Proud moments

Yesterday was a proud day for our family, in a few different ways. Our school district held a "junior olympics" for special education students in its elementary schools, and my son was among those who participated. Parents got to sit in the stands while teachers and other volunteers wrangled our kiddos, and I was proud to see my guy out there running around with his friends. I was also proud of his sister, who was one of those volunteers. She started the morning pretty whiny about having to go to something her brother was doing, and when a teacher we know drafted her to help out, I expected she'd last a short while and coming whining back. But she really got into helping the little kids, stayed at it the whole day, and had a great time. She's often mentioned a desire to work with young children, and in fact has a volunteer job this summer helping at a day camp, so I was proud to see that it was something she could really follow through on.

And one more proud moment: I'm a seat-of-my-pants sort of Web site programmer, learning what I need as I go along and panicking at the complicated stuff, so I'm really feeling quite impressed with my little self that I managed -- after plenty of tries, screw-ups and confusion -- to successfully plant a quiz on my About.com site. Check it out: It's an Alphabet Soup Quiz to test your acronym acument.

Mommy, what's that?

Another reason to stop your kid from watching TV: As of this month, condom ads have broken the, ahem, barrier of TV advertising and will now be appearing during primetime programs. Trojan swears that they're going to be responsible and focus on STDs and HIV and not make sex look like fun or anything, but that's not going to make it any easier for parents to explain to Junior exactly what that product is for. Some articles on this new advertising development have mentioned a survey that shows only one in four Americans objects to having this kind of content during family viewing hours. I wonder whether they called any household that actually had parents in it. They sure didn't ask me.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

My son got a buzz cut last week. This is something I've been lobbying for, because when you have a kid with major sensory-integration issues who hates to have his hair combed, you look for ways to avoid conflict. He and his dad had major battles over post-hairwash combing, with much yelling and screaming and gnashing of teeth (and that was just my husband). I, on the other hand, usually avoided the issue, even if it meant letting him go to school in the mornings with cowlicks like you wouldn't believe. With short-short hair in vogue now for boys, that seemed like the most logical solution: a no-comb style for a no-comb kid. He requested it himself when he popped into the barber's chair, and his dad begrudgingly went along. I'm happy to have this struggle out of the way, at least for the time being, and he looks cute enough, I suppose. But I do miss my little shaggy-headed boy. Even the cowlicks, just a little.

Big Brother is watching you, and wants your dessert

Do you know what your child eats for lunch at school? Do you care? Big Brother may soon give you the opportunity to stay right on top of that topic with a program that lets you electronically prepay your kids' lunch bill, and then see what he or she gets for it. Even items bought with hoarded change will show up, so there's no hiding that jumbo cookie or extra Snapple from Mom and Dad. I've been moderating a lunch-hour book club at my daughter's school for the past couple of years, so I've seen what sort of a la carte combos kid come up with; one boy routinely bought a lunch consisting of two or three pieces of cake. And I'll admit, it would be interesting to see just how many times a week my daughter eats pizza. But I can also see a few flaws in the system. For one thing, unless it tells you how much of what your child paid for he or she actually ate, you're still not getting a good idea of how much balanced nutrition is going on. And I've got to believe that it won't take long for the kids whose parents either don't participate in the plan or don't care what they buy to set up a pretty brisk business in ordering goodies for their friends. Where there's a will to eat a jumbo cookie, there's a way.

What did he say?

Boy, there's nothing that makes you feel older than reading the words of your children's favorite songs. I've gotten into the habit of doing Google searches on the lyrics of ditties my daughter wants to download from iTunes, unless I recognize the artist and am pretty darn sure the song's not nasty. But some of the ones I've looked into have made me drop my dentures. It's hard to believe some of this stuff is getting by the FCC, because I know she's hearing them on the radio, and they don't all have "clean" versions. I guess if you avoid four-letter words and load on the metaphors, you can sing or rap about just about anything. That's the only explanation I can thing of for the fact that 50 Cent's "Candyshop" is on the radio. I finally read through all the lyrics to that and, oh my goodness, there's no way you could clean up those lyrics without just starting over and writing a different song. I don't know what's scarier, the fact that the song's basically pornography with a beat, or that about half of my son's fifth-grade class listed it in the yearbook as their favorite piece of music. I know they don't understand the words and just like the rhythm, but ... sheesh. Do you think my parents felt this scandalized by, like, the Bee Gees?

New on Mothers with Attitude

Ken Swarner's latest "Family Man" column deals with his family's tendency to have medical emergencies in the middle of the night, necessitating emergency room visits at a time of day when dad's not exactly at his best. I'm guessing that most parents of children with special needs can relate to that, with the added degree of difficulty of having to remember your child's arm-length list of diagnoses and medical background when all your head wants to do is hit a pillow.

Mom as MVP

My son is playing in a special-needs baseball league this year, and it could not be more low-key. They play three innings, tops; everyone gets to bat each inning, everyone gets pitched to until they make contact with the ball, everyone gets on base and stays on base, and at the end of the inning, everyone who's on base runs home. There are a few kids who can actually catch and throw the ball, but there are also quite a few like my guy, who are more interested in playing with the dirt in the infield. It's nice, though, for him to put on a uniform and go outside and play with other kids, or at least in the vicinity of other kids, and it's nice for my husband and I to go out and be sports parents, even if it's in a league where everybody cheers for both sides. I'm hardly a "sports mom," though, not close to the pro level of the mom of sports writer Mark Dewar, who pays tribute to his MVP in his Contributor's Corner essay, "Athletes Choke, But Moms Don't."

Dropping like flies

Boy, you know, I just can't get a break. I've been working feverishly to try to prepare my son's way into middle school next year, and it seems that every time I think I've got things lined up, they fall apart. I had a good relationship with the speech therapist from her work with my daughter, but when I went to talk with her about my son she told me she was quitting. I didn't even get a chance to talk to the guidance counselor before hearing that he was retiring, and a new person would be there in the fall. And now I find that my daughter's child study team leader, who had been extremely helpful in advising me on my son's IEP and whom I had made sure would be his CST leader too, is leaving at the end of this year. It's getting so I'm afraid to talk to anybody. I've actually had a couple of nice conversations with the principal, so I figure he's doomed for sure.

I've always had a policy of thinking only six months ahead because so much can change in a school or a district, but this is getting ridiculous.

Book lover

My son loves the Shiloh trilogy of books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Just loves them. Loves them beyond all logic. For a kid who has about a 30-second attention span for all but a handful of obsessions, he can converse on Shiloh at length, apply life lessons from the book to other situations, and sit still, rapt with attention, for chapters upon chapters. As a big reader myself, I'm thrilled to see a book take such a strong hold on a youngster, even if, well, maybe, from time to time, we could, like, read a different book? No? Okay.

He's been on a particular Shiloh kick lately, dropping observations about evil Judd Travers and noble young Marty and the sweet beagle that one of them abused and the other saved. This is fine when he's talking to me, because I know what he's talking about, and the things he says make sense. But it can take other folks by surprise. Like Sunday, when we were down at the animal shelter looking for a prospective pet of our own. As we took one little pooch on a get-to-know-you walk with a shelter volunteer, my guy started talking about how mean Judd Travers was to his dogs, and how he chained them up, and yelled at them, and kicked them, and starved them, and hunted out of season. The volunteer's eyes got wider and wider until she asked me, "Is this a real person he's talking about?" She was pretty much ready to call the police on this scumbag, and was relieved to hear that he was a fictional scumbag, and one who got plenty of comeuppance. Maybe now she'll seek out the Shiloh books, for herself or her children, and my son will have passed on his passion. Or else she'll make some secret "nut-job" notation on our application to ensure that the closest we get to a real dog is a well-thumbed paperback.

Becoming one of those moms

I feel like I've gone over to the dark side: After years and years of refusing to go to Home & School Association meetings (got two special-needs kids at home, don't you know, need to be there every second), years and years of finding my little nitches that allow me to work at my children's school without having to deal with personalities and politics, I've actually volunteered to be vice president of the HSA at my daughter's middle school. It will be my son's middle school next year, and that's the real reason I'm joining up; it's all part of my plan to raise my profile among the administrators there, so that when my guy inevitably misbehaves he won't be "that horrible little boy" but "that horrible little boy whose mom is on the HSA board." Will it make a difference? Maybe, maybe not. But at least they'll know where to find me.

Heavy duty

I ordered my son a weighted blanket for his bed from Dream Catcher Blankets a while back, and it finally came last week. He was thrilled with it -- Eileen Jackson, who makes the blankets, found a really cute Scooby Doo fabric for my Scooby-loving boy. He likes having weight on top of him, and so my hope is that this will help him sleep better, and also calm him down when he needs it. The jury is still out on whether it's going to work for him -- he's been going through a really silly phase, and I'm not sure even a two-ton truck could weigh him down -- but hey, I crawled under it one time and I felt calmer. That's got to count for something.

Your name is what now?

I helped chaperone my daughter's last seventh-grade dance last night. This time, much to the delight of my poor elderly ears, I was not in the over-amped gymnasium but standing by the front door of the school, checking the names of arriving children off a list of all students in good standing. Let me just give my fellow parents a piece of advice here: If you are dropping your young person off at an event which might require them to have their names checked off a list, please drill them a bit before they get out of the car as to what letter of the alphabet their name starts with. I can't tell you how many kids stood, dumbfounded, staring at the signs that said "A-L" and "M-Z" and using up every last brain cell trying to figure out what line they belonged in. And they still got it wrong more often than not. Since the room was noisy, what with all those cerebral wheels whirring, I often had to ask kids to just tell me the first letter of their last name, at which point most of them told me their first name. I'll tell you, it all made me feel a lot better about my daughter and her learning disabilities. She, at least, got in the right line.

Sick days

My son was calm and well-behaved this weekend. He listened well. He paid more attention than ever at his special-needs baseball game (not much, but more). He was quiet all through church. He played by himself happily and didn't bug me for attention every two minutes. So I should have known he was sick long before the thermometer read 102.8 and the doctor confirmed my diagnosis of strep throat.

Do your kids get good when they're sick? I'd expect the opposite -- feeling bad should make sensory sensitive kids go nuts -- but this is a regular pattern with my guy. Adding this to his experience with a splint on his arm after a bad fall, in which he was calm and focused even though he couldn't suck his fingers as he so constantly does, I'm wondering: Maybe we should stop thinking about finding medication that can "cure" our kids of their neurological problems. Maybe we should start thinking about medication that keeps them always in a state of low-grade illness or injury. What's up with that?

New on Mothers with Attitude

In "Miracles," the latest installment of her "Thinking It Over" column, April Cain considers the connection between the late Pope John Paul II and her son's addition to the family. ... In "Three Little Words," special education director Amy Krause realizes how much she takes for granted ... and in his latest "Family Man" column, Ken Swarner wonders whether his wife even needs him to be there for some of their conversations.

Theme park fun

We just got back from a week in Orlando, and I once again got a lesson from my son on fun being in the eye of the beholder. With theme park upon theme park of rides and attractions to choose from, his absolute favorite spot was the display of GM cars that you pass when exiting from the Test Trak roller coaster at Epcot. It's just supposed to be a stroll by, maybe check out a car and watch a commercial, and then be on your way to the next meticulously designed and scripted Disney amusement, but for my car-obsessed guy it was the be-all and end-all. We got a Park Hopper pass so that no matter where we started the day, we could end it with those six or seven cars. He crawled in and out and all around them for hours and hours. Sometimes we'd feel guilty for not forcing him to experience more, and sometimes we'd get him to try a ride or two, but really, he was as joy-filled amongst these down-to-earth vehicles as a hall full of Small World marionettes. The happiest place on earth? Behind the wheel of a showroom Hummer, my friend.

In great shape for the shape you're in

This just in: It's okay to be fat! Or, if not okay, at least less "not okay" than it had appeared to be. Estimates of the number of deaths supposed to be caused by obesity have recently been revised down, making it seem as though all the hysteria over the overweight was misplaced and maybe more about selling health services and diet plans than actual medical fact. But not so fast: Others are interpreting the statistics to say that it's only okay to be fat if you're fit, "lack of fitness" being the real danger sign rather than a high scale reading. Fit and fat! Fat and fit! It just sounds like a marketing slogan, doesn't it?

How unsuperficial of them!

When you hear a Hollywood couple is breaking up, it's natural to assume that the cause is something seedy or career-related or otherwise removed from the realm of mere mortal relationships. Certainly, when Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards announced their breakup, the stories popped up pretty quick that he'd returned to his prostitute-friendly ways. But recently, while researching the topic of vaccines and autism for my About.com site, I turned up a fairly bizarre bunch of articles from British gossip sites and a few other sources indicating that the reason for the breakup is far more mundane: They fought over whether their toddler should have the MMR vaccine. Apparently, the difference of parenting opinion between Richards, who wanted to vaccinate the youngster, and Sheen, who feared it might cause autism, grew so heated that she decided to pack the marriage in, despite the fact that she was pregnant with the couple's second (and clearly soon-to-be-vaccinated) child. I've done enough research to know that the topic of whether vaccines cause autism is heated and divisive, but do couples really break up over it? Hollywood couples?

Opting for exclusion

My daughter just finished her first week in resource room for reading and math. That's something I've been fighting against for a long time, pretty much since she was in fourth grade, but in the end I'm the one who suggested the switch. She was doing great in seventh-grade inclusion, getting decent grades, liked by her teachers, keeping up to the best of her ability. It seemed like my theory of putting her in the most challenging environment possible was working. But of course, I wasn't the one having to live through the most challenging environment possible all day, every day. I've had jobs that were the most challenging environment, and I've quit them. My daughter can't quit; she's a good girl, she does what I say, and she tries to believe me when I tell her she can do it. But her feelings of anxiety and overwhelm-ment kept popping out in headaches and stomachaches and crying jags and teeth grinding and a raging case of negative self-talk. I could tell her she was doing fine until I was blue in the face, but if she couldn't own that feeling herself, pushing her was some kind of torture.

So I asked at her IEP meeting, "Do you think she'd be better off in resource?" I sort of hoped everyone would say, "No! Why would you think that! She's doing so well!" Instead, the response was something along the lines of, "Well, duh!" The decision was made to switch her for the last quarter of this year for some immediate stress relief and to ease her anxiety about next year's classes. She's never been one to enjoy changes in routine, but she jumped at this chance to switch and has been beaming about it most days this week. For the first time in a long time -- maybe ever -- she's noticing that she understands things a little better than some of her classmates. I'll always fear that this means she's in a class that's too easy and without a challenge she'll get lazy and fall back; but I also can't deny that leading the pack instead of struggling along behind it is an empowering feeling she could darn well use. We'll see how it goes.

Innovations in eyewear

I remember when I was a teenager, way longer ago than I care to admit, one of my great battles with my dad was over getting contact lenses. I wanted them, and he thought they were awful. Of course, he didn't wear glasses himself, so he had no idea what it was like to have your nose and ears pinched, how uncomfortable it was to have spectacles sliding down your nose in sweaty weather -- not to mention how much they messed up your makeup or clashed with your outfit. I eventually got what I wanted, as I usually did, mostly in this case because my mom (a glasses wearer herself) wanted me to have contacts even more than I did. My eyes never did adjust to them very well, though, and after years of tears and redness and crawling around on the floor looking for popped-out lenses, I went back to glasses and never looked back.

Contacts have come a long way since my teen years, and I'll bet there aren't many parents anymore who object to their kids getting them. No, kids who are looking to establish their independence by demanding things their parents are discomfited by have to be a little more creative nowadays than popping pieces of plastic on their eyeballs. They have to do things like this: sticking a rod through the bridge of their pierced nose and perching little eyeglass lenses on top. That's just the sort of extreme idea that makes parents shudder and talk about their dead bodies. But maybe because I've been wearing glasses most of my life, and feeling the weight on my poor little ears, I have to ask: Just how painful is piercing the bridge of your nose, anyway? Worse than facing the sunlight with scratchy contacts?

Who needs an Evil Genius when you've got a mom?

I went to see the movie "Ice Princess" with my daughter the other night. It was pretty standard Disney Channel fare, blown up for the big screen, with that timeless theme of Following Your Dream and having the courage to stand up and tell grown-ups they Just Don't Get It. I was able to enjoy the plot enough to suspend my motherly disbelief at the time, but the more I think about the film, the more it ticks me off. Let's just say it's not something you want your kids to take you to for Mother's Day, no matter how much you may love ice skating.

While the film is certainly formulaic, it does away with two of those staples of teen and Disney flicks: the nasty Alpha Girl who makes the less cool but nonetheless scrappy heroine's life a misery, and the Evil Villain whose diabolical plot the heroine somehow stands in the way of. It's hard to imagine a teen movie without an Alpha Girl, or a Disney movie without an Evil Villain. And yet, in "Ice Princess," the Alpha Girl becomes an ally pretty early on, and there is no Evil Villain bent on world domination or puppycide. Instead, as the perpetrators of cutting comments, confidence busters, dirty tricks and dire consequences, we have ... moms. And not even evil stepmoms. Just plain old striving smothering over-loving single moms who commit that unforgiveable teen movie offense of wanting things for their daughters. The nerve!

Joan Cusack, who either allowed herself to be filmed entirely without makeup or was wearing some sort of harried middle-aged mom spackle that made her look exactly like I do most days, plays the mom of a bright honor student, the kind who spouts complicated scientific formulas when she's flustered and does math sums in her head to such a degree that it makes other kids uncomfortable. The girl seems to be on a fast track to Harvard, and happy about it, until a summer science project turns into a fascination with figure skating. Because it's a Disney movie, she has such enormous natural talent that she's suddenly besting skaters who've been working at it since before they could lace up their own boots. It's not long before she's letting her grades slip, ditching college interviews, and squeezing into little sequined outfits. And a mom's not supposed to have her reservations about that? If it were drugs or drinking or bad boyfriends that were luring this good girl from the straight and narrow, we'd be slapping that mom silly for letting her out of the house. But figure skating? That's Following Her Dream, Mom! Back off and get your own!

Of course, the mom who wants her daughter to be a figure skater -- played by Kim Cattrall, who must have had it in her contract that under no circumstances would she be wearing the harried middle-aged mom spackle -- is also an evil dream-squishing killjoy. Because her beautiful blond child, who has devoted most of her young life to leaps and lutzes, just wants to do better in math! Please, Mom, don't make me cut class, she pleads. All this ice princess wants is to go to the homecoming dance and maybe get into college and marry her stupid football-playing boyfriend and drop out and have babies and a miserable life in a trailer somewhere and ... whoops, I'm letting my essential mom-ness get in the way of a girl and her dream again. Skating Mom was herself a skater who never fulfilled her promise, and so it must therefore be true that she's living through her child; the fact that she's the one who does the dirty tricks against a rival pretty much seals her deal as a Bad Mom Who Has Lost Perspective. And again, I say: If this was a movie about a promising athlete who was distracted by drugs or drink or bad boyfriends, we would be cheering as the mom fought those bad influences with a baseball bat and the fire of motherly love. But going to class? Doing homework? Being a normal kid? Well, why would you want to get in the way of that? Because we all know that being happy in high school is what really sets you up for success in life.

Yeah, I know, I'm touchy. I'm reading too much into a little piece of you-go-girl fluff. We moms, you know, we Take Everything So Seriously! The movie hits me at a time when I've just deviated from one dream for my daughter in order to maybe make her a little happier, and so watching the geek girl land her triple leaps and the Alpha girl hug her math tutor should fill me with reassurance that the path we set is not always the right one for our children to follow. But it doesn't. I still wonder. It's still such guesswork. You can tack a weepy, feel-good ending on it, but I'm not convinced that a few years down the road, those daughters and those moms aren't going to be second-guessing their decisions. Sometimes pushing our children is a bad idea, but sometimes it's the only way to get them where they're going. That's something you just can't skate around.

Busy girl

I've been a bad little blogger this week, but have pity: I had my son home from school on Monday with an Easter-onset illness, IEP meeting for my daughter on Wednesday during which I reversed my own policy so quickly I got whiplash, son home again on Thursday and also Friday morning with an eye infection, an annual pediatrician visit Thursday night, and a birthday party tomorrow involving taking a dozen kids to a science museum. Plus, have I mentioned I work for a Catholic newspaper, and there's this little story you may have heard about that's going to be making our deadline schedule very tight for the next few days? I'm keeping up with my article-a-day duties on my About.com site, but here, not so much. I'll have more on all this stuff next week. But maybe not until the paper goes out on Tuesday.

Birthday boy

My son turned 12 last week, and I have been after him to have a birthday party. We've had one every year he's been in school, and it's been nice getting his special-ed classmates together outside of school for a little social contact. Last year he had a bowling party, and I thought that was pretty successful, and easy for me, and was really pushing for him to go for that again. But he was resistant; he said he was too old for parties. Finally, he decided that what he really wanted was for everybody to go to a local science museum -- a trip that is logistically much, much more complicated than bowling and pizza. This is what I get for pushing the issue. I'm not just hosting a party, I'm planning a field trip. Maybe I'm too old.

The king, and I, and the noisy people behind me

My daughter and I went to the spring musical at her middle school last night -- "The King and I," performed in a shortened version that left out some very familiar songs and added some really boring narration to cover up the plot gaps. But you gotta love little 11-, 12-, 13-year-old kids up there on stage belting out classic songs and pretending. The boy who played the king even shaved his head for the role. The girl who played Anna went to my daughter's elementary school and was in a writing enrichment class I taught there, so we were happy to cheer her on. The only really bad performance of the evening was given by the people sitting behind us, who just would not stop talking all through the performance. That was sad enough when it was a group of little gossiping girls who only broke from their whispered conversation to scream the names of actors when they'd successfully completed their numbers. But after a while a group of grown men sat in the row between us and the girls, and then they started talking, too. One of them was our district superintendent of schools (and the husband of one of my best library volunteers), so I could hardly give him the evil eye. But I thought about it, alright. Perhaps what we needed was for the King of Siam to stomp out into the audience with his bare feet and his bald head, clap his hands, and order, "Silence!" Hey, it worked for him onstage.

It's not just our kids who are different

Most days I just amble along, being a parent, not thinking much about it, but some days something comes up to remind me that parents of kids with special needs just think differently. Chatting with a mom who was worried about her second-grader getting into Harvard was one of those days. Certainly any day that has an IEP meeting in it is one of those days. And tragedies like the school shooting in Minnesota brings on one of those days, too.

I imagine most parents react to stories like that with fear for their children's safety, worries that some crazy kid might bring violence to their own peaceful campuses, determination to weed out kids with mental health problems pronto. And sure, I worry about my kids' safety, too, and get that shiver of dread that one day they could go to school and never come home. But honestly, the first thing that went through my mind when I heard about the shooting at a high school on an Indian reservation was: I wonder if that kid had fetal alcohol syndrome? And hard upon that: If he did and that becomes part of the news story, will people look at my fetal-alcohol-affected kid as a threat, or a freak? How much teasing does it take to throw a kid over the edge, anyway?

I shudder to think about my child being hurt by a classmate, but in the back of my head, always, is the wondering whether someday, somehow, with poor administrative handling and IEP violations and abuse from teachers and other students, my kid could ever, in any way, be the one doing the hurting. It's unimaginable to me now, and I am beyond vigilant. But I'll bet I'm not the only mom of a behaviorally challenged kid who thinks that way. Who thinks differently.

Silver linings

It's funny sometimes how bad things make you notice good things so much more. I would never have wished for my son to hurt his arm, but in the aftermath of that accident I've become aware of some surprising little maturity leaps he's taken lately. How patient he was while waiting in the ER; how still he sat for the X-ray technician, how cooperative he was with her in learning how to place his arm on the table; how unconcerned he is about having a splint on his arm. It was only about two years ago, when he needed an MRI and an EEG for seizures, that we couldn't even imagine not knocking him out for those procedures. It was unthinkable that he would be able to understand that he had to lie still, much less get his neurological act together to do it. Yet there he was on Thursday, perfectly unmoving for the camera, perfectly understanding. I bet he could take that MRI now without meds, bet he could tolerate the EEG electrodes glued to his scalp. When did that happen? When did he become sensory un-defensive enough to tolerate a heavy binding itchy thing on his arm? I bet even he didn't know he could go for days without sucking his fingers; I suspect he believed just as hard as I did that it was essential to his emotional equilibrium. But he's been quite balanced these last few days. Who knew? Not me.

Sore subject

I had another little ER jaunt yesterday, this time with my son and a sore arm. He'd fallen at recess and scraped up his right palm pretty good, but what was really bothering him by the time he was leaving school was his left arm. Now, this is a kid who rarely feels pain, so when he's screaming "Ow! Ow! Ow!" when I try to move his arm, refusing to put his arm in the jacket sleeve, unable to buckle his seatbelt, and actually crying about it, I pay attention. My husband agreed that the arm looked a little swollen, so off we went to see a doctor and get some X-rays and wait and wait and wait.

He was not able to be very specific with the medical professionals about where it hurt; I tried to explain that he doesn't feel pain well and he's not really in tune with his body that way so he may not really know exactly where the pain is, and maybe they believed me. He did get the X-rays, which of course showed nothing, but the doctor said that since he was a "young main with open growth plates," she'd go ahead and put a splint on him for a few days, and if by Monday when we took it off the arm still hurt we could go to our pediatrician and get more X-rays and go on from there. I have a feeling this was an "appease the mom" device, and under normal circumstances would have felt full of doubt over whether I had made too much of his cries of pain. But during our long wait, something important occurred to me: He wasn't sucking his fingers. He always sucks his fingers. He will not allow himself to be dissuaded from sucking his fingers. But the fingers were on the hand attached to the sore arm. And he simply could not bend it to get them to his mouth. That arm hurt, alright. Of that, have no doubt.

Now, with the splint, he really can't bend it. Will three days be enough to break him of a habit he's had for 11 years? Maybe I should have asked the doctor if we could keep it on for a few weeks.

Pop star

I've certainly been bored enough to surf around the Web looking for something, anything to do, but I'm not sure I would stoop to this: there's a Web site devoted to a game that offers nothing more than the simulated popping of bubble wrap. There's certainly something therapeutic and maybe a little addictive about actually holding those puffy plastic bubbles between your fingers and pressing them 'til they pop, but doing the same with a mouse? The sound's nice, but the little tactile thrill is gone. Normal mode requires you to actually click a bubble to pop it, while "addictive" mode allows you to just run the arrow around the sheet and hear the pops with no additional input required. You'd have to be pretty bored to find that a worthy way to waste your time ... but maybe I'll bookmark it anyway, just in case.

Poor, deprived child

Ways in which I am ruining my 14-year-old daughter's life (as I have repeatedly been reminded this weekend):

1) I will not let her have a TV in her room like every single other teenager in America.
2) I will not let her watch MTV even though it's just for fun and she doesn't take any of that stuff seriously.
3) I will not let her download certain rap songs even though she does not understand what they mean and just likes the beat.
4) I will not buy a flat-screen TV for the living room.
5) I make her have a bedtime of 9:30 p.m. (still considered cruel and inhumane even though she often falls asleep at 9 p.m.)
6) I make her practice her trombone even though she hates her trombone.
7) I make her read even though she hates reading.
8) I make her be nice to her brother even though she hates her brother.
9) I will not let her have a phone in her room like every single other teenager in America.
10) I just laugh when she whines about #1-9.

Bad mom. Baaaaaaad mom.

Gotcha!

The city that we live in is sandwiched between two larger urban areas with embattled school systems, and there's a constant drive on to "catch" families from those other municipalities who are sneaking their kids into our schools. Rewards have been offered for turning out-of-town students in, whether they're using a false address or squeezing themselves into an illegal apartment. I'd never thought much about it -- if anything, considered it a sort of silly but probably fiscally necessary exercise. But yesterday, it hit close to home: A boy in my son's class was caught, and removed. The teacher told the kids he was moving, which is certainly preferable to explaining urban area vs. clinging-to-the-last-vestiges-of-suburbia politics to multiply disabled fifth-graders. But the truth was, he was in trouble for not having moved to the city he was being schooled in.

And yeah, I'm a taxpayer, and it's hard enough to meet our school budget without freeloaders barging in. The fact that this boy was a special-ed student I suppose adds to the financial burden he placed. But I also can't help feeling sorry for the boy, who is torn from his class just a few months shy of the end of school; disruptions are hard on any kid, but so much more so for kids with challenges. And I can't help feeling sorry for his family, who undoubtedly just wanted their child to be somewhere safe. We make hard choices as parents, and sometimes we make foolish ones, and ones that wind up hurting our children despite our best intentions. That's something I can empathize with for sure.

Letting the school down

Are Home and School Associations (or PTAs or PTOs or whatever the heck they're called where you're at) about to become things of the past? Some of you are cheering at that idea, I know, I can hear you. There's been a sort of HSA tyranny going on for years, making moms who don't volunteer feel inadequate, giving moms who do volunteer approximately the same status as cheerleaders when you were in high school. But now, even those cheerleader moms are starting to drop out, lost to a new job or some of the 5,000 other activities their kids are involved in, and the activities their organizations used to take responsibility for are in jeopardy. Certainly, I don't think anybody's going to cry if there are no more fund-raisers; how much gift wrap can we buy, really? But the stuff the fund-raisers paid for? There's liable to be a fuss when that stuff disappears.

My daughter brought home a letter today from her school principal and the president of the Home and School Association detailing all the things that won't happen if parents don't step up and volunteer to plan fund-raisers. It's written in exactly the same tone of ticked-off sarcasm I've heard teachers use with students: "Alright, fine. You don't want to do your work? Which should we cancel, the dances or the yearbook? We'll just take these nice honor society certificates right back to the store." I sympathize with the frustration the folks who are still trying to make things go must feel, and I also feel defensive as heck because, excuse me, I do volunteer. I volunteer plenty. Just because I don't want to stay out every night planning some sort of evening raffle extravaganza doesn't make me a bad parent. If the school really wants to bank some money, maybe they should take up the suggestion I made here a few years ago: Tell parents that if they donate a certain amount, they will never be bugged to buy cookies or plan events for the duration of the school year. I'd write them a check right now. Honor society certificates all around!

Something good about McDonald's

Well, I'm just the luckiest idiot in the world. For the second time, I left my wallet in McDonald's, and for the second time, I recovered it intact. I'm going to have to go this McDonald's now every week for the rest of my life out of gratitude. The first time I lost it there, a number of years ago, it was for exactly the same reason as yesterday: I was with the kids, I was distracted, and I was so busy making sure they left with their jackets and shoes and leftover food that I didn't notice I was missing my own belongings. The really embarrassing thing about this latest escapade is that I left the wallet there yesterday morning and didn't notice it was missing until tonight. Who does that? A very lucky idiot, I guess.

Every now and then it happens

Tonight I heard those words so sweet for a parent to hear from a teen: "Mom, you were right." My 14-year-old daughter was determined to watch the movie "Speed" on TV, despite the fact that it was rated R. She'd watched about half of it a few nights ago before I realized what the rating was, and wanted to watch the whole thing when it was repeated tonight. Now, it was on a basic cable station with commercials, so I was pretty sure they'd have to take all the hard R stuff out; and she swore nothing about it had bothered her during the previous viewing. But I also remembered that there were scary parts of that movie that just involved Dennis Hopper being one creepy dude; and remembered, too, that there have been other things on TV that didn't bother her right up until the point where they bothered her very, very much. So fuddy-duddy Mom was against the repeat viewing, and at the very least insisted that Dad be in the room watching with her (not Mom, you'll notice; things bother me, too.) So she watched the whole thing, and when I asked her how she liked it, she uttered those entirely gratifying words. And now, of course, I'll have to worry about whether I'm making her fearful by being afraid for her, and whether she was spooked by the movie this time because I was so sure she would be. But not tonight. Tonight, I'm just going to do the "you were right" dance and enjoy delightful vindication.

You are getting sleeeeeeeepy

I have fallen into this very bad habit of falling asleep the second the kids go to bed -- sometimes before -- and then waking up in the wee hours and doing all the things I should have done the previous evening, like, oh, say, writing this blog. (The date and time on this shows 8:54 p.m., which is the time I opened the template up, following which I sat down to watch cartoons with my son and woke up around 4 a.m. And now here I am. Good morning!) It's getting to the point where I sleep in my clothes more than I sleep in my PJs. My husband, who has to get up early for work, is stuck in the same pattern -- falls asleep on the couch watching TV, and is still there when the alarm goes off. It's like we're some sort of cliched feuding couple, with the husband sleeping on the couch. But really, we're just worn out. I'd attribute this to old age, but it's the sort of thing I used to do in college, using anything, even sleep, to put off doing work that needed to be done. You'd think I would have outgrown that kind of procrastination by age 45. You'd be wrong. The only difference is, instead of falling asleep after the Tonight Show goes off, I'm now falling asleep during "Jay Jay the Jet Plane."

The secret to happiness

Like probably a lot of other parents of children with special needs, I'm often amazed at what some moms and dads worry about. I was talking to a mom the other day who was positioning her second-grader to attend an Ivy League college, and I realized how far off my radar screen anything even remotely of that nature is. I'm more worried about whether her inability to pass a standardized test will keep my daughter from getting a high school diploma, or whether my son will be able to make it through school in our district or will have to be sent somewhere special. Ivy League? Heck, I'm not even thinking as far as the local junior college. One day at a time, right? That's what I tell my daughter when she gets all anxious about every possible consequence of every possible action, and that's a pretty good motto for me as a parent, too, I think. And so I appreciated "Finding Happiness in Your Child," some insights from Stan Goldberg, Ph.D., a learning consultant and the author of "Ready To Learn: How To Help Your Preschooler Succeed." It's nice to get permission to just enjoy the present.

Harried Parent's Book Club

Throughout the month of March, I'll be posting a book review a day on the About.com Parenting Special Children site as part of the Harried Parent's Book Club. Included will be parenting books and books about specific special needs. First up: Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach," a great behavior book on positive discipline.

Headline writers come out fighting

I'm feeling a little let down about the fact that "Million Dollar Baby" was such a big winner at the Oscars last night. I would have liked "Sideways" to win, and would have been fine with just about anything else taking home prizes, but it was not to be. Over and above those folks directly involved with the feel-good euthanasia film of the year, though, you've got to believe that headline writers across the country did a little dance of joy when Clint Eastwood's baby stole the spotlight. Name a boxing metaphor, phrase or cliche, it's been used this morning in stories about the ceremony. Lacking the opportunity to use words like "KO'd" and "packed a punch" and "champ" and "knockout" and "heavyweight," what on earth would those poor ink-stained wretches come up with? "'The Aviator' flies high"? "'Sideways' is top vintage"? "Oscar's 'Ray' of sunshine"? "'Finding Neverland' doesn't lose"? Oh, yeah, they're loving those boxing terms. Maybe some sort of fix was in?

Ceremony fever

I watched the "Independent Spirit Awards" last night, mostly to see my favorite movie of this season, "Sideways," get some of the love I'm pretty sure it's not going to get at the Oscars tonight. (Alright, it's not just my favorite movie of this season, it's the only movie up for anything I've actually seen. So sue me. We go with what we know.) It was a pretty amusing ceremony, sort of the anti-Oscars in terms of glamour but certainly not lacking in self-seriousness. I was a little shocked to see that even here there were cheesy musical numbers -- irreverent send-ups of each of the movies nominated for the top spot, in the style of Billy Crystal's Oscar send-ups but not, alas, with that much style. It's hard to know what was worse; listening to the lame attempts at musical comedy or looking at the interspersed shots of the movies' stars trying to hide their horror in the name of good sportsmanship. Now that's acting.

You're putting cameras where?

Now, I'm as interested in Oscar night gossip and backstage banter as the next pathetic show-biz obsessed person, but really, I think this is crossing the line: the WE Network is planning to broadcast from inside the ladies' room during commecials in the Oscar-cast. The idea is that viewers will madly channel-flip during ads to see who's gotta go now -- with host Sandra Bernhardt interviewing them on the way? I do think celebrities sometimes protest too much about the invasiveness of the media and what a hassle it is to be rich and famous and popular, but here, you know, I think they do have a point: Can't they even go to the bathroom now without having a microphone stuck in their face? There might, of course, be some interest in seeing how some of these gals get out of those ornate and excessive gowns to do their business ... but no, no, no. This is just wrong, people. And I'd expect a network that bills itself as "Women's Entertainment" to show a little female solidarity in this regard. Maybe we should start calling it the PEE Network instead.

Scooby's got game

I've written before about my son's invisible friend, Scooby Doo, and how talking with Scooby organizes him in useful ways, and how listening in on their conversations also often clues me in to school gossip that I'd never get from talking directly to my son. Even though 11 years old is pretty far along to still be having imaginary playmates, we've made our peace with Scooby as an at least developmentally appropriate companion, and his teachers and therapists have as well. So yesterday, when we were bowling as a family, when my son insisted that Scooby wanted to play, too, we went ahead and put the big dog on the scoreboard to fill out a twosome on the bumper lane.

Now here's the weird thing: While my son had a fairly typical game, scoring in the high 80s, Scooby did him way better. When throwing as Scooby, he sent the ball right down the middle of the lane and got spare after spare. How does that work, exactly? We're talking a significant difference in gross motor skills when impersonating a giant invisible dog. His physical therapist always tells my son that Scooby has to wait outside during their sessions, but now I'm thinking -- hey, maybe she should make the boy wait outside, and work with the dog! Scooby's got potential.

What my kids are reading now

The book my daughter's class just finished reading in school is "Holes," the contemporary kids' classic by Louis Sachar. The teacher told me that most of the students in the class had already read it and were very familiar with the plot's twists and turns. My daughter, not so much. This is the first time she's read it, and it's still considerably over her head. We're going to try watching the movie and see if Shia La Beouf can somehow bring it home, but if not we have a study guide and she'll just memorize that darn thing for the test.

The book she's reading for "pleasure," if you can use that term with a kid whose motto is "I hate reading," is a Full House novelization, "No-Rules Weekend!" No hard-to-follow plot twists here for sure. And apparently that's a good thing, because my girl actually said "I like this book" after we finished reading last time, and if she'll keep that attitude up I'll get her every Stephanie 'n' Michelle title I can find.

My son, on the other hand, is a book lover, and has been reading Beverly Cleary's "Dear Mr. Henshaw" to me with great enthusiasm. He read it last year with this special-ed class and again this year (he has the same teacher), and quotes it from time to time, so it's nice to actually read the book with him and share his excitement. I don't know how much he "gets" it, inferring the author's responses from the letters the main character writes, but he reads it willingly, and that's something in our house.

And your kid thinks you're embarrassing

Poor Lindsay Lohan. At an age when most starlets are making headlines with their own inappropriate behavior -- drug and alcohol abuse, fistfights, skipping out on hotel bills, car accidents -- she's had the scandal spotlight stolen from her again and again by her dad, who seems to be hellbent on keeping his girl out of the tabloids by getting himself in them. The latest in a string of "bad dad" headlines is a crash that resulted in a burnt-up car and a DWI arrest for the senior Lohan. Lindsay's not doing a lot of commenting on the old man's antics, but you've got to believe there's some publicist somewhere advising her to go into rehab or orchestrate a public wardrobe malfunction just to get a little publicity to herself.

Sideways in southern California

I grew up in southern California and went to college in Santa Barbara, so one of the things I enjoyed most about the movie "Sideways" was its locations in the Santa Ynez Valley. It was fun recognizing landmarks from my youth, like the sign for Pea Soup Andersen's that I passed so many times on family vacations, or the Danish tourist-trap-town of Solvang. I even took a road trip to this area myself with a couple of pals, although since we were in our late teens at the time there was no wine-tasting involved. I had read reviews that misidentified the film's setting as the better-known Northern California wine country, so it was a pleasant surprise to see the two friends played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church veer off the freeway so very much sooner.

Apparently a lot of folks are now making that detour, because "Sideways" has become a real boon for businesses in the area. You can now go to the Santa Barbara visitor's information Web site and download a "Sideways" map to help you drive along the route followed by Miles and Jack, or purchase a "Sideways" package including hotel and tour. The Hitching Post II, where the waitress played by Virginia Madsen worked, has an article about the filming of the movie on its Web site, and the Los Olivos Cafe, where the four main characters had dinner, offers a "Sideways" menu so you can dine just like they did. The $29 price tag includes a glass of Chardonnay or Pinot Noir, but no #@%!$ Merlot.

Time to think about camp

I haven't figured out yet what the heck I'm going to do with my kids over the summer. Have you? I've had them in a special-needs day camp in the past, and more recently in a church day camp that was willing to handle my son's behavior and hire a one-on-one aide for us. But this summer, I'm just not sure. I'm tempted to try to figure out some way to work at home so I could not send them to camp at all but do all sorts of good academic enrichment stuff ... but realistically, given my habit of biting off more than I can chew, am I really going to do all that or will we just wind up sitting around all day? It's getting to be time to figure these plans out. If you're flailing around for camp plans, too, check out the section on camp for kids with special needs I just put up on the Parenting Special Needs site at About.com. At least there, I look like I've got all the answers.

Too rich and too thin

Looking to feel uncharitably annoyed at someone today? Check out this article from Entertainment Tonight about stars who just can't seem to gain weight. Poor, under-100-pound dears. Most of them are short, but not that short; and most make no claim to an eating disorder, which would at least make me feel a little sorry for them. No, they're just "cursed" with a high metabolism and a natural resistance to fat, apparently. Makes you want to force-feed each and every one of them cheeseburgers, doesn't it? Or maybe just have one yourself ...

Beware of ads

If you think all the money being spent on proms these days is just obscene, check this out: A prom-dress manufacturer placed ads in two teen prom magazines, YM Your Prom and Teen Prom, that -- oops! -- contained the url of a child porn website. The mistake turned up in the company's brochure as well. Darn that typo. Publishers of YM Your Prom pulled what few issues were left of it off the newstand, while Teen Prom's said, "Hey, so they made a mistake. It's not our problem," and kept the issues on sale. I know, like me, you're shocked about this -- there are teen prom magazines? Who knew?

Love your teeth

Kissing prevents tooth decay! This is among the Valentine's Day insights from the Academy of General Dentistry that you probably don't want to share with your teen-age children. This one might be safer: the Academy also advises that kissing couples exchange up to 500 kinds of germs. I love the fact that the Academy of General Dentistry has some poor hack in a cubicle somewhere grasping for connections between dental care and major holidays. That's not too far from some of the jobs I've had in my writing past. Come to think of it, since I seem to be casting around for a way to get some Valentine content in this blog, I guess it's not too far from what I'm doing now.

Beware of beverages

Doctors are speaking out again against that great peril to today's youth: fruit juice. Seems the stuff's got too much sugar in it, even the 100-percent-juice variety, and it's fattening our kiddos, rotting their teeth, and probably making them hyper on top of it. And I'm sure they have a point. I remember when I started on Weight Watchers a year or so ago, I was astonished at the number of points it cost me to drink a glass of juice with dinner, and I think a large part of my weight loss came from switching to water. But at the same time -- do these doctors know what killjoys they are? Do they get a kick out of it? I imagine some sort of Anti-Fun Division of the AMA holding semi-annual meetings to go over our little list of creature comforts and pick one to come out against. Is juice really the best the could come up with this go-round? Seems to me there are worse things a kid could be ingesting.

Dance craze

Well, I've survived my second middle-school dance chaperoning experience, this time as soda pourer instead of door guarder. It was a Valentine's Dance, with many kids dressed in appropriate hues, and if there are any preteen girls out there reading this, let me just tell you that no matter what your body type is, you do not look good in pink sweatpants. Again this time, some of the girls looked like they were dressed for a Britney Spears video while others were endearingly, sloppily casual (my own dear big-T-shirted daughter included). Boys were mostly dress-down, but one lad seems to have entered into the festive spirit of the evening by coloring his stubbly head with a red Magic Marker. All together now: These kids today, boy, I don't know.

New stuff for parents

New on Mothers with Attitude: A parent's-eye-view of Tic disorders has been added to our Parent's Portfolio, written by "Thinking It Over" columnist April A. Cain. And new on About Parenting Special Needs: How is a special-needs parent like Spiderman or MacGyver? Check these Love Notes to find out.

The trouble with "Million Dollar Baby"

Have you seen "Million Dollar Baby"? The rumble is that it's not good for persons with disabilities, for reasons I can't write about or Roger Ebert will smack me upside the head with a baseball bat (if Roger Ebert even, you know, had a clue this site even existed). I posted a little round-up of the current controversy on the About Parenting Special Needs site, which does go into plot details, so surf at your own risk. I myself have not seen the film, though less because of ideological objections than because I never see movies, no time, no how. Maybe once a year I make it to a theater, and when I do, I darned well want to make sure I'm going to enjoy myself. Boxing along would knock "Baby" off my list, never mind that other thing that we're not supposed to discuss. I'm hoping to sneak out to see "Sideways" sometime before Oscar night; anybody know of anything objectionable there? I suppose as a mom of a child with FASD I should take offense at rampant alcohol abuse, but as long as nobody's pregnant, I'm willing to overlook.

If you have seen "Million Dollar Baby" and have something to say about it, please weigh in at the Parenting Special Needs Forum.

Reporting in

Sighs of relief at my house -- we've survived another report card. My daughter had two really impossible classes this quarter, one to increase her ability to take standardized tests (which, unless there's a magic wand involved, was not likely to happen in ten weeks), the other a health class that stands in for gym one-fourth of the year. She has an inclusion teacher for her academic classes but not for either of these, and that turns out to be a bad thing. There were moments when it seemed she might actually fail one or both of them. Hooray, then, for two D's! They rhyme with B's, which is what she got in her academic subjects (plus an A in social studies!) Not a bad quarter, really. On to the next. My son's report card was good, too, with improvement shown in behavior, surprisingly enough. The third quarter seems to be a tough one for him in terms of classroom decorum, so we'll see if he can hold on to that. I've got a whole five weeks 'til progress report time before I have to worry about it again, anyway.

Who's the expert here?

"In the real world, you have to choose a provider from your insurer's list, your child's coaches just want their star player to keep playing, your husband wants the kid to 'snap out of it,' your other kids are starting to act funny too, the therapists you consult don't tell you anything, and your anorexic is laughing at you." So writes Laura Collins in "Eating with Your Anorexic: How My Child Recovered Through Family-Based Treatment and Yours Can Too," and even if you've never dealt with an eating-disordered child, the experience of watching professionals completely bungle your child's treatment may be all too familiar. Read an excerpt from the book in Mothers with Attitude's Contributor's Corner, and relate.

Fiddler on the radio

Have you heard this new record by Gwen Stefani, "Rich Girl"? It's a pop/rap thing based, hilariously enough, on "If I Was a Rich Man" from "Fiddler on the Roof." Maybe I'm branding myself as an old fogey by knowing that it's based on "If I Was a Rich Man" from "Fiddler on the Roof" (though probably not as much as I am by calling it a "record"). My daughter certainly doesn't have a clue that the basic melody and lyrical intent originated anywhere outside today's radio playlist. But for goodness sake. I know today's music is all about sampling, and certainly the current trend of pop stars singing standards should have warned me that this sort of thing might be coming, but the thought of Tevye the milkman becoming the basis of a hot hit really just cracks me up. If somebody gets it in their head to turn "Sunrise, Sunset" -- a song that reliably made my own personal mother cry -- into a hip-hop remix, I'm just going to have to tell my daughter she can no longer listen to the radio anywhere that I can hear it. Some things you just don't mess with.

"Love Notes for Special Parents"

Could you use a little appreciation? Come on, who couldn't? Every day in February, I'm featuring a nice little affirmative pep talk for parents of children with special needs on the About.com Parenting Special Needs site. You might not get much recognition from your kids, your spouse, your children's teachers and doctors and therapists and what-all, but I'll always have something nice to say.

Now cut that out

I've been noticing an annoying trend in Web site advertising lately: audio. I'll be surfing around, listening to songs on iTunes and humming along, and all of a sudden my speakers will be flooded with some lousy canned music, usually way too loud and always disconcerting. Sometimes it actually seems to have been set up to coordinate with the actual concept of the site I'm visiting, but more often it seems cued to an ad. And as if that awful music isn't bad enough, other forcefed sound effects are creeping in. Yesterday I was convinced something must be horribly wrong with my computer -- I was hearing a loud crunching sound at irregular intervals, and it sounded for all the world like some evil virus having its way with my data. Only later, when the same sound came from my computer at work, did I finally notice that an ad on a site I visit often ended its little pitch for veggie burgers with a big bite being taken from the ad to the accompaniment of ... yep, that crunching sound. Is that really necessary? If this keeps up, browsers are going to have to come with some sort of discretionary mute button that will filter unwanted sounds while allowing ones we're actually interested in hearing. Or maybe advertisers could just shut the heck up.

Big foot

Earlier today I was getting my boots on to go out and felt that something about the shoe wasn't quite right. I looked down and realized that what I had slipped my foot into was not my lace-up black boot but my son's very similar looking one. And the scary thing is, it fit! When did my boy's feet get to be the same size as mine? This little fellow I used to tote under one arm? My little peanut-boy! I've been slowly getting used to the fact that he's getting taller, almost as tall as me now, and bigger around the middle, as his inability to keep his pants snapped makes clear, but somehow it never occurred to me that his feet would be adult-sized. Well, okay, small adult-sized. My feet are really fairly tiny. His used to be, too. I remember that. I remember how the first shoes we bought him when we went to pick him up at the orphanage in Russia turned out to be impossibly large, like twin boats on his teensy little tootsies. That was more than 10 years ago now. Time goes by fast. And feet grow.

Adaptation dread

I'm feeling a fair amount of apprehension about the upcoming movie version of "Because of Winn-Dixie." On the one hand, I adored the book, and am happy for anything that gives it a higher profile. On the other hand, the trailer seems awfully hokey, both girl and dog too cute by half, music and narration suggesting quaintness and quirkiness rather than the emotional truth of the story. I loved the low-key, episodic, bittersweet plot, and worry that they'll have to add artificial crises to make it movie-length and -weight. The one review I've read so far was good, so I'll keep my hopes up; but I'll be sad if the film raises awareness of the book just to turn everyone off to it.

Get moving

News flash: Just moving around burns calories! No, really! A study published in Science magazine indicates that the overweight have a greater tendency to just sit around, while normal-weight couch potatoes at least get up and, I don't know, jog to the refrigerator from time to time. This is excellent news for those of us who were taken aback by the government's recommendation that we all exercise an hour a day to stay fit; unless that directive was accompanied by a government regulation to make each day 25 hours long, it wasn't likely to happen. But "puttering," as the article calls it -- "puttering," I can do. I can get up, walk around, wrestle with children, run to the bathroom, no problem. That's my exercise routine, right there. But the best thing about this study is that the next time school personnel complain about all the extra movement my son does -- jumping and swaying when he's supposed to be standing still, rolling around on the floor when he's supposed to be sitting -- I can say, "Hey! He's puttering! It's a fitness thing!" What, do they want to promote childhood obesity?

Enough already

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a huge increase in the number of spam e-mail messages of the "I am a foreign national with a large amount of money I want to get into the United States and if you will only send me some cash/an airplane ticket/all your financial information I will cut you in on a large percentage of it" variety? I used to have one pop up in my inbox every so often, but lately there's been something like one a day. Did I accidentally leave my e-mail address somewhere that put me on the "greedy, gullible idiot" list? It's hard for me to believe that anybody still responds to these come-ons, if anybody ever did in the first place, but surely having so very, very many of them out there dilutes any impact they might have had. I mean, having five or 10 exotically named people offer up this unbelievable deal in a week, with only a small variation in details, might make even a greedy, gullible idiot suspicious. Diversify, spammers! Show some originality!

Called away

It's nice to be needed, I guess. Tuesdays are my busiest day at work and today was a particularly bad one, so of course this was the perfect day for me to get a call from the school nurse. My son wasn't sick, thank goodness -- and I say that both out of concern for his health and for what I would have done with him if he'd been sent home from school -- but he did have a, how shall I say it, "bathroom accident," and needed a change of pants. So I rushed out of my office with many apologies, hurried home, grabbed a pair of pants and a shirt for good measure, raced to the school, got myself to the nurse's office ... and realized I'd forgotten to bring underwear. Back in the car, back home, back to the school. I helped my guy get changed, loaded the wet duds in a plastic bag, saw him back off to his class, and went back to the workday chaos. It was, in a way, a nice little break, and a treat to see my son in the middle of the morning. It is nice to be needed. But nicer if he needed me when no one else did.

Book learning

I guess this is a good sign: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome has made it into middle-school health books. Right there in my daughter's textbook, along with information on drug abuse and alcohol abuse and the evils of tobacco was a paragraph or two on how bad it is for women to drink while they're pregnant and how different levels of alcohol consumption during different parts of a pregnancy will affect the unborn child. I tried to slip a little lesson in there about how that's what happened to her brother and shouldn't she just be more tolerant of all his particular weirdnesses now, but she wasn't buying it. I guess it's enough for now that it's at least in the book.

Late for school

We've had a pretty good year so far with the snow days here in our little northeastern city. Our former superintendant used to cancel school if there was a rumor of snow anywhere in an 100 mile radius, but the current holder of that office requires that there actually be an appreciable number of flakes on the actual ground before disrupting everyone's routine. This is much appreciated by parents, but not so much by teachers, who had become accustomed to days off and no bad commutes. The current school day has seen a few flurries but no snow days, and over the past week, I heard not one but two teachers trying to enlist students in an effort to get one -- in one case, by advising pupils to go to the superintendant's house and demand one, and in another ordering kids to perform a "snow dance." Whether either of their efforts had any influence I couldn't say, but we did get a regular dumping of snow over the weekend, and we do have a "delayed opening" tomorrow. "Delayed openings" are, I suppose, a sort of compromise, halfway between a snow day and a normal one. But in my parental book, it's still disruptive, and I still have to make all those class parent phone calls. I hope the teachers are at least satisfied, though I suspect this will just encourage them to come up with better demands and dances.

It's rough being a kid

Add something else to that list of adult ailments that are now being visited upon kids, like heart disease, obesity and high blood pressure: repetitive stress injuries. Computerized schoolwork, Web surfing and video gaming are putting kids at risk for carpal tunnel syndrome, cervical radiculopathy, disk compression and other grown-up sounding ailments -- and isn't that just a terrible comment on today's society? Let's get those kids moving, outside playing sports, so they can get Little League elbow and swimmer's shoulder and shin splints instead.

Not my kid

One of the teacher strategies I'm most uncomfortable with -- both back when I was a kid, and now as a parent -- is the "blanket condemnation," wherein a whole class gets yelled at and punished for the transgressions of a subset of students. Even if most of the class acted up, it's hard on the kids who didn't to get lumped in with the trouble. It presses all of a child's "unfair!" buttons, and I've got to believe that mutes the teacher's message, as much as I can sympathize with how hard it must be not to lose your temper when faced with a mob of unruly children. My daughter is usually one of those who was not causing trouble, and yet she's also the one who takes the threats most to heart. Many times over the past couple of years she's come home all upset because a teacher threatened the whole class with failure, or detention, or repeating a grade, because some kids couldn't pay attention and do their work. It's a hard situation, because you also don't want the teacher saying, "You're all in big trouble -- except you, my one wonderful student, you never cause me any problems, dear." Better to be yelled at by the teacher than branded teacher's pet.

A similar situation happened when I was in the library the other day, with a fourth-grade class getting taken to task by the librarian for not listening to a guest speaker, and then again for being noisy while getting their books, and then again by their teacher when she heard what had happened. I was full of sympathy for those kids who got in trouble by association, because while many, many of the kids were loud and disrespectful, some were paying attention and checking out their books and keeping their heads down. I don't know how I would have reacted if my daughter had come home with this particular story of injustice ... but I'm not sure it would have been the same as the parents I heard about today. Apparently the teacher gave the class a homework assignment to write a note of apology to the librarian for their behavior, and a number of parents called the principal to complain because their little darlings had assured them they had nothing to do with it. Never mind that the librarian countered that they were in fact involved -- even if they weren't, are parents sending the right message in allowing their kiddos to blow off an assignment, however unjust? If it were truly punitive, maybe; but an apology note? How hard is that? "I'm sorry my class was so rude in the library. We will try to do better." It's not like they had to write "I will not talk in the library" 500 times. I think I would have told my daughter that it stinks, but out of respect for her teacher she should write the note.

Maybe I'm in the minority here. I remember a couple of years ago, the gym teacher was having a real problem with my daughter's class, and she told them they would all have to stay after school on a particular day. It never happened, though: So many parents complained and refused to allow their kids to stay that she had to cancel it. I'm all for advocacy, and I'm sure I've stood up for my kids in ways teachers thought were counterproductive. But if parents wonder why teachers can't keep control of their classes, they may want to look at the kind of messages they're sending. If mom's going to get you out of trouble, what's to discourage you from getting into it?

Classification confusion

Sometimes I wonder if state special education departments have someone specifically in charge of acronyms. There must be some Senior Acronym Manager somewhere who decides, without apparent provocation, to change everyone's classification every year or two, just to keep us parents off balance. My daughter's learning and language problems have not changed since she was in kindergarten and classified as LLD -- Learning and Language Disabled -- but the alphabet letters designating her classification have changed so many times that I've lost track. Most recently, I've seen MC for "Multiple Classifications" on her IEP, with a parenthetical note indicating that this is different from MD, "Multiply Disabled," which incidentally is my son's classification. His acronym hasn't changed for years, but now it turns out that the acronym for his class is changing. Instead of being in an "MD" class, he will now be in an "LLD Severe" class, as distinguished from the "LLD Mild" class, previously just the "LLD" class, with kids who are classified LLD or whatever they're calling that now. I am assured that my son's class will be the same old thing with a new name, and his classification won't change, and it's all just some new whim of the Senior Acronym Manager. But I don't know. Could calling the MD class an LLD class be a first step to moving MD kids with more behavioral than learning problems into ED classes? Is it really just a cosmetic change? Maybe so. But I have to wonder, what's going undone in all the time it must take to keep deciding on these new designations? Couldn't we just replace the Senior Acronym Manager with, say, a Vice President in Charge of Figuring Out How the Heck to Do Inclusion, or a Director of Parent Satisfaction? We need them more than we need a new alphabet shuffle.

Health food

I have to admit, I'm not crazy about what I'm reading concerning the government's new dietary guidelines, which seem a lot like mom telling you to eat all that spinach, it's good for you. And, I'm sorry, 30 to 90 minutes of exercise a day? I'm sure it's healthy and all, but when was the last time you had an extra hour-and-a-half to kill? One thing I'm really excited about, though, is that snack food manufacturers are actually getting with the program and eliminating trans fats from their goodies. For years I've been the "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" cop, seeking out that wordy ingredient in stuff I'd love to eat and putting those bags and boxes back on the shelf if I found it. And now, suddenly -- more and more, I'm not finding it. I can eat Triscuits now! And Goldfish! And Oreos! And, um, you know, I'll lift those boxes from the floor to my mouth repeatedly over the course of a half-hour or so. Does that count as exercise?

Dare I hope?

I probably shouldn't write anything about this 'cause I'll jinx it, but I'm just so excited: My son has started making his bed! Well, okay, what he's started doing is pulling his comforter up so that it covers his messed up sheets, but this is a giant leap from his normal complete disregard for the condition of his bed. And okay, he's 11, so the fact that he's never done it with any regularity should probably be embarrassing to me. But I've never made it a priority for him; mornings are a whatever works time for us, and if he makes it to school dressed and fed most days, that's acheivement enough. So his willingness to make his bed, such as it is, has been pretty much of his own initiative, and I couldn't be prouder. And if it actually lasts more than a few days, then I'll really be impressed.

No-hug zone

What does it mean that neither of my children can bear to see my husband and I expressing affection for one another? Is it normal child squeamishness, jealousy, signs of insecure attachment, garden-variety annoying behavior? If my husband and I hug in front of our daughter, she makes disgusted noises and whines, "Can you please do that somewhere else?" My son, on the other hand, reacts by demanding to be part of the action: "I want a hug too! I want a hug too!" he cries as he wedges himself in between us. We have more group hugs than a bad sit-com. Aren't kids supposed to be happy that their parents love each other? Or is that, like, just too embarrassing for words?

Make me a burrito!

If you want to see the kind of thing my son and I do for fun (well, fun for him, and fun for me the first time, but maybe not the 23rd or 24th in a row), I've outlined some instructions on my About.com site to Make Your Child into a Burrito. It's along the same lines as the parent-child play in William Steig's book Pete's a Pizza, or the Hot Dog Roll activity outlined in Carol Stock Kranowitz's The Out-Of-Sync Child Has Fun, but it's our own much-practiced version of it, maybe influenced by many many trips to Taco Bell when my son was little. Now, he happens to be a Finger-Sucking Burrito, which is not something I'd ever hope to see on Taco Bell's menu, but ... whatever works, eh?

Early-morning excitement

A police officer rang our doorbell at 1:30 this morning. That'll get you jumping up from the spot where you've fallen asleep on the couch. I peeked out the window and saw four or five police cars crowding our cul-de-sac, headlights shining our way. My husband opened the door, and the officer asked him if we knew who owned the SUV parked in front of our house. Nope, not ours. He apologized for waking us and headed for the house across the street, leaving us to go gently back to sleep ... yeah, right. What could be so important about that car that they'd be ringing people's doorbells at 1:30 a.m.? Was there a criminal on the loose in the neighborhood? Suspected toxic substances? Abandoned satchels are now suspected of containing bombs; what about abandoned cars? The truck's spare tire had fallen off the back and was sitting on the ground, with police flashlights washing over it. What was in there? What was in the truck? What was going on? Police cars came and went, and finally my husband went to stand outside with the neigbors gaping at all the action (because we weren't the only ones who couldn't get back to sleep after a door-to-door search) and find out what was what.

In the end, it was anticlimactic. A hotheaded kid, the boyfriend of a girl at the closed end of the cul-de-sac, had a fight with said girlfriend, hopped in his red sportscar, and floored it as he spun around the corner and toward our open end of the cul-de-sac. Unfortunately, his display of righteous speed was cut off by a wet, slick spot in the road, which caused him to lose control and hit not one but two parked cars (including the SUV in front of our house). It's interesting to note that my husband was asleep on the couch by our front window, right outside of which this undoubtedly noisy accident occcured, and did not even stir. But he gets points from me anyway for going out into the dark night to gather gossip. The SUV belonged to a friend of our neighbor's daughter, and was not involved in any criminal activity or Homeland Security risks whatsoever. It was, however, now missing a side mirror and some paint. The speeding boyfriend had apparently panicked and drove away, then panicked some more and called the police to report himself, bringing them swarming into our little neighborhood in the wee small hours. Why it all couldn't have waited until daylight, I don't know. My son, who loves cars, is going to be mightily disappointed to have missed the excitement.

Stupid talk

Had a bad moment yesterday during the 6th-grade reading group I lead at my daughter's school. As I've mentioned before, I have a group of five boys, and although the conversation does sometimes get rambunctious, I generally like these guys. We were discussing the book "Skinnybones" by Barbara Park, about a scrawny boy who's picked on by a bigger boy who's a superior athlete, and doesn't quite triumph in the end, but finds his own kind of success. I asked the boys at my table if they'd had any experience with bullies, and a number of them mentioned a boy that I happen to know of -- he was in my son's special-ed class when they were both three years old, and although they've been on different tracks since, his sister went to my kids' school and I had contact with the family there from time to time. I really don't know much about the kid; I do know he's physically big, and according to the majority of boys at my table he's a big bully. Hearing him mentioned with universal disdain set my "picking on special-needs kids" alarm ringing, and I should probably have taken the opportunity to change the subject quickly.

If I'd been a little faster with the redirection, I wouldn't have had to hear this comment from one of the boys: "He's mean. He always calls people stupid. He's in special-ed, and he calls other people stupid." My soft mama's heart wounded, I jumped in then and said, "Hey, I have kids in special-ed. Let's be nice." What I should have done was turn it into a teaching moment about how making judgments about people is bad, even if they're making judgments about you. What turns someone from a bully into a victim, and vice-versa? In a book we take delight in seeing kids turn the tables on bullies, play little tricks on them, make them look foolish. But in real life -- and when the kid in question has learning disabilities or language disabilities that make appropriate social interaction difficult -- to what extent does picking on the bully become bullying? My daughter and I are reading "There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom" by Louis Sachar right now, and it's on pretty much that exact topic -- making us feel sympathy for the kid all the other kids hate. Maybe I should suggest that one to the book group.

Phone home

British researchers have raised the alarm: Don't give kids cell phones! It's bad for their brains! Maybe. They think. Could be. The little gadgets give out little bits of radiation, and little brains are more susceptible to injury, and so it seems prudent to protect them. I hate to tell the researchers, but at least here in the U.S., I think that particular ship has sailed. Given how absolutely commonplace it seems to be for middle schoolers to tote their own phones, I'm pretty sure younger kids -- including those in the 3- to 8-year-old range most at risk according to researchers -- are wired as well. True, I've never seen a toddler text-messaging, but just from watching a group of 6th-graders leaving a religious education class last night, flipping their phones open and immediately going into chat mode, I'm going to guess that their little brothers and sisters don't go much of anywhere without being instantly contact-able.

Now, see, the British get a reputation for being polite and circumspect, and news reports about the researchers' concerns confirm that by hedging the evidence so sincerely. There's no hard evidence that the phones are bad, but the researchers think they are, they're really pretty sure, and shouldn't that just be enough? Whereas if I were in charge of this cautionary message, I might be a little more blunt, and say someting like, YOUR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILD DOES NOT NEED A CELL PHONE! Do not purchase one for them! Do not give them so much allowance that they can purchase one for themselves! Don't be ridiculous! There will be plenty of time for out of control phone bills, endless annoying conversations, and pouting over phone restrictions when they're teenagers. If you think it's cute or fun or modern for your young tyke to trade in her toy phone for one that can actually ring up its very own charges, ask yourself: Is my brain maybe fried already?

Better than Shakespeare

My daughter got her assignment the other day for her big seventh-grade research paper. Her teacher had warned me it was coming at our conference last week, and she was dreading it as much as my daughter was, knowing how few of her students would actually apply themselves, do the work, and turn it on time. This seems to be a real challenge for most kids at my daughter's school, and I'm constantly hearing reports about reports never being turned in, disheartening the teachers no end. Turning things in is one of my daughter's great strengths, however, and I'm sure this research report will be no exception. I'm kind of looking forward to working with her on it, actually. The assignment is to research the life of a famous author, read a few of his or her works, and compare and contrast them. On the list of possible names, along with Shakespeare and a host of usual suspects, I was delighted to see Cynthia Rylant, whose books my children have enjoyed at all the various levels of their reading ability, from "Henry And Mudge" through "Cobble Street Cousins" through "Missing May." I instructed my girl to choose Rylant as her author, and I'll be interested to see what biographical info we turn up. I suspect they want her to compare and contrast young-adult-level short stories, but maybe we can sneak in there with some sort of analysis of the endearing coolness of the parent figures in author's primary-level chapter books. Or do you think that would tip the teacher off that I helped too much?

IEP season cometh

It's the New Year, so the dreaded IEP season must be grinding into gear. I got my little packet in the mail over the weekend, a meeting announcement and my 3,046th copy of the booklet informing me of my rights. My son's having his three-year testing this year, so he's already had a sit-down with the school psychologist and has more testing ahead, and I have to get together on Thursday with the social worker and talk social history. Since he's moving up to the middle school next year, I've been hounding my daughter's middle-school Child Study Team leader to meet with me so I can strategize all the things I'm going to have to demand for his IEP to make his school year smooth and as stress-free as it can be in a crowded school where they're having classes in closets. I'm ready for all this, I suppose, as well as I can be, but boy it makes me miss the last few years, when things were familiar and the agenda was pretty much set and there was nothing much to think about or fight for. I've had easy IEP seasons recently, but now my time has come. Better get the armor and lance out of the closet and suit up.

Day 8

I've been in something of a writing frenzy over at the About.com Parenting Special Needs site, coming up with an article a day to go with my Realistic Resolutions. Stop by and see if one of those articles might give you the help you need to actually keep a resolution this time around. I've resolved to write an article every day in January, and I haven't broken it yet.

Why gym teachers should get pay raises

Here's one of the many reasons you could never pay me enough to teach middle school: My seventh-grade daughter has health class instead of gym this quarter, and this week they're starting a unit on body parts. Not just any body parts. Those body parts. Body parts that can only be identified by names like "the P word" and "the B word." Body parts that boys and girls in a class together can't study without coming down with terminal cases of the giggles. Today my daughter came home all ablush with the news that they had had to sketch "the P word" in class. "That's so nasty!" she said again and again, undoubtedly echoing the sentiments of her classmates, who probably shared them in endless classroom whispering and gasping. But my daughter does at least have a theory about why kids should study this stuff in school, nasty though it may be: "So when people get married and do 'the S word,' they don't point and say, 'What is that thing?'" Thankfully, in our school district, they don't cover "the S word" in health class until eighth grade. I sure hope there will be no sketching involved.

Teacher tantrums

One of the cool, if occasionally unsettling, things about volunteering in the school library is that you get to see a little bit of the way teachers act when they're not particularly aware there are parents around. There seems to be a certain amount of invisibility that goes with being a regular school presence, and so you get to hear the gossip and the sarcastic remarks and the criticism and the office politics. And sometimes, you get to hear a teacher lose it. That's what happened yesterday when a 4th-grade teacher picked up her class at the library, and was so upset with the way they were carrying on in the hallway that she stopped and started screaming at them. "I've had it with you today!" she yelled more than once, and while I could sympathize with her frustration (as someone who has certainly had it with kids and knows how out-of-control that makes you feel), I couldn't help but observe that as disruptive as her students were apparently being, it couldn't possibly be more disruptive than a teacher screaming in the hallway. I was glad my son wasn't in her class, and glad that he was no longer in one of the classrooms across the hall from the library, because hearing someone yelling in the hallway would have made him crazy. I'll give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and not suspect that she thought there'd be no harm in yelling in front of a bunch of special-ed classrooms, even though that's probably the one spot in the school where it would most freak the students out. At any rate, she made it through her tantrum and trouped her chastised charges back upstairs to her room, where, by the way, she could have tantrummed with far fewer witnesses. No invisible volunteers, anyway.

Beam me up

I don't know if you've been following the recent news stories about laser beams targeting airplanes, accompanied by fears that pilots might be blinded by them and terrorists might be responsible, but here's a little suggestion: If you or someone you know owns a laser pointer, don't be aiming that thing at the sky. Highlighting stars or UFOs with a pen-sized device in your backyard may seem harmless enough, but apparently that light shines way, way up there, and if it hits something, you could be in major trouble. In our area this weekend there was a big story about a police helicopter that, on a mission to find out who shone a laser beam at a landing plane, saw another such beam and was able to trace it to a suburban home. Pretty much every police car in an 100-mile radius converged upon said domicile and carted the homeowner away with the full force of Homeland Security. The alleged laser-wielder has since claimed that he's just a hapless dad who goofed around with a laser pointer with his kids in the yard, never dreaming it could reach as far as an airplane. Maybe it will turn out he's really a particularly clever evildoer, but I don't know. Doesn't that just sound like the stupid sort of thing that would happen to you?

Turn your back for one minute ...

I've always had a policy of watching my son every minute, sometimes to ridiculous extremes, and it's worked out well for us, getting him safely at least as far as age 11 now. He's had a little maturity leap this year, and so I've been loosening the reins ever so slightly, supervising him less and less while he's safe at home. So when his friend came over yesterday, I let my boy get the door and let his friend in. I could hear enough from my bedroom -- our floor plan is pretty compact -- to know that they were setting up a video game, as they usually do, presumably one of my daughter's racing games. I don't allow anything not rated E for Everything In It's OK with Mom, so as long as there were no loud crashing noises coming from the living room, I figured things were fine and a little less Mom-hanging-over-the-shoulder was socially appropriate.

Silly me. Turns out my son's friend, the little darling, had brought his own video game to play: Grand Theft Auto Vice City, a game I don't even let my kids look at the cover of in the video-game store. If adults want to play it, I reserve the right to cluck disapprovingly, but whatever. Who, though, would think it was a good idea to give it to an 11-year-old? And now here it was in my own quiet living room. I had to resist the urge to spray the Playstation with Lysol. I told the friend in no uncertain terms that he was never to play that game here again, and that any future games would have to pass my inspection before being slipped into any machine in our house. Meanwhile, my son chirped happily for the rest of the day about carjacking and murder. Maybe this having a friend stuff isn't all that great an idea after all.

Getting in the reading habit

How often do you read with your child? When our kids are little and lap-sized and wild about Dr. Seuss, reading regularly is a joy that most parents regularly avail themselves of. But when they get older and engrossed in schoolwork, when the books get longer and more time-consuming to read, and when -- for so many of our kids -- enthusiasm for books gets dampened by reading comprehension problems, reading together too often becomes a chore for all concerned. My daughter hates reading, and has hated it for years. She's likened it to staring at black marks on a page. She even hates Harry Potter, which is something like heresy for a kid these days. But despite her often-considerable resistance, I've managed to keep up a chapter-a-day reading routine with her for the past few years, and although it hasn't magically transformed her into a lover of books, it has enormously improved her skills in decoding and comprehension. Practice may not make perfect, but it makes stronger. If you want to start a reading routine with your child -- or can't imagine how on earth you would manage it -- check out these tips for getting started.

Happy New Year

We had our usual wild and crazy New Year's Eve: Bowling and pizza with the kids at 5 p.m., followed by going to the store and shopping for our New Year's Day party, then putting kids to bed, then watching a movie, then waking kids up to watch the ball drop, then dropping into bed ourselves. Party animals are we, I'll tell you. The bowling alley manager wondered why my husband and I didn't come to the big New Year's Eve bash there -- the one that runs through midnight, not 7 p.m. like the earlier family event -- and I had to admit that we don't go out much as a couple. And really, you know, that suits us just fine. Give me a choice between ringing in the new year with a bunch of strangers with alcohol, or with my son and daughter swinging noisemakers and swilling sparkling apple cider, I'll take the latter every time. The fact is, we were pretty much homebodies before we had kids, too. But it's nice now to have such a sweet excuse.