Volunteer in hiding

Well, I guess this serves me right for making the big effort to volunteer at my kids' school: I've got to hide from the both of them while I'm on the premises. My daughter's long made it clear that she'd just as soon not see me during school hours, and if we do happen to cross paths, I oughtn't to try anything flagrant and embarrassing like eye contact. But my son's always seemed happy enough to have me working the library desk when he came in with his class -- too happy, apparently. His teacher this year reports that he gets overexcited at the prospect of seeing me, and this causes him to engage in un-library-like behavior like pushing, hitting, talking out of turn, and generally bugging the heck out of everybody. He's not like that in class, she assures me -- just when he's seeing, or going to be seeing, Mom.

I'd like to believe that's not so, but here's where it gets tricky: I've made a big, big deal about behavior analysis, and from a behavior analysis point of view, if there's something that seems to raise the child's stress level to the point where he loses control -- and if you note a pattern of problems surrounding a particular set of circumstances -- you change the environment to eliminate that thing. I never thought that "that thing" would be me, but it's hard to argue against it and for anything else. If I didn't like the teacher so much, I'd suspect she was doing this to get back at me for coming on strong about behavior management; but as it is, I think it's certainly worth withdrawing and seeing if my absence makes his heart grow calmer.

So I'll do my library time when his class isn't, and if I hear his little piping voice coming down the hallway I'll go into lockdown mode and hide away from windows and doors, hoping not to be seen. I'll still be able to contribute to the well-being of the school, and I'll still be able to network with whichever educators I can ambush in a hallway. But as for actually spying on my own personal kids -- do you think the school would allow me to donate a few two-way mirrors?

New on Mothers with Attitude

Three -- count 'em, three -- new columns grace the virtual pages of Mothers with Attitude today: April Cain remembers her son's birthmother in the latest installment of Thinking It Over; Julie Donner Andersen grouses at crabby people in Therapeutic Laughing; and Ken Swarner laments yet another undisplayable set of school pictures in Family Man. And thanks to them, I don't have to actually write anything original today myself! Ah, it's good to be an editor.

Taking togetherness too far

They say that doing things together is what keeps families strong, but maybe they should have specified that this wisdom does not apply to felonies. That fine point was missed by the New Jersey family that, in an attempt to save the family home from foreclosure, armed twin 14-year-old girls with their little brother's BB gun (painted with silver nail polish to look more realistic) and sent them to rob a bank while their mom waited in the getaway car. They apparently didn't getaway good enough, because Mom's now facing a 15-year jail sentences while her daughters spend the rest of their teens in a juvenile facility.

And there's probably a lot to be tsked over here about child endangerment and morality and using kids to commit a crime, but all I can think of is -- doesn't this just sound like the cutest little Olson twins movie? Except in the made-for-kidvid version, the family would stay together, the home would be saved, and nobody would do any time. I mean, hey, the twins' mom stole lots of stuff in "To Grandmother's House We Go," and she wound up with a cute guy and a winning lottery ticket. Are the Olsons contributing to the delinquency of minors, too?

Not quite wired enough

Our school district has gone into computers in a big way, raising property taxes to outfit schools with big old gobs of technology. The number of computers in the "media center" (formerly the library) at my son's school doubled over the summer, and the one at my daughter's middle school seems far more dedicated to screens than to books. What books there are have been cataloged on a computer system, and that system is set to trickle down to our elementary school this year; the low-tech paper card catalog has already been ditched. The weak point in all of this is that the media centers are under the administration of educators who used to be called librarians, and they didn't go into education to compute. Sometimes there seems to be more technology than anyone really knows what to do with. Fortunately, if the teachers can't figure things out, the kids usually can.

One use I'd love to see all those computers put to is setting up e-mail addresses or web pages for teachers that parents can access. Why don't any of my kids' teachers have sites like this one? A google search turns up a fair amount of web services set up to give teachers free 'net presences, but if our school's got any posted, nobody's telling me. Maybe I should volunteer to be webmaster for whoever'll have me? Or maybe they know what a headache free and open communication with me would be, and just aren't giving me their address.

Is A.D. P.C.?

I've been reading about the Supreme Court's upcoming consideration of whether saying the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional, or whether the "under God" part is an unacceptable bringing of religion into schools. It seems impossible to imagine that schoolkids might not be putting their hands over their hearts every a.m., or will have to recite some sanitized, ACLU-okayed version instead. It's true that I would probably feel differently if I didn't believe in God, and in our nation being under Him; but it's also true that eliminating any reference to religious belief from our schools and our society is going to be a pretty daunting task.

For example: Tonight I was doing homework with my daughter, and her job was to find answers to questions in her textbook. The lesson was on dates -- why we need them, what a timeline's for, how we determine them. One question asked how we number years, and in reading the paragraphs on that subject, it was clear that the answer was "forward and backward from the birth of Jesus Christ." There's really not any more P.C. way to explain A.D. and B.C., and I suppose as long as they don't make any claims about Jesus Christ being anyone's savior it's not specifically religious, but if a kid's going to be disturbed by saying "under God" in the pledge, isn't he going to be upset by this, too? Are we going to be forced to switch to something nondenominational like "Common Era" to avoid lessons like this? I think the founding fathers would be against it, but I'm not so sure about the ACLU.

Child appreciation

I'm really running the gauntlet of child evaluations this week, and it's got me a little on edge. Yesterday was progress report day, and we got through that with relatively little shock and upset. Tomorrow, I have my first meeting with my daughter's teachers, the whole lot of them, regular-education and inclusion alike, and I hope I'll hear what the progress report indicates -- that she's basically doing well -- and not what I usually hear in meetings like this, which is that she's doing well considering. Most desperately, I'm hoping that there won't be a repeat of my meeting with her teacher and instructional aide last year -- the one where I asked the aide what she would be doing to help my daughter, and she looked at me like a deer caught in the headlights. Her inability to articulate what an instructional aide does, exactly, pretty much carried into a whole year of not doing much but hovering and making my girl nervous. This year, there are actual special education teachers in my daughter's classroom doing their inclusion thing, and if they can't explain to me what that is, I'm going to the Board of Ed.

Then, on Thursday, comes our annual visit with the pediatric neurologist. The appointment for my daughter is always a piece of cake, since she can sit through grown-ups talking and follow instructions and answer questions in a way that's pretty appropriate, considering. My son, on the other hand, has no consideration at all, and tends to display his most impulsive, most uncooperative, most out-of-control behavior for this particular doctor. And since she sees him once a year, and only at his absolute rock-bottom worst, I shouldn't be upset that she thinks I'm nuts not to medicate him into a stupor. But I always am anyway. Why can't she just take my word for it that he's doing fine? Or his father's word, or his teachers' word, or his therapists' word? And more importantly, if I have all those words, why do I need this doctor's word, anyway? I guess we all like to think that everybody looks at our kids in the same appreciative way we do. And if they don't, man, I'll tell you, they all deserve bad grades on their progress reports.

Pumpkins with purpose

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

Something new

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

Turn off that cough

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

FAS makes the big time

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

Sad news, unreported

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

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

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

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

Survive this

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

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

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

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

Social studies

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

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

Thinking unrealistically

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever happened to the "family hour"?

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

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

Insecure security

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

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

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

Hands-on dads and wanna-be moms

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

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

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

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

Back again

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

More bloggin' moms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officially back to school

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

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

Why does sixth grade have to be so hard?

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

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

Out of the swim

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

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

Clifford, RIP

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

What our schools need now is ... butter?

Today's IEP List:

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

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

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

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

High anxiety

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

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

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

The IEP List: In the news

Recent news items of interest to Involved, Educated Parents:

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

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

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

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

Getting back in fighting shape

We've now successfully made it through the first week of school without major trauma. My daughter settled down after her first dreadful day of middle school and is now down to simply not liking it, from hating it with every fiber of her being. I've had enough contact with school personnel to feel that she'll probably be okay. My son's teacher has been conscientiously following through on every note I send her and every discussion we've had. She sent me the report that finally came through from the behaviorist who saw him last year, and it's pretty hilarious stuff -- apparently, among other things, my guy took off his shoes 21 times in the course of two hours of observation (and apparently was nagged to put them back on again 20 times by his aide, which may explain some of the problems he was having). Yesterday she reported that a behaviorist saw him again, and that we'd discuss it at our meeting on Tuesday at 8 a.m. I've got my IEP tote bag all loaded up and ready to go. And in the spirit of getting back to a school year of advocacy, here's an IEP List of serious sites that have been lurking around my e-mail inbox:

1. A page from the LDPride Web site that offers explanations of learning styles and multiple intelligences, including a quiz that can help you figure out your or your children's styles. I personally learn best in short intense bursts of concentration between long fitful bouts of procrastination. I wonder if that's an official style?

2. An article on "Explosive Outbursts in Children With Tourette's Disorder" from the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

3. "Measuring the facial phenotype of individuals with prenatal alcohol exposure: correlations with brain dysfunction" looks interesting and very promising, but I was not able to get past the point where I'm supposed to measure all this stuff on my kid's face. He's supposed to sit still for this? For years, his head circumference would vary greatly from doctor visit to doctor visit because he put up such a fight, and these were professionals. I'm just as liable to prove he doesn't have FAS with all this measuring, and then we'll be back in "what the heck is wrong with this kid?" land again. Maybe I'll leave well-enough alone.

4. The Apraxia-Kids site, with lots of good information, publications, and message boards.

5. And, okay, one frivolous one, for when you're home from the child study team meeting and just want to crawl into your jammies, curl up in bed, and think about how simple life used to be — Kermitage.com is a site that gives complete rundowns of every episode of every season of "The Muppet Show." The amount of free time it must take to put something like this together astounds me, but I'm grateful just the same. Everything's better after a visit with Fozzie Bear.

The day after

I'd like to report that my reassurances to my daughter all summer long that middle school would be fine were prophetic, and that everything was indeed okay. Alas, she came home crying and saying she didn't like middle school at all and dreading the fact that she ever had to go back again. I'd hoped that, since she's in an inclusion class and is supposed to have a special-ed teacher to help her, someone would be making sure throughout the day that she was okay and knew what to do. I'd hoped that, since her IEP specifies that she has auditory processing problems and needs visual aids and reinforcement, someone would understand that a day spent listening to rules and regulations and instructions of all sorts would be beyond stressful. And maybe they did -- once my girl gets panicky, she can't explain what's going on with her very well, to people at school or to me, either.

I spent the evening calming her down, setting up what routines I could with limited knowledge of the school day, getting her a notebook big enough to hold what she'd need to get through the day in case she couldn't figure her locker out, writing notes to teachers in the hope they'd give a little aid and comfort. It's not the way I'd like to start out; I spend a lot of time convincing people that my daughter doesn't need hand-holding, and that she should be given the opportunity to do anything the other kids are doing. I believe that's true, and that once she gets comfortable she will be fine in middle school. But for this first week? A little hand-holding would probably be good.

Meanwhile, back at elementary school, my son had a good first day. They did manage to scare up an aide for him, and his teacher did set up a meeting with me within the first week as promised, and all in all the prognosis is good. Just so there's no crisis with him until I settle the crisis with his sister. One disaster at a time, is all I ask.

First day of school, minus one

Now, here's the kind of thing that drives me crazy: I called the principal at my son's school this morning, the day before the first day of school, to see if I could find out who would be my boy's individual aide this year. There were three aides at the school that were likely possibilities, one much hoped for, the other two problematic, and I thought if I could get a name, I could prepare my kid and maybe myself. And surprise! The principal reported that he had talked to the special ed office, and they claimed that my son's IEP indicated no need for an individual aide. So, never mind worrying about which aide it would be -- there was no aide for him at all.

I did a quick double-check of his IEP, and "individual aide" was listed there, big as life. I called the special ed office and was told by a secretary that she knew nothing, nobody who knew anything was available, and I had to talk to the child study team leader. Called the child study team -- nobody there, left a message. Fumed for a while. The child study team leader, I will say, called me back pretty promptly, having straightened things out as well as they can be straightened on less than 24 hours notice. There will be an aide. It will be someone entirely new. Perhaps someone just hired. Maybe the aide will be in place tomorrow. Maybe not. But soon. I've made it clear that if my boy gets in trouble before he gets his aide, I will blame the school district. It's not like this aide is a new thing -- he's had one for the past three years. Why does everything have to be so hard?

So now I'm trying to figure out if this is a bad omen -- the beginning of a chain of screw-ups -- or a good omen -- the one messed-up thing that always has to happen, gotten out of the way early. Tomorrow may tell. I'll report back.

Pushy doctors and murderous millionaires

An IEP List of recent items in the news.

1. Another case of doctors trying to take away parents' rights to decide on their child's treatment. I don't know if the parents are right or wrong here, but the idea of losing custody for trying to get a second opinion is pretty scary.

2. A health report suggests that too much inactivity, TV and sunscreen may be leaving teens deficient in Vitamin D.

3. I've worried a lot about what being the oldest kid in class, by a year or two, might be doing to my daughter, but according to this report, being the youngest isn't a bowl of cherries either.

4. Kid's Health News offers pointers on finding a doctor for your child, and although it's aimed at parents of new babies, it's just as applicable to new adoptive parents. In our case, with our kids with special needs and especially our hyperactive son, we found that the most important things were a) a practice in which you see the same doctor every time, so you don't have to go through the whole involved history again and again; and b) a practice where you don't have to spend an hour in the waiting room.

5. A fairly bizarre story about the questions being posed to potential jurors in the trial of Robert Durst, a millionaire in NYC who alledgedly shot his neighbor, indicates that, among other things, his defense may include a claim that he has Asberger's syndrome.

Teen hypochondria, and more

An IEP List of random thoughts for today.

1. My 13-year-old's been moaning and groaning about aches and pains all summer, with headaches and stomachaches and potential dread diseases galore. Since she seems pretty healthy, I haven't been taking her complaints too serioiusly, figuring that her ailments are either growing pains; teen-girl hormones at work; or the result of spending too much time with her grandmother, who can deliver a pretty mean litany of ailments herself. This item from the ParenTalk Newsletter has me wondering otherwise; maybe she's really just being a teen, and this is the only cool way of begging TLC. I'll be trying to give a little more of it from now on.

2. If you're looking for ways to a do a little at-home speech therapy with your kids, try this book of one-a-day "Articulation and Language Activities." My daughter's therapist gave us a copy of August's selections, and she's enjoyed doing them so much that I'm planning to buy the book and continue through the year.

3. Did your mom ever put little notes in your school lunch? Mine did, and I remember it as a feel-good sort of thing, though at the time it may have been a feel-embarrassed one, too. An article on catholicmom.com promotes the idea of slipping notes to loved ones all over the place, and really, I'll think about it; but in this day and age, shouldn't we just be text-messaging them instead?

The IEP List: Stressing about School

Mostly, I'm happy that my kids are going back to school on Wednesday. Mostly, my reaction is like the one in the second line of Ken Swarner's new "Family Man" column. But I have to admit that the onset of school season has me a little stressed, too. Here's what's on this Involved, Educated Parent's worry list for today.

1. My son ended his mostly successful seven weeks at a mainstream summer camp by mooning his campmates. Does this mean that a) he's ready to get back to the structure and control of his self-contained special-ed classroom; or b) that I'm going to be getting lots of very interesting calls from the principal?

2. All those wonderful and perceptive notes to the teacher I was going to write for the first day of school -- the ones I had all summer to write, at my creative leisure -- are unwritten still. And due Wednesday.

3. The very year I send my sweet, good little 13-year-old to middle school, a movie comes out about a sweet, good little 13-year-old who goes to middle school and learns some Very Bad Things. I thought Evan Rachel Wood, the movie's star, was fantastic in the late, lamented "Once and Again," and so I wish her and her movie well, but -- sheesh. Do I really have to do a daily check for body piercings and shoplifted goods? (Maybe not. Slate has an interesting take on preteens and the moms who worry about them.)

4. I will never be as organized as these people.

5. I got my daughter this simple, basic homework planner, partly because there were good recommendations on amazon.com and the cover is yellow, her favorite color, but I don't know -- do you think I should have gotten this fancier one instead? Personally, I like a lot of bells and whistles with my planner, but my girl's even a little confused by the simple one, so maybe I chose wisely.

6. The blissful summer of imagining how well the upcoming school year is going to go is over, and now I have to start dealing with things again -- did they give my son the right aide? is he in the right class? is my daughter actually getting inclusion after three years of promises? is she being coddled too much? is he being protected enough? are plans being followed? is behavior being analyzed? is homework being done? When I think of all the phone calls and letters and meetings and conferences and wailing and gnashing of teeth in my near future, it makes me want to sit and moan with my daughter, "Why can't it be June again?"

The IEP List: Three semi-cool sites

These sites may not, in the end, turn out to be as useful as they seem -- but they're still interesting spots for Involved, Educated Parents with a little time to kill.

1. Special Education News seems like a pretty great idea -- special education-related news items in categories like "behavior management" and "for families" -- but maybe there's not enough news to go around, because the site doesn't look like it's been updated in years. Still, some nice special-needs parenting links.

2. The Santa Ana Unified School District has an enormous array of forms online for downloading, including behavior contracts, reports and requests, and something called an IEP Writer. I don't know if these can be adapted to parental uses, or indeed for uses anywhere outside the Santa Ana Unified School District, but it sure looks like a treasure trove.

3. The Special Education Advocacy Class page offers downloads of videos with titles like "Least Restrictive Environment," "Life Span Development," and "The Math of Psychological and Educational Testing." Sadly, they won't play on Macs, so they're useless to me, but I've heard they're pretty good.

Introducing "The IEP List"

The start of a new school year is as good a time as any to make changes and reorganize, and since I seem to be having more ideas for this blog lately than I ever get the self control to sit down and write about, I'm going to institute a new feature on "Parenting Isn't Pretty." Let's call it, for now, The IEP List -- with IEP standing not for Individualized Education Program, but Involved, Educated Parent (or maybe Information, Education, Procrastination). It will be a daily grab bag of news stories, Web sites, book recommendations, and half-formed musings. Something like this:

1. USA Today, AP and others give statistics gleaned from the 2000 Census about adoptive families. Among the findings: There are 1.6 million adopted kids in the U.S., about 2.5% of all children; 13% are adopted from other countries, of which Korea is #1. I remember that some adoptive parents complained about having to give out that information when the Census was circulating, but it's kind of nice to have the stats now.

2. I don't know what part of this USA Today story on "Captain Underpants" author Dav Pilkey makes me like him more: the fact that he struggled with ADHD and dyslexia as a kid and succeeded as an author as much because of as in spite of them; or the fact that he and Cynthia Rylant, probably my favorite children's author, are "sweethearts."

3. Two stories of dramatically different approaches to dealing with autism: one mom who brought her autistic 8-year-old son to be prayed over in an exorcism attempt that resulted in the boy's death; and another mom who camped out in front of a new Krispy Kreme store for 13 days so that her autistic son, who's 12 and obsessed with the donuts, could cut the ribbon for the store opening.

4. A 9-year-old girl left home alone with her 4-year-old cousin loaded him in her mother's SUV and went for a little joyride. She could barely see over the steering wheel, but managed to weave down a busy street, turn into a parking lot, hit several cars and finally strike a pedestrian. My kids to play at sitting in the driver's seat sometimes, and I've let them start the car a time or two, but maybe I should stress again that actually putting it in gear and leaving the driveway is out of the question. Car insurance is expensive enough without covering 9-year-olds.

5. This bingo game for business meetings makes me think that somebody should be putting one together for IEP meetings. I've sure wanted to yell the victory word suggested a time or two in one of those get-togethers.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Just in time for the start of school and the resumption of early wake-up calls, Julie Donner Andersen delivers a rallying cry (or maybe a rallying snooze alarm) for sleepyheads in her latest "Therapeutic Laughter" column, Attack of the Morning People. My daughter's always been one of those morning people — the one I can always count on to be up and dressed and self-fed long before my son and I manage to open a bleary eye — but even she's been falling into later and later summer sleeping habits lately. Making that 8:15 a.m. middle school opening bell may be more challenging than I expected, although perhaps nobody will actually notice if I'm driving the car in my PJs. ... Ken Swarner reflects on the many and creative names being given to grandparents these days in the current installment of his Family Man column. In our family, we've had a grandma, grandpa, nana and dada. Also a "tootah," derived form the Russian word for aunt, which is what my kids call my daughter's godmother. Then, too, I guess you could say that my nephew's name for me is a little strange: it's "uncle." I keep trying to persuade him that I'm an aunt, really I am, but he's four years old and he's pretty sure he's got it right. I blame the Teletubbies. ... Teasing is the topic for April Cain's new "Thinking It Over" column, Swimming Upstream in the Food Chain of Childhood. I can't feel too righteously indignant about teasing right now, since my son is apparently still teasing his little campmate on a daily basis. Well, the teachers call it teasing; I think he's just perseverating on the kid's name, yelling it out to him over and over, with no particular malice in his heedlessly impulsive head. Of course, none of that's going to mean much to the kid who's being yelled at. Maybe his mom's somewhere complaining about this mean boy who's teasing her son, and what kind of parents would raise a boy who would do that? Knowing the futility of lecturing about things that are basically impulsive and un-willful, I'm just hoping he'll get distracted and find something new to fixate on until camp's over. And not, let's hope, someone.

Pop (and mom) quiz

What kind of parent are you? (Sorry -- "exhausted" isn't one of the categories.) If you're in the mood for a little self-examination, try iParenting.com's parenting style quiz and ID yourself as permissive, authoritarian, or authoritative. Me, I scored high for Parenting Style C, "authoritative," which is described as "demanding of your child but you give in return. You are open to discussion and negotiating, giving the child firmness and self-control. The parent-child relationship is based on respect and routines. Children learn social skills and their self-image is a positive one." I like to think that I really am this way, but of course it was pretty easy to see which answers in the quiz would lead to such a happy self-assessment, and though I wouldn't say I cheated, I'll admit to being suggestible.

It doesn't help, of course, that the choice of answers on general parenting quizzes like this one bear approximately zero relationship to the parenting of children with special needs. I'd need a fourth or maybe fifth or sixth choice on some of these scenarios, and others aren't anything I'm likely to experience with my two. Being demanding and getting respect aren't honestly big on my list of priorities; I'm just happy if everybody gets through the day without a meltdown by any one of us. Maybe that's the kind of parent I am: Style D, "Survivalist."

Book report

One of the nicest things about our recent vacation was the opportunity to spend some uninterrupted time reading, thanks to the kid-distracting presence in our time-share of two TVs and a Game Cube. (Oh, stop yelling at me. The kids played outside plenty. They went in the pool. They went on go-carts. They walked and swung and slid and bowled and bumper-boated. They also read -- my daughter finished two Magic Tree House books and my son and I knocked off 11 chapters of James and the Giant Peach. So don't begrudge me the rest and relaxation that comes with kids being electronically occupied.) Among the five -- count 'em, five! -- books I finished during the week was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an offbeat mystery narrated by a 15-year-old autistic boy. I thought the author, who has worked with autistic teens, got the kid down just right, within the bounds of poetic license. I nodded and thought of my own neurologically challenged guy frequently.

I also found it interesting that, despite the fact that the story was told through the rigid and sometimes obsessive point of view of the child, the author managed to sneak in a pretty accurate sense of what it feels like to parent a kid like this. Not that the parents come off all that well -- their considerable and sometimes tragic mistakes are what lurches the main part of the story into action -- but the frustration and helplessness of trying to reach your child and screwing up and trying again and screwing up again and seeing things you thought would help blow up in your face and trying again ... that had me nodding, too. The strain a child with special needs puts on a marriage, the impossibility of having any sort of independent life, the necessity of putting one's self aside and putting one's child first -- all those hard, hard things are rendered with a fair amount of poignancy, considering that the narrator is unable to express emotion. It's a nice feat of writing, in a book that does well by its challenged and challenging protagonist. I'd certainly recommend it, even if you have to prop your own little detective in front of a video game to find the time to read it.

Vacation's over

Well, we survived another family vacation. This year's will probably be remembered as "the one where the lights went out," since our destination was within the reach of the Great Blackout of '03, as our paper is calling it. I'm happy to report that guests and staff at the resort in the Catskills responded to the lack of power with as fair a degree of calmness and fellowship as has been reported among the citizens of New York City, although none of us were actually trapped in a subway. In fact, at the moment the air conditioners went out, I myself was on a trail ride getting my arm scratched by a horse who thought it would be funny to walk me real, real close to every low-branched tree he could find. Once it became clear that the power was well and truly out, we did a little scurrying to make sure we'd have something to eat for dinner, and a little worrying about how we would go to the very dark bathroom in the middle of the night with no light, but the lights came back on before the night had completely fallen, and in plenty of time to watch "West Wing" reruns on Bravo, so all was well. And now we're back home, updating clocks that have been blinking for days and perusing days-old newspaper reports and getting ready to get back to real life. And, of course, write about it.

And away we go

If you're one of those fantastically disciplined moms who never misses a good planning tip or organizational strategy, you'll want to check out this ParentStages.com list of things to do to get ready for a family car trip. Then again, if you're a "dash around at the last minute like a chicken with its head cut off" kinda mom, like me, you'll want to go ahead and print out that fabulously idealistic list, put it somewhere, forget where it is, spend all your packing time dashing around looking for it, and finally throw everybody's gear in the minivan in plastic shopping bags from the grocery. All our, um, bags are packed, and my family's heading off today for a week away. Please use this time as an opportunity to check out our archives and all the goodies over at Mothers with Attitude. Happy sunburning!

Break the law, cure a kid

Want to contribute to autism research? In New Jersey, it's as easy as running a stop sign, speeding or passing on the right. A new law places a $1 surcharge on moving violations to fund autism research in the Garden State. It's hard to say what the connection would be between autism and bad driving — there's no retributional theme, like maybe fining drunk drivers more heavily and giving the money to researching fetal alcohol syndrome — but hey, research money is research money. ... If you'd rather contribute to research in a way that doesn't add points to your license or raise your insurance rates, check out the survey for mothers of children with special needs being conducted by writer Amy Baskin. Participants may be quoted in a book Baskin is co-authoring on the ways in which moms "manage to maintain their own identity, dreams and professional goals while mothering a child with a disability." Dreams? Professional goals? Sounds ambitious to me. Most days, I'm happy if I just manage to maintain my sanity.

No port in a storm

My son is partway through his second summer at a mainstream camp, and interestingly, for the second year, the only kid he's having any trouble with is another child with special needs. Shouldn't there be some sort of honor among the neurologically impaired, that when they're a minority among the neurologically sound they bond together? The only thing I can figure is that the "regular" kids are better able to appreciate that my guy's a little different and adjust their own behavior to accommodate his, while other kids with differences are too locked into their own rigid habits to do so. It makes me wonder about the fact that I'm so adament about him being in a self-contained class in school -- would he do better socially, somehow, in a mainstream class? Or would extended exposure to him in situations where his quirks aren't so amusing cause the mainstream kids to lose their good will. We're not likely to find out soon, since I still think he needs the structure and protection that a self-contained class affords him. But it sure bears some thinking about.

The Problem with Paxil

Depressing news about the anti-depressant Paxil: The FDA has issued a recommendation that the drug not be administered to children and adolescents diagnosed with depression while it reviews "reports of an increased risk of suicidal thinking and suicide attempts" among those users. Of course, as the FDA FAQ points out, it never actually approved Paxil for pediatric use in the first place, but physicians still prescribe it for what is delicately referred to as "an off-label use." And is this because they have a rock-solid knowledge of childhood depression and exactly what is needed to cure it? These words from the FDA don't exactly fill one with confidence:

Childhood depression is different from adult depression. The reasons are not clear but could relate to the continuing development of the child’s brain. It has been difficult to show effectiveness in children of antidepressants known to work in adults and a number of effective adult antidepressants have not been shown to work in childhood depression Children may also react very differently to some medicines and some side effects over a range of drugs are seen in children that are not seen in adults.

So a drug that's not approved for children is being prescribed for something nobody really understands very well. And if instead of making your kid happy it make him want to kill himself? Oops, oh well, try something else.

And yet, I'm sure there are children who have been helped by Paxil. I'm sure there are parents who feel it has saved their children's lives, and will now agonize over whether they really have to find a new drug. It may ultimately be found that there is no risk of suicidal thinking after all, and kids may have to go through the long and complicated withdrawal process for nothing. As leery as I am of medication in situations like this, I can't deny that many good parents whose opinions I trust feel strongly in its favor. It's a decision that every family has to make for themselves.

Still, in this day when medication is so strongly urged and promoted; when doctors tell me it's silly to have reservations; when TV commercials make you wish you had something wrong with you so you could take a pill and be like all those happy people — it's maybe good to have a reminder that a great deal of psychiatric diagnosing and medicating of children is a matter of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Like giving insulin to a diabetic? Not so much.

Heard any bad adoption jokes lately?

Anybody out there got an opinion? Hmm? Anybody actually manage to get out of the house and watch a movie? Anybody get to watch TV before their kids go to bed, or stay awake after? Anybody getting into those fun summer beach reads? Personally, I can't remember the last time I went to the movies or watched a prime-time show all the way through in actual prime time. My current fun read is a book on "Developmental Reading Disabilities" which is intended for speech therapists and is slightly over my head (which at least gives me some sympathy for how reading feels to my daughter all the time). That's why I've had a little trouble keeping up the Adoption Watch message board all by myself. It's way easier to comment on the media and popular culture when you're personally exposed to it.

The plan was to set the board up and to watch other people's comments come pouring in — because I thought at the time, and still do, that a clearinghouse for information on the portrayal of adoption in the media was something that would be useful and of interest to a great many people. But either those great many people never found the board or never bothered to post on it, because my original posts have grown old and lonely and dusty without much company. So I'm going to make another try to post frequently myself, and invite anyone else out there who hears of or sees movies, TV shows, books or articles that touch on adoption to post about them as well. You no longer have to join ezboard to post; just make up an alias and go. Somebody? Anybody?

New on Mothers with Attitude

Here's the downside of helping your kids learn to read and write and spell: It's not so easy to keep secrets from them anymore. So Ken Swarner laments in his latest Family Man essay. ... And on the subject of reading, I've put together a page featuring the books my kiddos have been plowing through this summer. If you're looking for good reads for reading- or attention-disabled youngsters, it's a good place to start. (Love those Cobble Street Cousins.)

Reading to Invisible Scooby

I've been feeling a little bad about reading to my son this summer. Not that I don't love the time we spend curled up with a book together, or think that listening to a parent read has no value to a child. It's just that he's a good reader in his own right, and I like for him to exercise that skill, too.

But the book we've spent the past month or more on, "There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom" by Louis Sachar, was one he preferred to hear the first time through. I know it wasn't beyond his sight reading level; the chapters were short, like he likes them, and the print wasn't tiny. But it's almost as though he was so interested in the subject matter -- about a boy so unpopular in school that his only friends are little toy make-believe animals he relates to in his room -- that he didn't want to have to waste attention on the mechanics of reading. Sometimes, you have to let art wash over you.

When we finally finished the book earlier this week, he grabbed it from me rather than letting me put it back on the shelf. I let him take it to his room, although the clutter quotient in that smallish space is awfully high, and was rewarded with the sound of him reading it for himself -- to his own make-believe friend. In his case, it's the much-loved Invisible Scooby-Doo who's getting to hear his master's deft, emotionally rich interpretation of the text. One day, I hope he'll read like that to me. But for now, I'm glad he lets me read to him. (Next up: Judy Blume's "Freckle Juice." Should I worry that my son's already asked if he can color his face with Magic Marker?)

Hair from the heart

I seem to be hearing a lot lately about a program called Locks of Love. First it was in a comic strip called "Zits" — a teenage girl was complaining about how impossible it was to do anything with her long messy hair, and her mother suggested she cut the offending hair off and give it to someone who needs it. The daughter learned that "Locks of Love" makes donated hair into wigs for children who have lost their hair due to cancer or alopecia, and ultimately does sacrifice her ponytail to the cause.

Then, a few weeks later, our priest presented the exact same tale as a true story in his homily. Maybe it was just a coincidence and there are lots of teens crabby enough about their hair to cut it off for the cause; or maybe he doesn't believe anybody in his congregation reads the funny papers. But it was enough to make me want to look into the organization, find the Web site, and think about how I can help.

The fact is, although I am not myself a crabby teen girl, I have been growing my hair out lately. I don't think I've had it cut in more than a year, mostly because the thought of scheduling and actually taking the time to go to the hairdresser fills me with exhaustion. But now, see, I'm not just lazy and unkempt: I'm lazy and unkempt for charity. I figure I've got a good couple of years before my locks will be anywhere near the 10" required for donation, and then I can go for one free trim, have the hair lopped off, and then go back to doing absolutely nothing while my next contribution grows. This is the kind of volunteer work I can really get into.

Dress for success

It's not even fall yet, and already my daughter is having her first struggle with middle school rules and regulations. The issue at hand is the school dress code, which the principal thoughtfully mailed out in time for school-clothes-shopping season, and although it doesn't seem unusually restrictive to me, the fashion dictates have my usually passive girl stomping and fuming. It's not that she's all caught up in wearing the latest stylish thing or the coolest kooky trend. She's always preferred comfort above all, and that's where the rules get her goat — because along with the forbidding of too tight, too short, too high-heeled, too droopy-hemmed, and too offensive couture, the principal has outlawed oversized T-shirts, decreeing that said garments should end at the "high hip area." And my young student-to-be has never heard anything so ridiculous in all her young life.

You should have heard her and her friend squawking about having to wear neater-looking T's to class. You'd have thought the dress code mandated shirts and ties, dresses and nylon stockings, polished shoes and buttoned cuffs. Oh, the indignity, the cruelty, the extreme discomfort of wearing a T-shirt that does not fall to mid-thigh! She hates shorter T-shirts! They're not her style! They don't feel right! Woe is her. Me? Not so much. While I'm personally in favor of any clothing baggy enough to conceal the sort of body she's developing under there, I'm smart enough to know that if I'm going to pick a battle going into a new school, it's not going to be over shirt hems. I'm more likely to fight for the comfortable fit of student and classroom than the comfortable fit of her clothes.

Besides, when I was a kid, girls didn't even get to wear pants to school, much less baggy T-shirts. My daughter isn't interested in stories about the olden days, and it's just as well, because under cross-examination, I'd have to admit that the no-pants rule only lasted through the elementary school years, and that on my first day of middle school in 1971, I wore a very spiffy pair of crushed velvet hotpants. They were of a length that would not pass my daughter's principal's below-the-fingertips rule for shorts and skirts, but I believe my matching peasant blouse did indeed stop right at the high hip area.

Reading girl

Hey, my reading-phobic daughter has, as of today, read a total of seven books this summer. Seven! We know the exact number because she's been filling out a form picked up at a Barnes and Noble bookstore, and when she gets to eight books she gets a free one. Free books aren't exactly a thrill for her, but I think she is proud to be filling in those blanks. To try to fan the flames of excitement over reading, I also bought a "reading log" from the Really Good Stuff Web site; meant for a classroom, it's a laminated log with paper leaves that kids can fill in with the title, author, and what they like about the books they've been reading. Our log's looking pretty fluffy, with her seven leaves on it.

Whenever my girl balks at reading, as she tends to do, I explain that reading is like exercise for your brain, and will help with her ongoing language learning disabilities. And darned if it doesn't seem to be working. She's been more and more able to express herself over the past couple of months, finding the words to ask questions she was never able to ask before. Including, interestingly, questions about her birthparents and her adoption. I've tried to engage her in conversation about adoption for years, and she's never been very interested, usually following up my sensitive openings with questions about what's for dinner. But now, suddenly, she's exploding with curiosity and fantasies about what life would have been like with her birthparents and plans for contacting them when she's a grown-up. So now it's my turn to get reading: Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew, for starters. Now that she's becoming able to communicate in ways she never could before, I need to be able to communicate back.

Short, and short-tempered

Every child's right to use pharmaceuticals to attain perfect normalcy got another boost today when the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of growth hormone shots to help short kids become less so. Perhaps you will understand my consternation at this decision when I mention that the FDA approved the use of Humatrope for boys whose adult height is predicted to be less than 5-foot-3 and girls likely to be under 4-foot-11 — and then reveal that I myself, at a fully grown and much-advanced-adult height, am a growth-hormone-deprived 4-foot-10. Two of those inches, I gained in my 20s.

So I may not know from being ADHD or ODD or OCD or any of those other D's they give children drugs for, and I may therefore try to reserve my opinion on medicating kids for those problems ... just mumbling disgruntedly to myself, but not too loudly. But I know from being short. And while there certainly are some drawbacks to extreme lack of height — just try buying pants off the rack, for example — it's nothing worth subjecting your children to six shots a week for. It is eminently survivable.

Sure, I got teased a lot. I was short in kindergarten, I was short in junior high, I was short in high school. I spent years waiting for the growth spurt that never came. But I like to think that being short helped to toughen me a bit to the torment kids inflict on each other, because my height was so clearly something I could do nothing about, and so it wasn't something I internalized or spent a lot of time blaming myself for. Kids will always find something to tease other kids about. At various times, I got it for being overweight, for being a spoiled only child, for being lousy at gym, for being pushy -- all charges that stung. But my height was always such an obvious target that it was hardly worth making up other things to tease me about, and that was the one accusation it was easy for me to brush off. In the long run, I'm glad I grew up short.

Is it so impossible for families today to think of things the same way? Is normalcy so de rigeur that any departure from it is unthinkably painful enough to justify any remedy? Was Randy Newman right all along about short people having no reason to live? The drug companies would certainly like us to think so. My mom always used to tell me that good things come in small packages, but I guess the only small packages these days are the ones that contain our daily meds. Snippy little thing, aren't I?

Wrap it up

Coming soon to a lunchbox near you: baggies you can eat. Chemists have come up with an edible food wrapping that you can gobble right along with your sandwich, and it may be on the market by the end of the year. The paper-like wrapping, which can also be used on frozen foods and then cooked, is made of compressed fruits and vegetables and is intended to cut down on the plastics and foils that get tossed in the trash. Even if your kids refuse to eat their broccoli-flavored wrap, the stuff is biodegradable, so won't last long in a landfill.

The well-meaning food chemists behind this are touting it as a nutritional as well as an environmental breakthrough, since the wrappings count as a fruit or vegetable serving, but you just know once these things are actually for sale, marketing departments will legislate that they be made in more kid-friendly flavors than carrot, tomato and papaya. Before you know it, they'll be neon-colored, sugar-packed, zingy-flavored and nutrient free, and kids will be eating the wrappers and throwing away the sandwich. Better living through chemistry! Or something like that.

New on Mothers with Attitude

After a bit of a drought, we finally have new entries from all three of our regular columnists. Julie Donner Andersen writes about spending some special one-on-one time with her kids, with mixed results, in her Therapeutic Laughing column. Ken Swarner's latest installment in his Family Man column examines the undeniable and slightly scary transformation that occurs when dad becomes grandpa. And April Cain reflects in Thinking It Over on how hard it is to give kids a little freedom, and how necessary.

Old habits die hard

I got myself into a pretty good tizzy the other day over a comment my mother-in-law made about the fact that my son, at the ripe old age of 10, is still sucking his fingers. Now, I know that's not exactly an appropriate behavior for his age. And in terms of personal hygeine and good dental care, it's also not ideal. But it's also true that sucking his fingers is a sure-fire calming technique for him, and that his other calming choices -- sucking on his shirt, blowing raspberries on his arm, putting his hands down his pants -- are at least as problematic. Picking at him constantly to take his fingers out of his mouth, take his fingers out of his mouth, take his fingers out of his mouth is a pretty good way to nudge his stress level up into the danger zone, not to mention my husband's and mine. So I haven't placed making him kick the habit anywhere high on my list of priorities.

The finger-sucking boy, therefore, was perfectly calm when we went for a visit with his grandma. My stress level, on the other hand, started creeping up when she started commenting on what a shame it was that he still sucked his fingers. It bugged me when she tried to get him to stop. It bugged me more when she asked my husband, "Don't the other kids tease him? He's 10 years old!" And it bugged me most when she turned to him and started in on how it's all our fault for not making him stop. I jumped right in and told her to leave it alone. And since her hearing's gone glitchy lately, I had to repeat myself. By the third time I said it, I was yelling. I grabbed the boy's spitty hand and took him outside for a walk, as much to give myself a time-out as anything.

The thing is, he's been doing so great this summer. He's been reading with me every day, doing worksheets on demand, practicing his piano, going to a mainstream camp without a problem, faithfully taking computerized typing lessons every day, working with a tutor once a week. He's doing so much, so calmly, and I'm so proud of him. I feel completely good and confident about saying that as long as he's doing so many big things so well, I'm not going to sweat the small stuff. So why does a little criticism throw me into meltdown mode? Why can't I just blow off the looks and the tsks and the implications of parental weakness? Why can't I be as oblivious as he is? Maybe I ought to give that finger-sucking business a try myself.

Looking for This?

I've finally found a search engine for Mothers with Attitude that should enable users to find anything that's ever been on it anywhere, from the very first "Boiling Point" essay in January, 2000, to the very latest entry in "Parenting Isn't Pretty." In addition to the link in the previous sentence, you can access it from the Pico Search logo in the bottom left-hand column on the MWA home page. Eventually, I'll work it into the template here and all throughout the site, but right now the thought of all that code-pasting gives me a headache. Do try a search, though, and see what you come up with.

Another reason to obsess over head circumference

I remember when we first brought our son home from Russia at age 21 months, what a big issue his small head seemed to be. He was small all over, to be sure, about 18 pounds at almost 2, but it was his head size that elicited the most comment. We seemed to visit the pediatrician a lot in the first year or so, and to see a different doctor at the large pediatric practice every time, and every one of them would take a look at my guy and say something along the lines of, "Boy, his head is really small." His head measurement was well below the bottom of the growth curve, but so was everything else about him. His head looked proportional enough to me. But apparently it looked freakish to the medically trained eye.

His neurologist concluded that his small head size might be a sign of FAE, or just a sign that very small heads run in his birthfamily, and eventually his head grew to a less comment-worthy size, or maybe he just passed the age at which doctors stop measuring. Looking at youngsters in the early toddler years now, I can see that they often have what look to me to be enormous heads, and so maybe that's why my boy's much more proportional noggin seemed so striking to those who look at kids all day. At the time, though, the doctors' constant comments just seemed like another annoying part of society's obsession with measuring and plotting our children's development and discerning who had the honor of being most glowingly average. Not my guy, for sure.

That pediatric preoccupation with cranial circumference is likely to increase if the findings described in this news report pan out. It seems that researchers in San Diego, California, found a correlation between a rapid increase in head size among infants and autism. Apparently it's been noted before that autistic children tend to have large heads, but what the latest research indicates is that they may have smaller than normal head size at birth, then have abnormal bursts of brain growth and head expansion between the ages of 2 and 14 months, ending up with a larger than usual head and a troublesome brain structure. The hope is that these observations may lead to identifying autism in much younger children and starting interventions earlier. And that's certainly a good thing.

But just to summarize now for you parents of very small children: You need to worry about small head size. You need to worry about big head size. You need to worry about head size going from small to big. And given the difficulty that doctors and nurses seem to have in getting that tape around a wiggly child's head and giving a good reading, you need to worry about normal head size because the next time the measurement is taken it could be proven wrong.

Is "good" bad?

Parentstages.com features an article on the ways in which a perfectly good word like "good" may not be good enough when it comes to encouraging children. The author proposes that, instead of letting loose with a simple superlative, parents and teachers should give specifics as to what merits applause. And I think he's probably right — the Nurtured Child Approach that's been so successful with my son suggests much the same thing, and it's the detailed positive comments that seem to have made the most difference.

At some point, though, doesn't your imagination just break down? I mean, when you have kids with multiple special needs, every day is filled with little opportunities to be extra-enriching. Every conversation should hit speech development points; every play time should offer sensory integration-targeted activities; every book should be read with a mind to asking questions and boosting comprehension. And now, you can't even end it with an exhausted, "Good job!" I'd like to be detailed and specific and supportive of my children in the most elaborate and effective way possible; but sometimes, goodness me, "good" is as good as it gets.

Book report

It's been a while since I've read any how-to special-needs parenting books, and it's been a nice break reading regular old nonfiction instead of nonfiction I'd have to follow through on. But the break's over — I went book-browsing today in a Barnes and Noble that has a particularly well laid-out parenting special needs section, and came away with two books on ADHD: Born to Be Wild: Freeing the Spirit of the Hyperactive Child by Kristi Meisenbach Boylan, and Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception by Thom Hartmann. Both seem to argue for an appreciation of ADHD as a set of different abilities instead of a disability to be fixed, and that's something I'm in the mood to read right now. I've been trying to convince my son's Child Study Team that his behavior would be much more manageable and his learning much improved if a more creative approach could be taken to classwork. This isn't a kid who will ever work at a desk job or take on work that requires calm, quiet and control, so why focus so much effort on getting him to sit still and shut up? He's got some very clear strengths; he's curious, creative, questioning, focused when he's interested and a hands-on kind of guy. Why not work with those traits instead of against them? Maybe these books will give me some ammo for that upcoming battle, or at least give me a little more courage in my convictions.