing thing: Here I am, the big library volunteer mom, checking in those books, making a list of transgressors who haven't turned theirs in and turning it over to the school librarian. I'm the enforcer of the overdues, and yet, here I am, the night before my son goes to the library with me behind the desk, and I can't find his book. I know I've seen it around here recently -- "Curious George Takes the Cake," it is -- but I don't see it around here now. I've checked all the big sloppy piles o' junk where I usually put the library books, but there are no library books to be found. No school library books, anyway; there's a bunch of city library books on the end table in the living room, and actually there is a school library book that I checked out as a volunteer buried in a box in my room, but Curious George? I'm curious as to where he might be.
The problem here is that we cleaned off the dining room table on Saturday, and that's always a fatal thing to do in terms of finding what needs finding. Something always disappears into limbo when all the sloppy piles on that table are put into orderly places. Last time it was a $100 gift certificate. This time, it's a library book. Or maybe not. Maybe I took the book off the dining room table and put it in my son's backpack, and maybe he brought it to school on Monday two days early. Maybe the teacher's lost it! Yes, that must be it. And if not, at least my library mom status gives me a few minutes to pay for the book before my boy comes in so he can still check something out. Volunteering has its priveleges.
+ + +
JANUARY 31, 2002
The cold that has so far made its way through my daughter and me seems today to have settled on my son. I'm feeling much better, just as my girl felt much better as soon as I was stricken, but the little guy feels feverish and is coughing and acting subdued, at least for him. He was able to work himself up into a little bit of a frenzy around bedtime, but it was a pale imitation of his usual 9:30 wild boy act. He's a sickie, and if he's still under the weather tomorrow, we both get to take a sick day. I am not necessarily hoping for an overnight recovery.
Illness has been blowing through our town these past weeks, probably due at least in part to the fact that the weather has been snowing one day, 60 degrees the next. You hear whispers of various viruses settling in at the different elementary schools around town. Judging from what I heard in the halls while working at the library this week, our school has the "coughing like a seal" cold running rampant. This is loud and a little scary but preferable to the "throwing up" virus at my co-worker's kids' school. Let's hope that one keeps to its own campus.
+ + +
FEBRUARY 1, 2002
I had a meeting with my son's teacher the other day, and she told me this story: My boy had been reading a story in his reading book about brothers and sisters, and it included a passage about adoption -- something about siblings who did not have the same birthparents but nonetheless shared a forever bond. And my son looked up at his teacher with his big blue eyes, and said that was like him and his sister -- "We have different mommies and daddies, but she's my sister and I'll love her forever." Major aww moment there. My son's good at those. He's a regular walking Hallmark commercial.
Even so, I was particularly impressed by this piece of sentiment, because he and his sister are usually at each other's throats. He enjoys hitting her, hugging her when she clearly does not wish to be hugged, and making rude noises in her direction. She enjoys making sarcastic remarks in his direction, pushing him away, and putting a cereal box between them during breakfast so that she does not have to see his face. It's impressive that he would nonetheless declare his love for her in such a spontaneous manner. It's more impressive that he's actually been listening when I've talked about adoption, and about the fact that the two of them have different birthparents. I'm actually stunned that he's picked that up. It's further evidence that he hears and processes everything, whether he shows any signs of being in the same dimension when you're talking or not.
Because I enjoy pushing my luck, I told my daughter about what her brother had said. She rolled her eyes at that, and said, as she so often does. "But he's crazy!" Then, she thought about it for a moment, and said in a most exasperated fashion, "I mean, I love him. But he's crazy!" I tell you, it's these tender emotional moments that keep a mom going.
Monday, January 21, 2002
January 21-25, 2002
JANUARY 21, 2002
We're doing a lot of worrying in advance at our house these days about middle school. My daughter still has half of 4th and all of 5th grade to go before she moves to the big scary school up the street, but she can't stop thinking about it. What's it like to have a locker? How do you remember the combination? How do you know which rooms to go to? How much time is there to switch classes? Are you required to chat in the hallways like on "Lizzie McGuire"? Is there swimming involved?
I've been chastising her for worrying too soon, but then the other day I realized: If middle school starts half an hour earlier than elementary school, and she wants to get there at least 10 minutes early, I'm going to be dropping her off 40 minutes before my son will need to be at his school, and since we're less than 5 minutes from either school, there'll be too much time in between to do it in one trip. How am I going to manage two? Will my son be old enough to be left alone in a year and a half? Will I need to yank him out of bed to help drop his sister off, then bring him home, then take him out again? Do we know someone who can give her a ride? Should I set it up this far in advance?
Now, I still think it's too soon for my girl to be worrying about anything middle-school related. Clearly, that's my job, and I don't like to share.
+ + +
JANUARY 22, 2002
Apparently, my husband and I are among those responsible for the decline of the American family. I wouldn't have thought so, but I was laying out an article for the Catholic newspaper I work for, and a psychiatrist was quoted as describing how the disrepair of the family unit was causing societal woe, and she mentioned, as one damaging factor, that ever fewer children are living with their "biological, married parents." Certainly the rise in single-parent families is something that has been debated before, and will be again. Though I may or may not agree with her assessment there, I can at least see where she's coming from. But biological? Is she theorizing that adoptive parents are contributing to the breakdown of American civilization? I had to say "What the ..." Well, I was working on a Catholic paper, so I suppose I had to say "What the heck." But it certainly took me aback.
I like to think I'm pretty thick-skinned about the treatment of adoption in the media. I don't get all huffy about commericals or greeting cards or highway signs that are thought to be less than sensitive. And in this case, I suppose, the speaker in question was referring to the number of children floating in foster care, and not to those integrated into adoptive family units. All the same, I deleted that sentence from the article for our publication. Every now and then, I claim the right to get defensive.
+ + +
JANUARY 23, 2002
Ah, luxury. After a couple of extra-specially stress-filled days at work, my boss told me to take today off. A whole day, with the kids at school! They're always home when I'm home on the weekends, and whenever my office is closed for some reason the school always seems to be closed as well. But not today! Today is mine. Whatever shall I do?
There are so many possibilities. I could clean the house in peace. (Ha!) I could catch up on reading all those magazines that have been piling up. I could start in on that big ol' book about the brain I bought over the weekend (Synaptic Self : How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux. Looks interesting. Feels heavy.) I could finally start on that project to write an outline for a booklet on PI issues that I promised people on an e-mail list would be done a few weeks ago. I could watch a DVD or go shopping or throw out all the torn plastic bags on the floor of my son's room while he's not looking (he likes collecting and tearing plastic shopping bags, okay? It's a hobby.) But I know what will probably happen: I'll just sit here at my desk all day, drinking coffee and surfing aimlessly around the 'net, checking my e-mail every 20 seconds and waiting for something interesting to come by.
Kind of like I do on days off when the kids are home.
+ + +
JANUARY 24, 2002
My daughter seems to be doing better now in fourth grade. She needs less help with her homework. She seems to be able to find answers in the textbook with more skill than in past months. The math they're doing now is easier for her (unless there's a page on money. Arghhh, money -- let's not go there). She's said numerous times that fourth grade is easy now. She often comes home an announces that a test or quiz was "piece of cake, Mom, piece of cake." Have I mentioned that she's now using lots of new expressions?
I've been feeling good about the progress and confidence I'm seeing. So of course, when I saw my daughter's aide at school the other day, she had to tell me how concerned she was, my daughter was struggling so much with the work, she was so frustrated by some of the assignments, she thought everybody was doing better than her, and so on. Why doesn't anybody at school ever see the same girl I see? I see confidence, happiness, progress. They see faltering, frustration, failure. I don't see her in the classroom, but it's hard to believe that she's that severely different. I think it's just another symptom of the basic dichotomy that's followed us all through school: They look at her with sympathy, and I look at her with hope. Maybe we all need to get new glasses.
+ + +
JANUARY 25, 2002
When my son's teacher brought him to the door yesterday, she announced that the bad news was this big (small space between fingers) and the good news was this big (large space between hands). Which did I want first? I went for the tiny bad news. It came in two parts: One, he has used the "d-word" in class. (At which point my boy, standing nearby, helpfully chimed in with which "d-word" that was.) Two, he had wandered away from the classroom at lunchtime and gotten in the line for another class, causing a certain amount of panic until he was found. I think he's giving the classroom aide a run for her money this year. I promised to talk to him about how important it is to stay with his class, but talking with my son about events that are in the past or in the future, but not happening right now, is usually an iffy proposition. Heck, sometimes talking to him about things that are happening right now is iffy, too.
Then on to the good news: That day, in class, he had written a book report. A book report! His very first. For a jumpy guy with poor fine motor skills, this was big good news indeed. The teacher reported with amazement that after his standard opening of, "It's too hard. I can't do it," he had delved into it and wound up with something that had multiple paragraphs, went into the text at some depth, and ended up with a little analysis at the end. Too cool. Of course, after baiting me with that, the teacher said I couldn't see it for a few days because now he had to rewrite and polish it, and even then she'd only give me a copy because she was going to put it up on the board. Man, how I hate to wait! It almost makes me want to say the "d-word."
We're doing a lot of worrying in advance at our house these days about middle school. My daughter still has half of 4th and all of 5th grade to go before she moves to the big scary school up the street, but she can't stop thinking about it. What's it like to have a locker? How do you remember the combination? How do you know which rooms to go to? How much time is there to switch classes? Are you required to chat in the hallways like on "Lizzie McGuire"? Is there swimming involved?
I've been chastising her for worrying too soon, but then the other day I realized: If middle school starts half an hour earlier than elementary school, and she wants to get there at least 10 minutes early, I'm going to be dropping her off 40 minutes before my son will need to be at his school, and since we're less than 5 minutes from either school, there'll be too much time in between to do it in one trip. How am I going to manage two? Will my son be old enough to be left alone in a year and a half? Will I need to yank him out of bed to help drop his sister off, then bring him home, then take him out again? Do we know someone who can give her a ride? Should I set it up this far in advance?
Now, I still think it's too soon for my girl to be worrying about anything middle-school related. Clearly, that's my job, and I don't like to share.
+ + +
JANUARY 22, 2002
Apparently, my husband and I are among those responsible for the decline of the American family. I wouldn't have thought so, but I was laying out an article for the Catholic newspaper I work for, and a psychiatrist was quoted as describing how the disrepair of the family unit was causing societal woe, and she mentioned, as one damaging factor, that ever fewer children are living with their "biological, married parents." Certainly the rise in single-parent families is something that has been debated before, and will be again. Though I may or may not agree with her assessment there, I can at least see where she's coming from. But biological? Is she theorizing that adoptive parents are contributing to the breakdown of American civilization? I had to say "What the ..." Well, I was working on a Catholic paper, so I suppose I had to say "What the heck." But it certainly took me aback.
I like to think I'm pretty thick-skinned about the treatment of adoption in the media. I don't get all huffy about commericals or greeting cards or highway signs that are thought to be less than sensitive. And in this case, I suppose, the speaker in question was referring to the number of children floating in foster care, and not to those integrated into adoptive family units. All the same, I deleted that sentence from the article for our publication. Every now and then, I claim the right to get defensive.
+ + +
JANUARY 23, 2002
Ah, luxury. After a couple of extra-specially stress-filled days at work, my boss told me to take today off. A whole day, with the kids at school! They're always home when I'm home on the weekends, and whenever my office is closed for some reason the school always seems to be closed as well. But not today! Today is mine. Whatever shall I do?
There are so many possibilities. I could clean the house in peace. (Ha!) I could catch up on reading all those magazines that have been piling up. I could start in on that big ol' book about the brain I bought over the weekend (Synaptic Self : How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux. Looks interesting. Feels heavy.) I could finally start on that project to write an outline for a booklet on PI issues that I promised people on an e-mail list would be done a few weeks ago. I could watch a DVD or go shopping or throw out all the torn plastic bags on the floor of my son's room while he's not looking (he likes collecting and tearing plastic shopping bags, okay? It's a hobby.) But I know what will probably happen: I'll just sit here at my desk all day, drinking coffee and surfing aimlessly around the 'net, checking my e-mail every 20 seconds and waiting for something interesting to come by.
Kind of like I do on days off when the kids are home.
+ + +
JANUARY 24, 2002
My daughter seems to be doing better now in fourth grade. She needs less help with her homework. She seems to be able to find answers in the textbook with more skill than in past months. The math they're doing now is easier for her (unless there's a page on money. Arghhh, money -- let's not go there). She's said numerous times that fourth grade is easy now. She often comes home an announces that a test or quiz was "piece of cake, Mom, piece of cake." Have I mentioned that she's now using lots of new expressions?
I've been feeling good about the progress and confidence I'm seeing. So of course, when I saw my daughter's aide at school the other day, she had to tell me how concerned she was, my daughter was struggling so much with the work, she was so frustrated by some of the assignments, she thought everybody was doing better than her, and so on. Why doesn't anybody at school ever see the same girl I see? I see confidence, happiness, progress. They see faltering, frustration, failure. I don't see her in the classroom, but it's hard to believe that she's that severely different. I think it's just another symptom of the basic dichotomy that's followed us all through school: They look at her with sympathy, and I look at her with hope. Maybe we all need to get new glasses.
+ + +
JANUARY 25, 2002
When my son's teacher brought him to the door yesterday, she announced that the bad news was this big (small space between fingers) and the good news was this big (large space between hands). Which did I want first? I went for the tiny bad news. It came in two parts: One, he has used the "d-word" in class. (At which point my boy, standing nearby, helpfully chimed in with which "d-word" that was.) Two, he had wandered away from the classroom at lunchtime and gotten in the line for another class, causing a certain amount of panic until he was found. I think he's giving the classroom aide a run for her money this year. I promised to talk to him about how important it is to stay with his class, but talking with my son about events that are in the past or in the future, but not happening right now, is usually an iffy proposition. Heck, sometimes talking to him about things that are happening right now is iffy, too.
Then on to the good news: That day, in class, he had written a book report. A book report! His very first. For a jumpy guy with poor fine motor skills, this was big good news indeed. The teacher reported with amazement that after his standard opening of, "It's too hard. I can't do it," he had delved into it and wound up with something that had multiple paragraphs, went into the text at some depth, and ended up with a little analysis at the end. Too cool. Of course, after baiting me with that, the teacher said I couldn't see it for a few days because now he had to rewrite and polish it, and even then she'd only give me a copy because she was going to put it up on the board. Man, how I hate to wait! It almost makes me want to say the "d-word."
Monday, January 14, 2002
January 14-18, 2002
JANUARY 14, 2002
My daughter's teacher paid me a compliment when we met after school last week. At least, I think it was meant as a compliment. We were talking about how my daughter was doing, and I was telling her about the things I was doing to help her at home, showing her books I was reading, going on a little about theories of teaching reading comprehension, and she asked if I had ever thought of going into teaching myself. Since I seemed so interested in it and all. She thought it might be one of those cases where one's hobby and one's career might be one and the same.
I told her what I tell myself whenever I get thoughts of being a teacher, which is: Honey, I just don't have the patience. She demurred that nobody has that patience with their own kids, but with other people's kids, you do. I'm not so sure. I taught an extra-curricular enrichment class at my children's school on four weekends last year, and there were some kids I could barely make it through 50 minutes with before wanting to send them to the principal, permanently. I don't think I have it in me to deal with 25 kids for six hours a day and actually be expected to make them learn. And if I did -- if I did have that kind of patience and fortitude and tenacious will to teach -- I'd probably use it to homeschool my own kids. I'm in awe of people who do that, just as I'm in awe of teachers who do it in an actual school building. I do a lot of things well, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be one of them.
Still, it's always nice to be asked.
+ + +
JANUARY 15, 2002
I got a nice compact package of the best and worst of my cute, jumpy, FAE 8-year-old yesterday, all in the space of an after-school hour. When I picked him up from school he was, as usual, at the very edge of self-control and about to leap joyfully over. He had six hours of pent-up impulsiveness and shouting to let out, and as usual there was no time like the present. No sooner had he told a brief story about his speech therapist and a radio than he decided that screaming the word "radio" at the top of his lungs over and over was the way he was going to let off steam on this particular day. As we stood waiting for my daughter to come out, people gave me that look, the one that said: "Can't you make that kid shut up?" And the answer, of course, is: No. I can shush him and threaten him and beg him and cajole him, or I can ignore him. Either way, he's going to keep screaming that word. Once he gets on a echolalic jag like this, he'll keep doing it until he's good and well done. I'm not sure he actually knows that he's doing it. Everybody in a mile radius does, though.
As it happened, I needed to bring the kids back to my office for a little while to finish up some work. Screaming "radio" in an outdoor schoolyard is one thing, screaming it in a busy office is another; would he get over it in time? As it turned out, he was perfectly fine. In fact, he was at his most charming. He watered a plant on my desk, then wandered off to find the office manager, who gave him a big box of keys that she'd forgotten where they fit. He found the lock that went with one of them, then enjoyed looking through a big book of formica colors. He went downstairs with her, met our new employee, checked out the man's nifty keychain and told him what kind of cars he drove. Then he came back up, in a pretty fine mood, just in time to grab some copies off the printer for me and get ready to go. The perfect office boy was he. Now why couldn't all those judging eyes from the schoolyard have been watching him then?
+ + +
JANUARY 16, 2002
My son brought home a little book today he'd made at school. "My VIP Family," it said on the front, and inside were phrases like "cooks me good food" and "reads me stories," with blanks to fill in the name of the family member who does so. I've learned not to expect too much with these "parent affirmation projects" -- wherein the teachers give kids an opportunity to write things that will make their parents feel all proud and loved. When my son's class did a project before Christmas on what they'd like to give a family member for the holiday, most of the kids wrote about giving Mom jewelry or Dad a new car. My boy wrote about giving his stuffed Scooby Doo dog some Scooby snacks. Then again, the first time my daughter said "I love you" to me, years after we'd adopted her at age 4.5, it was because of a Valentine's project of her speech therapist's. She was doing it because she was supposed to, not because she had a clue what it meant, but it sounded good all the same.
At any rate, I paged through the book with some trepidation, but my son managed to give everybody in his life their due. We got "Mom and dad tuck me in bed at night," with "tuck" here standing in for the more accurate "wrestle, wrangle and forcibly subdue." He filled in "Dad cooks me good food to eat," which will allow all his teachers to know the truth about how truly useless Mama is. He charitably put his sister's name for "plays games with me," entered that his teacher "reads me stories" (hey, I do that too! What am I, chopped liver?), and that his school aide "helps me" (and that she certainly does). So far, so good. The next to last page reads "Mom and dad love me," and darn it, that warm appreciated feeling does creep up on me. Then there's the end: "I love my family, too." To which my boy added "Scooby Doo." Can't get through a parental appreciation assignment without the Scoobster. But he's a pretty lovable pup.
+ + +
JANUARY 17, 2002
I love volunteering at the library at my kids's school, because it's a great way to spy. Sitting there in a roomful of books, blending in to the general school background, you sometimes get to hear and see things the administration probably wishes parents wouldn't. I've heard teachers yelling at students, and discussing certain ones in a most snippy manner. Today, though, I saw something that sent a chill down my spine: There was a fire drill, and the kids had to leave the building with such haste that they were not allowed to put on their jackets. And so I watched a school-full of kids line up in shirtsleeves in 40something degree weather. At least one child was wearing a T-shirt. My daughter, of course, had picked this day to wear a long-sleeved T instead of a sweatshirt. She'll be bundling up from now on, for sure.
Today the drill was very short, and the weather not bitter cold, windy or snowy. And sure, I see the logic of not going for the jackets: If the building is burning around you, there's not a moment to spare to pile up by the coat rack and find your personal covering. But at the same time -- brrr! What if it really was a fire, and they were outside for hours? What if it was 20 instead of 40? Would they really have them all out there jacketless? That, of course, is the problem with spying: Sometimes you find out things you'd really rather be blissfully ignorant of.
+ + +
JANUARY 18, 2002
I can remember when I used to have so much time for television. I remember having lots of shows I never missed, line-ups figured out for each night, "TV Guide" marked up with daily preferences, VCR set up for nights when I couldn't decide between a pair of programs. So much time, so much energy for entertainment. Before we were married, my husband and I pretended to like each other's favorite programs; after, the truth came out and we watched separately. Then came the kids, and little by little they have sucked up all that time and all that energy until now I can barely muster the interest to watch three little hour-long dramas, and I'm secretly happy when they're re-runs because that means I can fall asleep where I sit a little bit earlier that night.
One of the few shows I stay up for is "Once and Again," and I've pretty much managed to follow it through all its schedule changes and moves. Now it looks like I'll have one more night free, because the prognosis for ABC renewing it for another season, or even finishing out this one, is looking mighty bad. It's never exactly burned up the ratings, and whether that's due to the aforementioned schedule changes, or ABC's lackluster promotion of the show, or the viewing public's general lack of interest in a sensitive, meandering drama from the creators of "thirtysomething" on divorce, dating, and blended families (sadly, I rather think it's the latter), the network is in enough of a decline to want to cut its losses. Fans with a lot of time on their hands have launched a letter-writing campaign, and are waxing hot-under-the-collar on Mighty Big TV forums. And I can remember when I'd feel all up in arms about something like this, too. But now, I save all my outraged letter writing for child study teams, and the loss of a treasured program strikes me mostly as an opportunity for a little extra snooze time. Having kids changes you, don't they say?
My daughter's teacher paid me a compliment when we met after school last week. At least, I think it was meant as a compliment. We were talking about how my daughter was doing, and I was telling her about the things I was doing to help her at home, showing her books I was reading, going on a little about theories of teaching reading comprehension, and she asked if I had ever thought of going into teaching myself. Since I seemed so interested in it and all. She thought it might be one of those cases where one's hobby and one's career might be one and the same.
I told her what I tell myself whenever I get thoughts of being a teacher, which is: Honey, I just don't have the patience. She demurred that nobody has that patience with their own kids, but with other people's kids, you do. I'm not so sure. I taught an extra-curricular enrichment class at my children's school on four weekends last year, and there were some kids I could barely make it through 50 minutes with before wanting to send them to the principal, permanently. I don't think I have it in me to deal with 25 kids for six hours a day and actually be expected to make them learn. And if I did -- if I did have that kind of patience and fortitude and tenacious will to teach -- I'd probably use it to homeschool my own kids. I'm in awe of people who do that, just as I'm in awe of teachers who do it in an actual school building. I do a lot of things well, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be one of them.
Still, it's always nice to be asked.
+ + +
JANUARY 15, 2002
I got a nice compact package of the best and worst of my cute, jumpy, FAE 8-year-old yesterday, all in the space of an after-school hour. When I picked him up from school he was, as usual, at the very edge of self-control and about to leap joyfully over. He had six hours of pent-up impulsiveness and shouting to let out, and as usual there was no time like the present. No sooner had he told a brief story about his speech therapist and a radio than he decided that screaming the word "radio" at the top of his lungs over and over was the way he was going to let off steam on this particular day. As we stood waiting for my daughter to come out, people gave me that look, the one that said: "Can't you make that kid shut up?" And the answer, of course, is: No. I can shush him and threaten him and beg him and cajole him, or I can ignore him. Either way, he's going to keep screaming that word. Once he gets on a echolalic jag like this, he'll keep doing it until he's good and well done. I'm not sure he actually knows that he's doing it. Everybody in a mile radius does, though.
As it happened, I needed to bring the kids back to my office for a little while to finish up some work. Screaming "radio" in an outdoor schoolyard is one thing, screaming it in a busy office is another; would he get over it in time? As it turned out, he was perfectly fine. In fact, he was at his most charming. He watered a plant on my desk, then wandered off to find the office manager, who gave him a big box of keys that she'd forgotten where they fit. He found the lock that went with one of them, then enjoyed looking through a big book of formica colors. He went downstairs with her, met our new employee, checked out the man's nifty keychain and told him what kind of cars he drove. Then he came back up, in a pretty fine mood, just in time to grab some copies off the printer for me and get ready to go. The perfect office boy was he. Now why couldn't all those judging eyes from the schoolyard have been watching him then?
+ + +
JANUARY 16, 2002
My son brought home a little book today he'd made at school. "My VIP Family," it said on the front, and inside were phrases like "cooks me good food" and "reads me stories," with blanks to fill in the name of the family member who does so. I've learned not to expect too much with these "parent affirmation projects" -- wherein the teachers give kids an opportunity to write things that will make their parents feel all proud and loved. When my son's class did a project before Christmas on what they'd like to give a family member for the holiday, most of the kids wrote about giving Mom jewelry or Dad a new car. My boy wrote about giving his stuffed Scooby Doo dog some Scooby snacks. Then again, the first time my daughter said "I love you" to me, years after we'd adopted her at age 4.5, it was because of a Valentine's project of her speech therapist's. She was doing it because she was supposed to, not because she had a clue what it meant, but it sounded good all the same.
At any rate, I paged through the book with some trepidation, but my son managed to give everybody in his life their due. We got "Mom and dad tuck me in bed at night," with "tuck" here standing in for the more accurate "wrestle, wrangle and forcibly subdue." He filled in "Dad cooks me good food to eat," which will allow all his teachers to know the truth about how truly useless Mama is. He charitably put his sister's name for "plays games with me," entered that his teacher "reads me stories" (hey, I do that too! What am I, chopped liver?), and that his school aide "helps me" (and that she certainly does). So far, so good. The next to last page reads "Mom and dad love me," and darn it, that warm appreciated feeling does creep up on me. Then there's the end: "I love my family, too." To which my boy added "Scooby Doo." Can't get through a parental appreciation assignment without the Scoobster. But he's a pretty lovable pup.
+ + +
JANUARY 17, 2002
I love volunteering at the library at my kids's school, because it's a great way to spy. Sitting there in a roomful of books, blending in to the general school background, you sometimes get to hear and see things the administration probably wishes parents wouldn't. I've heard teachers yelling at students, and discussing certain ones in a most snippy manner. Today, though, I saw something that sent a chill down my spine: There was a fire drill, and the kids had to leave the building with such haste that they were not allowed to put on their jackets. And so I watched a school-full of kids line up in shirtsleeves in 40something degree weather. At least one child was wearing a T-shirt. My daughter, of course, had picked this day to wear a long-sleeved T instead of a sweatshirt. She'll be bundling up from now on, for sure.
Today the drill was very short, and the weather not bitter cold, windy or snowy. And sure, I see the logic of not going for the jackets: If the building is burning around you, there's not a moment to spare to pile up by the coat rack and find your personal covering. But at the same time -- brrr! What if it really was a fire, and they were outside for hours? What if it was 20 instead of 40? Would they really have them all out there jacketless? That, of course, is the problem with spying: Sometimes you find out things you'd really rather be blissfully ignorant of.
+ + +
JANUARY 18, 2002
I can remember when I used to have so much time for television. I remember having lots of shows I never missed, line-ups figured out for each night, "TV Guide" marked up with daily preferences, VCR set up for nights when I couldn't decide between a pair of programs. So much time, so much energy for entertainment. Before we were married, my husband and I pretended to like each other's favorite programs; after, the truth came out and we watched separately. Then came the kids, and little by little they have sucked up all that time and all that energy until now I can barely muster the interest to watch three little hour-long dramas, and I'm secretly happy when they're re-runs because that means I can fall asleep where I sit a little bit earlier that night.
One of the few shows I stay up for is "Once and Again," and I've pretty much managed to follow it through all its schedule changes and moves. Now it looks like I'll have one more night free, because the prognosis for ABC renewing it for another season, or even finishing out this one, is looking mighty bad. It's never exactly burned up the ratings, and whether that's due to the aforementioned schedule changes, or ABC's lackluster promotion of the show, or the viewing public's general lack of interest in a sensitive, meandering drama from the creators of "thirtysomething" on divorce, dating, and blended families (sadly, I rather think it's the latter), the network is in enough of a decline to want to cut its losses. Fans with a lot of time on their hands have launched a letter-writing campaign, and are waxing hot-under-the-collar on Mighty Big TV forums. And I can remember when I'd feel all up in arms about something like this, too. But now, I save all my outraged letter writing for child study teams, and the loss of a treasured program strikes me mostly as an opportunity for a little extra snooze time. Having kids changes you, don't they say?
Monday, January 07, 2002
January 7-11, 2012
JANUARY 7, 2002
We had a fairly piddly showing of snow here last night, which faded off to rain much too quickly to suggest the possibility of a snow day off from school. The kids had been rather hoping for one -- the teachers, too, since they appear to have played up the likelihood on Friday in a monumental case of wishful thinking. My son was looking forward to playing in the snow, but there's barely enough form a single snowball, much less a snowman. And my daughter was looking forward, cheerfully, desperately, to not having to go to class and do the dreaded work.
It does my heart good to hear her whine about going to school, because it is such a normal kid response. There was a time, for years really after she came to us from a Russian orphanage, when school was her favorite place to be. Much more comfortable and familiar than home, for goodness sake. Probably a lot of it was the coziness of her self-contained special-ed classroom, and maybe leaving that for the draftier confines of a mainstream class has been part of her change in attitude. Maturity has certainly played a part, too. And I'd like to think that it's a sign of good bonding with our family. Whatever the reason, I'm sure glad she'd rather stay home. But tough luck, babe -- it's off to school for you.
+ + +
JANUARY 8, 2002
Do they make Cliff's Notes for children's literature? Because if I'm going to help my daughter be a good reader, ask good questions, draw conclusions from text, and figure out content, I should sure as heck make sure I'm telling her the right things, shouldn't I? It's been easy so far, with nice straightforward stories, but her 4th grade reading book threw me a curve ball this week, a mystery story in which I confidently led her down a path that turned out to be the wrong one. And now I have to teach her that good readers sometimes have to say "What the heck?" and go back to the beginning.
The story was "The Stranger" by Chris Van Allsburg, with whom I was familiar from "The Polar Express," one of hundreds of books my daughter doesn't remember ever having had read to her. In this one, a farmer takes a stranger into his home and... well... strange things happen. Not "Friday the 13th" strange, but maybe "Twilight Zone" strange. Or, if you're a preteen addicted to the Disney channel like my daughter, "So Weird" strange. One strategy of good readers that my daughter is starting to do well is bringing in knowledge from other material and applying it to a new story. In this case, the other material was the TV show "It's a Miracle," in which, like the stranger in this story, somebody got hit by a car. But it's a start. Now if I could only figure out definitively who this stranger is supposed to be (is it Jack Frost? A more generic personification of winter? George Clooney, king of cool?), we'll have an end.
+ + +
JANUARY 9, 2002
At the Wendy's our family sometimes goes to -- probably at any Wendy's -- there's a giant photo of the restaurant's founder and pitchman, Dave Thomas, on the wall by the door. As we leave, I tell the kids to say goodbye to Dave, and they respond with a cheerful, overloud "Goodbye, Dave!" It's a bittersweet memory now that we have to say goodbye to Dave for good, as the news comes that the jovial hamburger cook and adoption advocate has died of liver cancer at age 69.
Other pictures we look at when we're chowing down on our chili are the posters of waiting children that deck Wendy's walls and sometimes its placemats. I've taken my kids to look at all those little faces and tried to explain that, just as they waited for a Mama and Papa in the orphanage, these children were waiting for Mamas and Papas now. I don't know how much my kids get it -- their developmental delays still preclude, at this point, a working understanding of adoption -- but looking at all those smiles and statistics usually gets me teary. When my husband and I first started down the road to adoption, we did it by calling the National Adoption Center number on a Wendy's placemat. Our efforts to adopt a child from foster care were unsuccessful, and we wound up adopting from Russia instead. But I don't think Dave would have minded.
+ + +
JANUARY 10, 2002
My son thinks the second funniest sound he's heard in his life is the sound he makes when he blows a raspberry against his arm. Man, what a hoot! He giggles uncontrollably and does it again and again and again. The funniest sound he's ever heard is when his one particular classmate does it. All behavioral rules are off when his friend makes that sound. He got into trouble at the library today because his friend made that sound, then he made that sound, then the librarian took their books away. To me, it's among the most annoying sounds in the world. But I'm not an 8-year-old boy.
My son has had a real increase in camaraderie with the boys in his special-ed class this year, and that's good. His emotional development is so very delayed, and this seems a step up to a new plateau. At the same time, though, there's been an increase in poorly thought out copying of other's misbehavior, and that's bad. I've read about that so many times in literature on fetal alcohol impairment, and I know that the lack of awareness of consequences that has him blowing raspberries now may having him commiting much more serious mayhem in the future. It's not uncommon, to be sure, for "normal" boys to misbehave together; but most don't start after they can see their friend is already in trouble. My son says he just didn't want his buddy to be lonely in time-out.
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JANUARY 11, 2002
Well, this is just great. Eleven days into 2002, and I've already blown the Mother of the Year Award. When I went to pick up my son from school yesterday, his teacher suggested I take a look at the shoes he had put on that morning. Not only was he wearing one each from two different pairs, but one of them was on the wrong foot. The teacher said they figured I had been working hard with him on self care and dressing himself, and didn't want to discourage him by making him change his footwear. Or maybe she just said that to help me save face. The sad truth is: I just flat-out didn't notice. What kind of mom am I?
Not a morning mom, that's for sure. It seems, whatever I do, we're always racing. My son and I both have trouble getting out of bed, which means that as I'm hastily jumping into the shower I'm screaming for him to get dressed. He races through breakfast, and apparently through shoe-donning as well. My daughter's much more organized; it's not unusual for her to be the one to wake me up. So is it any surprise that I can't be trusted to ensure that all garments are appropriately matched and placed? Heck, I'm feeling pretty lucky that he had shoes on at all.
Wednesday, January 02, 2002
January 2-4, 2002
JANUARY 2, 2002
Whew! Made it through another holiday season intact. Against all odds, my son actually behaved pretty darn well. Made me feel guilty to read of all the folks on the various e-mail support lists I belong to whose children made the holidays so hellish, when in fact my kids were pretty heavenly. Got to remember to thank God for these blessings -- the blessing of unexpected good behavior, the blessing of serene and boring days, the blessing of toys unbroken and spirits uncrushed. It was the best of times.
And now they're back at school, and the new year begins in earnest. I have taken my resolution this year from the TV show "Once and Again," and from the most unlikely character thereon: Tiffany, the airheaded former girlfriend of the ex-husband of Sela Ward's character. On a recent episode, when faced with the fellow's endless negativity, Tiffany declared: "You can't bum me out. I'm unbummable." And so I shall resolve to be in 2002 -- unbummable. Child study teams, learning disabilities, behavioral glitches, know-it-all relatives, stupid social studies textbooks -- to them shall I say, "You can't bum me out." I shall test the powers of positive self-talk. And maybe, for a change, I'll be a mother with a good attitude. (But what fun would that be?)
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JANUARY 3, 2002
The gymnastics school my kids go to has a little glassed-in room off the main floor for parents to watch their offspring flip and fly, and I have been enjoying my time there mainly because it gives me an uninterrupted hour-ish segment to actually sit and read a book. Today, though, as I was desperately trying to finish the very excellent "Mosaic of Thought" (about the techniques used by good readers and how to teach them to struggling readers), my attention kept being hijacked by a conversation a couple of rows away. A dad was talking to a mom about vaccinations, and how his family's refusal to give them to their younger children had caused his daughter to be rejected by a private school. I tried to tune them out, but I wondered if their reason for the vaccination ban was the supposed link between vaccinations and autism, and sure enough at some point he mentioned that his oldest child was autistic.
Part of me wanted to chime in, and part of me wanted to go to another part of the building to get away. There was something irritating about the whole conversation, and I think I know what it was: It was the man's tone, his "let me explain everything about vaccinations to you" tone. Although I agreed with some of what he was saying (certainly any possibility of a connection between vaccines and autism needs to be explored, and not blatantly disregarded by doctors as it mostly seems to have been), and disagreed with some (flat-out not vaccinating your children seems extreme, and if you choose that route you need to accept that there are places your kids will not be welcome), it was really the tone that rubbed me the wrong way. And I know why: It's the kind of tone I would use if I were talking to a stranger about one of my kids' hot-button issues, and I don't want to think about myself sounding like such a know-it-all. Because I don't. Know it all. Nobody does. But it's easy to let yourself think that, and easy to write like that, and easy to talk like that. Embarrassing, later, to think about, when you realize you misspoke or hear somebody else expounding so.
In the end, I didn't leave the room. But I did put my fingers over my ears.
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JANUARY 4, 2002
I got my daughter a very cute pair of Sketchers sneakers for Christmas. After she squealed and slipped them on, she hesitantly informed me that although she loved them, she would not be able to wear them for gym because the gym teacher said "No Sketchers." Now, I'm pretty sure she meant "no" to the funky Sketchers with high heels or other fashion accoutrements, and not to these sporty Sketchers that were indistinguishable from the shoes she'd been wearing since September save for the brand name, but my daughter was uncomfortable nonetheless. And since I believe in teaching kids to follow school rules even when I personally think they're stupid, we bought another pair of sneaks for gym days.
While we were there, we bought another pair for my son, too, in case the rubber-soled but decidedly loafer-like shoes I'd picked out for him were insufficiently sneaker-like for gym wear. And sure enough, the gym teacher spoke to me after school today about the fact that what he was wearing would clearly be classified as a "shoe," and therefore not acceptable for sports action. He'll go to school on gym day tomorrow more athletically shod, but for goodness sake, if there are going to be all these sneaker rules, couldn't she put out a memo? Tack those shoe specs to the school dress code, at the very least, so parents don't innocently shop for something unsportsmanlike.