Funky Winkerbean finally gets to the birthmother reunion

I've written before about the comic strip "Funky Winkerbean" taking on a storyline of an adopted child searching for his birthmother, and after a number of false starts over the years, the reunion finally came this week. If you don't get the strip in your paper (or never check the funnies), you can see them on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site. The background of Lisa's pregnancy is available in an archive on the Funky Winkerbean site.

I'm glad this finally got resolved, and that the arc included young Wally talking to his adoptive parents about his search (albeit after the fact) and reassuring them of their place in his life. I'll be reading along hoping for more. If this storyline has been meaningful to you, or may be meaningful one day for your kids, check bookstores in October -- strip creator Tom Batiuk mentions in his blog that a book compiling all Lisa's storylines is due then.

Medical crisis du jour

My daughter had a colossal nosebleed today. A real gusher. It continued long enough to make me call her pediatrician's office, and a nurse told me to wait five or 10 minutes more and then take her to an urgent care center. By 10 minutes it was slowing down, and it finally stopped, with the help of an icepack to the nose.

Then, five hours or so later, just before bedtime, it started again. More gushing. So this time we did hop in the car and head to the Immedicenter, where a doctor cauterized a scraped-up area on her septum. No more nose-picking for you, young lady! If my admonishments to that effect couldn't stop her, perhaps that burning stick up her nose will.

Will my pretty new site crash your browser?

I finally completed a redesign of the Mothers with Attitude site that I've been working on in stolen moments for about a year. It looks pretty nifty on the browsers on my newer Mac, but I took a look at it in Internet Explorer on our older laptop today and it was kind of a mess, finally freezing IE up.

If you have a moment, and nothing in your browser you couldn't afford to force-quit away, stop by MWA and take a look, then come back and comment on how it looks on your system. Maybe mention what operation system and browser you're using, if possible. I can't bear the thought of finding the time to re-do it, but I don't want to be crashing folks on a regular basis, either.

My summer TV obsession

I find myself lately being completely obsessed by the HBO show John from Cincinnati. Anybody out there watching it? Nobody I know is, which means I have to haunt message boards and see strangers talk about it. It gives me that same "I have no idea what I just watched, but I've sure never seen anything like that on television" thrill I got years ago from Twin Peaks, and although that show's implosion left me swearing I'd never get taken again, I seem to have jumped aboard the surfboard for this one.

There's even a special-needs parenting connection, a little bit: I wrote on my About site about the use of echolalia by the title character, first in a mindlessly echoing way, then in a way that imbues the echoes with some meaning, and then weaving them into a mind-blowing sermon. I hope the show creators really are going somewhere with this, and know where that somewhere is, and don't wipe-out along the way.

Still, it's not like there are tons of shows to go ga-ga over in the summer. With Brothers & Sisters repeating the same episodes again and again, it's nice to have something to look forward to on Sundays. And then Mondays, and Wednesdays, and whatever other days they're showing repeats. Have I mentioned I'm obsessed?

The risks of silly walks

My son has a weird way of walking sometimes where he leans forward, puts his arms out, and kind of bobs as he goes. This has bothered his teachers since he first started in school. This has bothered me ... well, never, actually. Because I'm a weak, enabling mom, no doubt. I've just never been of the opinion that standing up straight needs to be one of his major goals, and the fact that he gets a good, comforting proprioceptive kick from that bobbing makes it something to not take so lightly.

Lately, the rationale used to stamp this out is that it makes him look weird to his peers. This, too, is fine by me -- standing up straight is not going to suddenly make him a typical 14-year-old, and his peers might as well see him coming. My suspicion is that it's just something that bugs grown-ups, and that they think is an easy and obvious thing to fix. Yet they've been working on this since he was five, and fixed? Not so much.

There is one downside to walking his walk, though, that we discovered on a stroll around the neighborhood last week: If you're leaning forward and your collar is open, a bug can fly in and bite you on the chest.

It freaked me out, I'll admit, seeing those two little marks on my boy's chest. They swelled up pretty fast, and I was all over the Internet trying to find out what dire possibilities we were facing. The description kept bringing up spider bites, but unless we have flying spiders or he walked through a spider web, that seemed unlikely. He said he heard a little buzz, but there was no stinger left behind.

The bite was painful enough to make my feeling-no-pain kid say "Ow!" and the initial swelling was followed up by hives at a nearby spot, which had me hyperventilating. And then ... nothing. He was fine. I was a wreck, but he was A-OK.

I don't think this is going to make me change my position on his walking position. He can still bob and weave for all I care. But you know what? I'm going to button up his darn shirt when he does it.

My honor-roll girl

Sign me up for one of those bumper stickers -- my kid made the honor roll!

I've known that for a couple of weeks, because the school sent my daughter a letter of congratulations. What the school didn't send until yesterday was the actual report card. So odd to get the announcement without the actual scores in hand.

I was interested to see the actual grades that resulted in that happy honor-roll placement, because I had been fairly worried that she would get Ds in a couple of classes. I guess talking to her teachers helped, because she bopped to B level in both of them. Mercy grades? Maybe, but we'll take 'em.

Interestingly, although she did honor-roll level work that fourth quarter, she actually failed a couple of her final exams. Her final grades for the year survived on the weight of the classroom work she's been doing, which confirms my faith that if you just do the dang homework, you can pass classes, at least at her level. So many kids blow off the homework, but you get points for it, and you get the goodwill of teachers, too. That and the faithful retaking of failed tests as per her IEP seems to be carrying her along.

Wonder if we could get her retakes on the final?

The real blogger in the family

My son is totally shaming me as a blogger. I set him the task of blogging once a day this summer -- five sentences about anything -- and darned if he's not doing it. Of course, he's motivated: I told him that if he did his daily writing through the start of school, I'd buy him a song on iTunes that I've been saying "no" to. I thought I was pretty safe. But he's writing, and that makes me happy, too.

If you're looking for a summer writing project for your kiddo, a Blogger blog's not a bad idea. Free, easy to do, and it looks like something when they're done. I'm probably more impressed with my son's blogging than he is, but that's because I can barely drag my pixels over here to blog once a week or so. Show-off.

Special-needs sports stars

A newspaper photographer was following my son's Challenger League baseball team for much of the season this year, and the results hit our local paper this weekend with some really wonderful pictures. My first thought on looking at them was, she must have been using a massive telephoto lens, because she could never have gotten these candid shots if an easily distracted kid like my son saw her with a camera.

You can see the photos in slide shows here on the newspaper's site, with audio interviews with coaches and parents. Just click on the link next to "multimedia." My son is in some of the photographs (if you play the first, longest slideshow, he's the skinny kid on the left in the fourth photo to come up), but didn't get interviewed. My husband was there when the reporter approached him, and apparently my son waved her away saying "No interviews! No interviews, please!" What, does he think he was adopted by Angelina Jolie?

Stealth teacher

So I've been trying to get one of my daughter's high school teachers on the phone, and this teacher has acknowledged to my daughter that she knows I want to talk to her, and yet after two attempts at contact in two different portions of the school year I have received zero phone calls (or e-mails, though I gave my e-mail address in case she'd rather not speak).

I was trying to figure out whether I really wanted to get the guidance counselor involved, as is the parent contact protocol; try again to reach the teacher informally; or just give up and hope for the best. But then a funny thing happened.

Someone called asking to speak with my daughter. Since my daughter's been having some problems with kids teasing her at school, and a recent suspicious phone call along those lines, I asked who was calling. The caller hesitated and said, "I am calling from the high school." Well, goodie for you. It sounded like a kid telling me they were calling from a location physically at the high school, so I asked again who was calling. And then the voice, faltering again, announced itself to be the teacher I've been trying to reach (and not by name, either, just by job description).

Well, hello!, I said, and launched into a conversation that the teacher had clearly been trying to avoid. We actually had a nice chat before she asked again to talk to my daughter, regarding scheduling for a test make-up. But it struck me as so odd -- why was she avoiding me in the first place? and why, when she was speaking to me directly, was she so reluctant to say who she was? Maybe I didn't sound like a grown-up to her, either. But professionally, when a teacher calls a student's household, would they not announce themselves with name and title?

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if there's a file somewhere with my name on it and a big red stamp saying "TROUBLE! Do not engage this mom in conversation." Although there are teachers who have dared to do so, and in most cases emerged with their heads still attached. I can be nice! Really!

Singing the parental advisory hits

My son has been taking voice lessons for a little while, more as just a fun activity than in any attempt to make him a singing sensation. In the time he's been singing his voice has dropped, and he's trapped in that teen purgatory of no-longer-a-tenor, not-quite-a-baritone. His teacher has been having quite a time trying to find appropriate material for him to work on. There were some nice Broadway songbooks for his kiddie voice, but the Broadway songbooks for lower voices? A little more contemporary, and a little more troublesome, theme-wise, especially for perseverative kids like my boy. I have to agree with the teacher that "I'm Not Wearing Underwear Today" from "Avenue Q" is probably not the right material here.

I was thinking about the trickiness of the new Broadway songbook on Tony night when "Spring Awakening" won trophy after trophy. I listened to the whole soundtrack online the next day, and the songs are terrific, but it's hard to ignore that big Parental Advisory label on the CD cover and "Explicit" tag on all the numbers. These are the things I look at when downloading music for my kids, and there's hardly a song here I'd feel comfortable putting on their iPods. And I think the voice teacher's unlikely to want to work with him on songs with titles like "The Bitch of Living" and "Totally F***ed." Yeah, we'll have him perform that one at a recital.

If Mom likes it, it must be square

This song, "Hey There, Delilah" by the Plain White Ts, has been running around in my head since it plucked its way out from all the rap and noise on my kids' favorite radio station. I'm not sure how something this sweet and quiet is getting airplay these days, but it's lovely, isn't it? It's giving me serious Simon & Garfunkel flashbacks. You can listen to it in the video below, and then it will rattle around your head, too. Unless, like my kids, you think it's just too slow.

Nicely played

Yesterday was a red-letter day for us. For the first time, last night, my son ... sat through ... an entire school concert. Yes!

If that doesn't sound like such an accomplishment for a 14-year-old, then you don't have a scoodgy boy like mine.

It was his sister's high-school band concert, and I'd lured him there with the promise that he could leave after a couple of songs -- I just wanted to include him, a little bit. But he sat through a couple of songs, and a couple more, and pretty soon an hour and a concert and a nice little milestone were passed. Sure, he squeaked in his seat some, and he flung his arm around my neck a few times in a way that I thought might alter my spine, and at the end he screamed out his sisters name and opined that she "Rocked The House!"

All in all, though, it was a good experience. The band played nicely. And the boy listened nicely, too.

Meddling mom

I've been doing the "how much do I interfere?" dance with my daughter all year.

It's her first year in high school, and she's handled things really well. And so, I've let go a bit, not hanging over her homework or constantly touching base with her teachers. High school makes it harder to do those things anyway, so I was happy to fade back. That's what you do with supports, right? Fade them back when they're not needed?

I've had a few teacher conversations, and one situation where I orchestrated a class change. I've also had one bad contact, when I questioned something a teacher was doing and got a cold shoulder for it. Beyond that, though, I've held my peace.

Now, the end of the year is at hand, and her latest progress report indicated continuing struggles in two subjects. I'm pretty sure she won't fail. I'm pretty sure she can do better. And I'm pretty sure that I need to know what's up before next year's schedule is set in stone.

So today, I sent notes to the teachers with my kinda uncomfortable daughter, just asking them to call and chat. In the big time here, in high school, you're supposed to go through the counselor to contact teachers ... but this isn't a big-time problem, and it's so late in the year. A few teachers have OK'd informal conversations, I hope these two will too.

Or maybe they'll just do the "overinvolved parent!" eyeroll and try stonewalling me for the next four weeks. Or maybe my girl will accidentally forget to give them the notes until it's too late anyway.

Sometimes, don't you just envy those parents who are blissfully uninvolved? I tried, man ... can't do it.

TV takes on special-needs parenting ... maybe

I've been watching and blogging about the ABC show Brothers & Sisters for most of the season, and it's made a nice transition from being an intrigue-filled look at a family and a family business in the wake of the patriarch/founder's death to a gentler, sillier examination of the ties that bind families together, whether you really feel like being bound to that person or not. The repartee and rapport between the siblings is golden, well-written and well-acted by the likes of Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffith and Ron Rifkin. I started the season watching it because I need something to space out to at the end of the weekend (it's on Sundays at 10 p.m.), and ended the season with it as my most anticipated show of the week.

One couple who has gotten less plot than usual in the family saga is Tommy, one of the brothers of the title, and his wife, Julia. There was a little plot flurry early on over Tommy's infertility (his brothers donated sperm), and a little flurry about Julia being pregnant with twins, and then a big episode in which the twins were born premature and one of them died. The other was still hospitalized as of Sunday's season finale, and her parents were dealing with that in different ways -- mom depressed and taking sedatives, dad spending time away from home and acting like nothing was wrong.

The writers of this show have a lot of pots on the stove, so to speak, and I don't know whether Tommy and Julia and their baby, Elizabeth, will ever get put on the front burner. But I'm hoping for it, because there's real potential for dealing with issues of special-needs parenting. While Elizabeth survived her birth in better health than her brother, she could well have significant problems related to her prematurity. Watching parents and extended family deal with that could be therapeutic to those of us who've experienced that in real life. The different dynamics of moms and dads in special-needs families could also make for good TV -- I recommend Married With Special-Needs Children to the producers as a textbook.

The show's already dipped its toe into the subject with one sister's daughter having diabetes; let's hope that next season, they dive on in. If you haven't seen the show and are interested in it, you can view all the past episodes online at ABC.com, and read recaps on my B&S blog.

Airsickness problem solved

We just got back from vacation, which involved two plane flights and much trauma for my daughter. She gets airsick and often throws up on landing, leading her to be understandably unenthusiastic about air travel.

This time around, we tried Dramamine for the tummy troubles, and it made her nicely sleepy for the flight and not nauseated at touchdown time. Unfortunately, it did nothing for the ear discomfort she feels, and without the distraction of vomiting, the ear pain had her crying and moaning. No amount of yawning, chewing, ear tugging, ear massaging, or jaw-working seemed to help. So on the way home, we gave her some Advil along with the Dramamine, and that took care of all nasty landing difficulties. Hooray! She was a little loopy for most of the evening, but otherwise unaffected.

Just thought I'd share this solution for those with noise-sensitive, pressure-sensitive, movement-sensitive, pain-sensitive teens, who need their young people to be unafraid of flying, and also don't like to be thrown up upon all that much.

Comic strip returns to adoption theme

Just a quick note to mention that the comic strip Funky Winkerbean is returning to a periodic adoption story-line, and it looks like this time they're finally going to go through with having a child placed for adoption by one character, Lisa, look up his birthparents.

Funky Winkerbean originally followed Lisa and her classmates through their high school adventures, then took a generational leap and showed those kids as adults with a new group in high school. Lisa's son was adopted by a teacher who is now the high school principal, while Lisa later married a classmate, Les, who teaches at the high school.

The strip has periodically teased the possibility of the boy, Darin, looking up his birthparents, but now, with a push from his girlfriend, he seems poised to do it. If your paper doesn't carry the strip, you can access it online from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site, among others. The strip has a pretty decent track record in handling dramatic storylines in a restrained way, so it will be interesting to see how this plot thread is woven in.

The livest wire in the room

My son's 14th birthday went off just fine on Sunday, and I did indeed stick to the limited guest list. That made for a smaller-scale bash, and a much quieter one, too, as his classmates this year are notably more subdued than the kids he's been with before. Maybe I should be concerned because these kids seem to be, in some ways, "lower functioning," at least in terms of ability to speak spontaneously and at an audible level. But I think it's the perfect class for him, for two reasons: With no other live wires to spark off, he's much more able to control his behavior; and with no one else rambunctious in the room, his teachers are happy to have one kid with spirit and humor. A room full of them, you don't necessarily want. One, though, keeps things lively in a good way.

Have a happy, guilt-drenched birthday

I think I'm breaking the Mommy Code, and worse than that, the Special Needs Mommy Code. The subject of my offense is my son's birthday party next Sunday. He has been quite firm that he only wants to invite his current self-contained classmates, and no children from the other classes. Because the various classes mix and mingle from one year to another, I've often invited all the children in a couple of classes to make sure we get all of his friends there. It's the code, you know? Most years, he's eager that I do get everyone included. This year? Just the six kids in his class, period, end of list.

Which is fine, from a cost perspective, and from a "manage a bunch of special-needs teens at a bowling alley" perspective. But there's a glitch: A girl who was in his class last year but is in a different class now, invited him to her birthday party this year. And it looks like we're not inviting her back. Which is not done, right? You have to reciprocate? Especially if it could be perceived as rejection by a child who maybe gets enough rejection from non-special-ed kids, whose thoughtless ways we sniff at?

I should either override my son's wishes and invite this girl, in which case I really have to invite all the kids in that class lest they wonder why we like her and not them; or I have to stick with my guy's plan and let the ego chips fall where they may. Knowing me, I'll probably limit the invitations but carry a crushing load of guilt around, plus the dread of one day being called on my code violation by an angry mother. What do you think; am I overreacting? Or am I a bad, bad birthday mom?

The voice of bad experience

I was in a meeting the other day for a school parent committee when one of the participants used that voice. That "I am a trained professional and you are an emotional parent" voice. That voice I've heard at countless IEP meetings where I want information and explanation and innovation and the professionals want to maintain the status quo at all costs. That voice that responds to every passionate question with the same dispassionate answer. I hate that voice. The speaker in question was in the meeting as a parent but is an educator by trade, and I don't know if she even knew she was using it. It must become second nature, when confronted by someone who is disputing the facts, to flip into it. And she wasn't wrong; she did have the facts on her side in the conversation. But man -- that voice. That voice is a loaded weapon, and ought not to be aimed casually. I found myself springing to the defense of those on the other side of the argument, just because the presence of that voice in the room seemed so wrong. Just as educators fall back on that voice without even realizing it, special-ed parents fall into defensiveness and righteous indignation just as surely.

Little Miss Sunshine, and a little rant

I finally caught up with the movie Little Miss Sunshine last night on DVD, and found it to be every bit as funny and enjoyable as I'd heard. What's really amazing is that my husband, who's not a big fan of little comedies or independent films, watched it and laughed right along with me. Whether that broadness of appeal will serve it well on Oscar night remains to be seen. I don't know if it's really substantial enough to bear the Best Picture mantle, but it would be kind of a kick to see something sweet and light and fun beat out all the grim and violent and super-serious fare that usually triumphs. Speaking of all those grim and violent films -- one thing that really struck me about Little Miss Sunshine is that it's like a case study for why the movie rating system needs to be overhauled. I'm not saying it's a great movie for kids; they'd be bored, if nothing else. But to give this confection the same rating as, say, an over-the-top violent film like The Departed seems kinda nuts. Little Miss Sunshine's "R" seems to be mostly for its language, and it's true that the grandfather's patter is extremely salty and sexual. The other characters call him on it, though, and aside from his spiels there are only a few random "F-words" used in times of extreme frustration and anger by the parents and teen brother. The grandfather is also seen snorting heroin once, and the covers of some pornographic magazines are shown. Compared to the language load you'd get in most R-rated films, or drug use or sex or graphic violence, it's pristine. The ratings are supposed to guide parents, and I'll tell you, if they're putting the same rating on this movie and, say, "Saw III," they're not helping me distinguish very well things that will give my teens a naughty laugh versus things that will make them unable to sleep, ever. I'm just saying, there needs to be a better system, and there needs to be people setting the ratings who are more shocked by violence than they are by bad language and a chubby little girl doing a fake strip-tease fully clothed.

Mother in waiting

My daughter is hanging out at the mall today. That's something she hasn't done much of, partly because she's not a big one for shopping, partly because she doesn't have that many friends to hang out with, partly because I am smothering and overprotective. I'm trying to suppress those latter impulses today; she's old enough to hang out, and maybe probably has enough good sense to do so safely, despite my worst fears. She's out with a boy she's been friends with for a few years, friends but not friends friends, if you know what I mean, and although I'm not crazy about the prospects of him having good sense, his mother is with them at least in a transportational sense and it will probably be okay. Right? Right? She's a freshman in high school and I'm supposed to be giving her space. Not enough space to get lost in, but enough to maybe have a soda at the food court. I'll be glad when she's home, though.

The fine points of diagnosis

Here's how most moms know that their child is sick: The child is slow in the morning, won't get out of bed, and is whiny and clingy all day. Here's how I know my son is sick: He pops out of bed early and gets completely dressed, then sits quietly all through his sick day home from school. Why does perfect conduct have to mean illness for this guy? Normally, I have to remove him from bed with a crowbar, but Friday morning he was awake and clad before I was, and sure enough, he had a fever. Sigh. It's nice for a bit, to have this quiet calm boy, but after a while I do miss his spirit. He'll be back to talking and questioning and jumping and wrestling and burying himself under the bedcovers soon enough, and I'll be glad. But couldn't I get just a little of that good behavior without bad health?

Traffic trauma

Today was like, "Snow Day 2: The Aftermath." It didn't really even snow all that blasted much here, not by a normal winter's standards. But it hasn't been a normal winter, and I guess everybody was all discombobulated by it, because traffic this morning on the pretty-well-plowed streets was unbelievable. About 20 minutes in to the normally 10-minute drive to my son's school, I could still see an endless line of stop-and-go traffic stretching out ahead of me, and figured I could find better ways to spend the next 20 minutes than creeping along, so we headed back home. I had my guy do some homework he'd forgotten about, and when I could see out my window that the streets were clear we tried the commute again, and made it in no time. He'll probably get tagged with a tardy, but at least he passed the time productively and got a less frustrating start to the day. I mean, considering how much muttering and grumbling and yelling at cars I would have done if we'd stayed in the endless line-up, he'd have been a pretty tense teen by the time I dropped him off.

Working in a winter wonderland

We're having our first snow day of a warm and snowless winter today. This was already kind of a disruptive week of school, with half days for both kids (though on different days for different schools), my son's teacher on jury duty, and next week being Winter Break. Not a lot of learning going to be going on this week, I think. But also not a lot of homework, and one fewer drop-off-pick-up routine today, and those both have their charms. My kids got iTunes gifts for Valentine's Day and have been peacefully listening to/watching them all morning, letting me get a little work done. It's days like this I really realize how much they've grown up, and how able they've become to amuse themselves, something I wasn't sure I'd ever see. Will I one day wish that they needed me more constantly, for old time's sake? Maybe. But not today.

Test whiplash

My daughter recently had her three year evaluation by the special education team, and then about a month later got her second report card from her first year in high school. And you know, you could get whiplash from looking at these two items side by side. Because the evaluation gives every indication that this is a young person with very limited potential, skills down at elementary school level, low IQ, poor communication abilities. You'd just cry, reading this, and want to give her a hug and teach her how to weave baskets. And then you'd look at the report card, for a slate of classes that include two resource room, two inclusion, and three mainstream, and you'd see ... four As, two Bs and one C. She's a sweet kid who tries hard and I'm willing to buy that there's a little bit of mercy grading going on, but this much? To this degree? How is it that her skills test so abysmally, yet she's able to pull decent marks in grade-level classes? Clearly she has functional and compensatory abilities that aren't measured on tests. It makes me wonder if the evaluations have any value at all for a student like her, other than to keep her in services. I don't feel like we learn anything at all useful from them. And she comes out of them feeling stupid, to the degree that she can't quite own the greatness of having a good report card. The kind of standardized tests the government places so much stress on don't measure her strengths very well, either. So maybe the report card's the aberration here, I don't know. But I'm putting it on my refrigerator anyway.

Grey's Anatomy is more powerful than I thought

I knew Grey's Anatomy was a big powerful TV hit, able to survive time-slot changes and win awards and stir controversies, but I didn't realize quite how powerful it was until last Thursday night. I had to go to a meeting that the superintendent of our school district holds periodically to communicate to designated members of each school's parent organization what's going on in education and educational politics. There's been a lot to say on the matter in our town lately, with a couple of school budgets and construction projects going down in flames for reasons too complex and infuriating to go into here. There's been a lot to say, and this particular superintendent says it and says it and says it, at legendary length. He's actually an engaging speaker, and I think he's done as good a job for our schoolchildren as he's been allowed to, but meetings of which he is in charge are notoriously long and talky. So when one fell on a Thursday, I mourned for my ability to watch Grey's, instructed my husband to tape it if I wasn't home, and secretly plotted to have a family emergency that required me to duck out at 8:45. But, shockingly, no such contingencies were necessary -- the superintendent announced at the outset that several people had requested that the meeting be over in time for Grey's Anatomy, and at 8:30, after an hour-and-a-half of talking, he indeed announced that he would wrap up the formal portion of the meeting so that anybody who had a show to catch could leave. Unbelievable! This, my friends, is the power of the Seattle Grace crew: They can make an education bureaucrat stop talking. I wonder if Bailey would come to my next IEP meeting?

Staying up late for Lost

So Lostis finally, finally back, and how happy am I that it's on at 10 p.m. now? I know some viewers have lamented that the show isn't still on at 9 p.m. or even 8 p.m., but as for me, I'm entirely loving the ability to hunker down and watch the show without either a) hopping up during commercials to get kids into bed, or b) delaying bedtime and risking that one of my kids will wander into the room to see someone getting hit by a bus, or creamed by a smoke monster or something. My kids have enough trouble getting to sleep without all of that. So hooray for Lost on late! But they better keep the action coming if I'm going to stay awake.

Watching his mouth

My son tends to get stuck on certain phrases and repeat them over and over. Most of the time they're just mildly annoying; lately variations on "I'm old," with "ooold" getting a stretched out rolling sort of sound, have fallen firmly into this category, and "I'm not in the mood" was around for a long while but is now phasing out. Every now and then, though, he gets stuck on something that's not so okay to say -- never a bad word, thankfully, but something like, "I'm going to pound you! Are you going to pound me?" Last night, when we went to pick up a new pair of glasses for him (never having found the lost ones), he came out with "Don't lose these or I'll beat you!" The words "I'll beat you!" were heard any number of times during our visit to the optometrist, and I can't honestly say whether folks were looking at us with concern because I was so busy trying to get him to stop saying that, or to explain to all and sundry that it was his invisible friend Scooby who was threatening to beat him, and not his gentle loving Mom and Dad. He hasn't said anything like that since we left the eye doctor, so I have hopes "I'll beat you!" isn't going into heavy repetitive rotation. Getting ooold doesn't seem so bad compared to that.

Sleep research

I'm reading a book right now called Sleepless in America: Is Your Child Misbehaving or Missing Sleep? by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, who also wrote Raising Your Spirited Child, an earlier parenting book favorite of mine. I'm just a little way in, but Kurcinka is making a decent case for the idea that a lot of bad behavior is caused by fatigue, or rather, by the wired-upping that kids need to do to stay alert when they're fatigued. And while I try not to get swept up in each new parenting theory, especially one posited by someone who was selling a different parenting theory not that long ago, I have to say that to some extent, this seems applicable to my son's behavior. Not the sole reason for it, certainly, but a factor. Even he sees it: The kid saw the book on my desk, pointed to the subtitle, and said, "That's like me, mom!" So I have to give the notion some credence. I haven't gotten to the part in the book yet where Kurcinka gives instructions on how to re-make your family's sleep patterns, but I've taken some preliminary steps and will see over the next couple of weeks if they make a difference. Like making my son go to bed at 9 p.m. when his older sister, the sleepyhead, goes down; he may still lay in bed for an hour or more talking to himself, but when sleep does come it should be earlier. I'm also making an effort to get myself into bed at 11 p.m. every night, rather than falling asleep in my clothes at 10:30, with the lights on because I'm planning to still do more work, and waking up at 2:30 a.m. to finally "go to bed" and then lay awake for a while. I don't know how much sleep deprivation contributes to my son's bad behavior, but I know it contributes to mine.

Social success, of sorts

Well, here's another landmark for my son: He's finally found a social-skills group that will have him for a member. For years, I'd try to get him into groups like this one only to have the gatekeepers evaluate him and tell me, noooo, no no, no, he's not for us, leaving me to wonder what kind of social skills the kids in the group must possess that would still be needful of a group but would be so very superior to my distractible and impulsive but basically good-natured guy's. I guess he's grown into acceptability with time, because this weekend he participated in a group and the folks evaluating him felt he fit in fine. I could hear his voice wafting out to the waiting room from time to time, sounding perfectly friendly and comfortable. So now I have to wonder: Does the fact that his social skills are now good enough to allow him to be in a social-skills group mean that he no longer needs to be in one?

A little early-morning justice

This morning, while driving to school, my son and I saw a familiar sight: a special-education bus with its lights flashing and stop-sign outstretched. This bus, I'll admit, is kind of a nuisance; it blocks a busy road by a middle school each morning just a few minutes before school starts, catching those of us who leave too late and count on shaving seconds on the route in a long, slow wait as a child is wheeled from the house, loaded aboard, and given a few last good words from Mom. It's a nuisance, but a necessary one, and as someone who has in the past loaded her own child into such a bus, I don't begrudge it. But this morning, someone sure did: We saw one, then two cars cut around the bus and accelerate away. Except -- oh, joy! -- the second car was actually a police car, and it immediately pulled over the person who just could not wait for that bus to load. Ha! That's the kind of thing you almost never see happen, a police car right in place to nab someone driving unsafely. The rest of us sat very politely and waited for that loading to completely take place, and for those lights to go off and that stop sign to fold in. All the time in the world, yes sir, officer. No hurry here. Although, you know, did the mom really need to chat up the bus driver at such length? Did I used to do that, too?

A pleasant IEP meeting? Not impossible!

I've had good IEP meetings and bad ones, meetings that had school personnel making threats and ones that had me doing the same, some that were just too rushed or too manipulative or too annoying, but my favorite kind -- and the kind I've really had more often than not, at least in recent years -- are the ones that drift off into a long pleasant conversation between me and the teacher and therapists about how wonderful my child is. That's the kind I had today, for my son, with the child study team leader breaking in now and then to try and ask a serious question so she could do her work. Next year will be high-school transition year for my guy, and then we will have some serious things to discuss, and I can only imagine that meetings at the high school level for someone with his behavior challenges will be far less enjoyable, but for now: They like him. They really like him. And that's nice for a mama to hear.

Should I stay or should I go?

My son, the seventh grader, is doing more and more of his homework completely on his own. We have to nag him to his workspace at the kitchen table, but once he's there, he does a pretty good job of working independently. Which is great! Except that his writing is messy, and his teacher would like it to be neater. So she writes notes asking that we tell him to take his time and write slowly. Which you have to do constantly or you get one neat word and a mess after. But if we sit with him and prompt him and prompt him to write neatly, he's not working alone. And maybe, sometimes, because it's hard to just sit there and watch mistakes being made, we correct his work, too. So the work that goes to school is neat and also correct. Much more correct than the work he does at school. So the teacher writes notes asking us to make sure he does his work alone. Which he does. Which is great! Except that his writing is messy. You see where I'm going with this. As far as I can see, the teacher has two options: Messy writing done independently, or neat writing done with Mom or Dad hanging over shoulder. Personally, I'd opt for the former. But opt she must.

When your child's no longer the noisy one

We're still sitting in the "quiet room" in church -- a closed-in area at the back of the sanctuary where families of noisy children can see and hear but not be seen and heard -- partly out of long-standing habit, partly because being in a place where there's less stress on being quiet and still makes it easier for my son to be quiet and still. There are good days and less good days, but yesterday morning was one of those that made me realize how very far he's come. There was a little curly-haired blond boy in the room with us, and he had clearly just learned how to make the D and T sounds, because he was very, very motivated to show them off to everybody. "DIT! DIT! DIT DIT DIT DIT DIT DIT!" was what we heard, loudly, endlessly, punctuated by frequent but ineffective shhhhhs from his DAD! DAD! DAD! And although it was certainly distracting, I couldn't help but shoot many smiles at the noisy one, because I remember so clearly when my son was the one who Would Not Shut Up, and I also remember when being in the room with a kid who Would Not Shut Up would drive my son crazy. But this time he sat pretty quietly himself, no talking, no rolling around, no "Be quiet, baby!" Maybe it really is time we move into the "big church" and give it a try. But I'd miss these little reminders of big progress.

Not ready for prime time

Do you watch much TV? Do you watch much TV before 10 p.m.? I find it really hard to commit to anything that's on when my kids are awake (8 to 9 p.m.) or getting ready for bed (9 to 10 p.m.) By 10 p.m., I'm usually ready and able to watch, but by that time I'm half asleep. Still, I'm thrilled that Lost is moving to the 10 p.m. hour, so my husband and I won't have to keep shagging my son out of the room while we watch it, and I surely wish Grey's Anatomy would move later, too, because I have to keep running out of my room during the commercials to do prayers and teeth-brushes and tuck-ins. Of course, the commercial breaks in Grey's seem to last about five minutes each, so it's not like I'm missing anything. But it kinda ruins the mood, y'know?

Makeover day at the high school

Here is what they did yesterday in my daughter's high school art class: They painted. On her. Girls at the high school seem to be obsessed with getting my girl to wear makeup, and although I've offered many times to help her pick out some natural-looking and non-dramatic cosmetics, she wants no part of it. Not her style. She just wants to go un-made-up in her baggy sweatshirts and sweatpants and get people to stop telling her to paint her face and wear tight clothes. But yesterday she must have had a weak moment, or a bored one, and she let a girl put foundation on her and some lip gloss. The teacher was absent, so the class was in the auditorium with minimal supervision and I guess it was makeover day. My daughter didn't seem too upset about it, but she also didn't seem eager to hit the mall for some more face goop. Shouldn't kids be able to set their own individual style and be respected for that? Oops, I'm sorry. We're talking about teenagers here. Silly of me, I know.

Your vocabulary word for the day is "Mongoloid"

Alright, folks, tell me if I'm being oversensitive here. My daughter's reading a book in her high school resource-room class about children with disabilities who go to a mainstream camp and have some struggles fitting in there. So yesterday, she brings home her first list of vocabulary words for the book, and one of the words is "Mongoloid." This is a word she's being asked to memorize the definition of, and use in a sentence. Now, that word hits me as offensive, and I look it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary says it's offensive when used to describe a person with Down syndrome, which is the definition she's been given. I wrote a note to the teacher, questioning whether this was an appropriate word to put on a vocab list -- I have no problem with discussing it in class, and explaining its meaning in the context of the story and its time, but to ask kids to put it in a sentence? To test them on it, and expect them to add it to their vocabularies? No! Right?

The teacher just called me back and explained that it's a word that people use, and it's part of the English curriculum, and that when she quizzed the class none of them knew what it meant and so it's on the vocab list. Isn't it a good thing they don't know what it means? It just floors me that this is thought to be a good word to encourage them to use. The teacher kept mentioning that it's the word her grandmother used ... but gads, aren't there lots of words our grandmother used that we would never never never want to make part of the English curriculum today? This is a special-ed teacher! Am I nuts here? I hugely do not want to pick a fight with this teacher; she's just come back from a maternity leave, replacing a substitute who was neither a special-ed teacher nor a language-arts teacher and basically wasted a semester of my daughter's time. This teacher seems to be doing a lot of things that are right, and other teachers I respect have spoken well of her. But she clearly doesn't "get" my concern here, and so I'm wondering: Am I overreacting? What would you do if your child came home with "Mongoloid" as a vocab word to learn?

Of course, it doesn't help that my daughter put her brother's name down as her "cue" for remembering "Mongoloid," and put as her sentence "My brother is a Mongoloid," leaving me to explain that a) you must never, ever write or say a sentence like that and, b) your brother does not actually have Down syndrome. The fact that this word is being systematically taught to kids who don't have the filters on their thinking to use it correctly is pretty disturbing, too.

The book that kept me reading all weekend

I did something this past weekend that I really love to do but rarely manage: I read a book all the way through. Okay, I actually finished it up on Monday, but it's an almost-500 page book and I had less than 100 to go after Sunday. The page-turner in question was Tiny Titan, the non-fiction story of a family that survived through so many special-needs challenges that you cannot but put the book down at the end and say, "I am never going to whine about my simple, simple life again." (And, yet, I did whine about my simple, simple life yesterday, didn't I? Um, maybe I hadn't quite finished the book yet. I'm done with whining now, honest.) The titan of the title is a little girl born with Noonan Syndrome whose mother nursed and tended and advocated for her through innumerable medical crises. And then, when the medical crises were under control and the family budget was just starting to recover, what did this family of six do? Adopt another family of five from foster care, with suitcases full of emotional and mental-health baggage, including FASD, bipolar disorder, and RAD. Yet still they persevered, up and down, all along the roller coaster, in a book that's hard to put down. If you've got a free weekend, pick it up. It will make you feel better about the complications you face, and maybe a little worse because you don't face them with as much pluck and determination as the fightin' mom who wrote this book.

A remote and a pair of glasses slip into the great beyond

We're losing things around the house, and it's driving me crazy, crazy beyond all reason. None of these things are irreplaceable. They're not worth the tantrums I've been throwing, or the zealous straightening-up and grumbling. They're just things, much less precious than the people I've been yelling at about them. And yet something about not being able to find them, when I've looked everywhere they could possibly, possibly be, makes me feel out of control in a bad way. I have to be in control of so much -- the kids' educational situation, learning and medical and emotional issues, paperwork and referrals and reports -- losing control of something as stupid and simple as where the blasted DVD remote is is just maddening. Stressed much? Me? Nahhh.

A new four-eyes in the family

My son got glasses this week. It's something that's been coming for a long time; the doctor mentioned years ago that he has a short optic nerve due to his fetal alcohol effects, and that vision might eventually be a problem. And I'm very thankful that it didn't become a problem when he was younger and less able to keep something on his face. He's able to do that now. Absolutely able. Not very interested in doing it, you know, but able. I see lots of "where are your glasses, put them on" nagging in my future, but since he's not so vision-impaired that he needs the specs to function, I'll take it slow. It's a milestone, though -- my husband is now the only member of the family who doesn't wear glasses. And age may catch him up to us pretty soon.

Why does everything have to be a battle?

Kids starting a new school means mom starting with a new Child Study Team, and while my daughter's made a smooth transition into high school, I'm starting to feel like my transition to new CST personnel may not be such a glide. I have her IEP meeting coming up next week, along with a review of the triannual reports, and I'm dreading it more than usual. Her caseworker seems nice, and we've had some friendly conversations, but there's one issue that every time it comes up, the gate goes crashing down, and the discussion ends. And it's something that needs to be at least discussed -- I'm not saying I'm going to force anything, I just want to talk as a team. I think I'm caught in politics between this caseworker and a teacher, and I hate being caught in politics. I hate feeling I'm going to have to go to war to just have a discussion. I hate feeling like this person thinks she can make decisions all by herself; even though I may agree with her, that's not how it works. I've had these battles before, and I'll have them again, but I really don't want to have one now, over something that's only a big deal if she makes it one. Sigh. Where'd I put that armor, now?

Emergency First Aid

You know, most of the time, I feel like a pretty competent mom. I feel like my kids benefit from my knowledge and advocacy, and I think they're doing pretty well and making progress I'm proud of. But then sometimes, I'll be rushing my son to school -- why does it always seem to happen when I'm rushing my son to school -- and I'll notice something that makes me feel like a total negligent idiot parent. Like he'll be wearing two different shoes. Or he'll have a big breakfast-related stain on the front of his shirt. Or, like this morning, I'll notice the bandaid on his finger and realize that, despite the fact that the nurse called to tell me about the cut, and despite the fact that he came home full of talk about it, I never removed the bandaid and looked at the wound and cleaned it off and TLC'd it. He was still wearing the same grubby bandaid from school the previous day, looking much the worse for wear. Figuring it's better to be late than look uncaring, I pulled over on our to-school route, grabbed the factory-sealed First Aid kit that came with our minivan, put a little antibiotic goo on the boo-boo and applied a fresh bandaid. He was five minutes late, but well-tended. Except I just know he's going to give me up to the teacher with a story about exactly what we did on the way to school. Bad mom, yep, right over here.

A connoisseur of jewelry

For a long time, my son has been known as the kid who likes keys. People tend to remember when a child grabs their keys out of their hands and tells them what kind of car they drive. But over the past year, speech therapists have been working with him on conversation openers that do not involve seizing belongings or chattering about car dealers and mileage. And somewhere along the line, somebody must have said something like, "For example, if a woman is wearing earrings, you could compliment her on those." Because now, my son is becoming known as the boy who says, "Nice earrings!"

It's flattering to have one's earware noticed in a positive manner, and most women are tickled by it, especially coming from a teenager in a day when most teenagers don't even give you the time of day. But then, when he does it over and over, often in the same conversation, it becomes clear that he doesn't have any type of decent follow-up to that. Once it moves from charming to a little creepy, it's maybe time to move on to something new. Nice shoes? Nice purse? Time to confer with the speech therapists again. And maybe someone from the Style Channel.

Madonna fatigue

I'm sorry, I don't want to seem insensitive to the fragile ego of one of the most provocative and exhibitionistic celebrities of our time, but after reading headline after headline, day after day, I'd just like to ask: Could Madonna please just shut up now about her adoption? For goodness sakes, lady, stop holding press conferences and parent that child! Do you think you're the only adoptive parent who's had her motives questioned and her intentions insulted? Welcome to the club, babe! There are people in Russia who think I adopted my kids for their body parts, or slave labor. There are people in the U.S. who think I adopted kids in Russia because I'm racist and wanted a white baby. Most adoptive parents could tell you stories about comments made by family members that make the tabloids look like Emily Post. Criticism and second-guessing by the ignorant and annoying are part and parcel of being an adoptive family. Find yourself a nice online support group and whine about it there, like the rest of us.

Adoption watch

So now it looks like Madonna is going to adopt. And I have to ask, as I've asked about celebrity adoptions before: How do these people get home studies? I'm pretty sure that if I'd told our social worker that I hung out on stage tied to a cross, we would have had a hard time getting that paperwork done.

In other adoption entertainment news, I was a little disturbed watching the episode of Heroes in which the creepy adoptive dad of the indestructible cheerleader had the birthparents chat with her. Not because the content of the chat was wrong, just the opposite: It's pretty much word for word what I say to my own teen daughter, who is not indestructible. He seemed so reasonable and loving, and yet we kind of know, don't we, that he's evil incarnate? So even when adoption is presented in a reasonable light, it's messed up. Sigh.

It was a foster kid on Grey's Anatomy, not an adopted one, that caught my eye, but her bit about not feeling any pain sure sounded familiar. My son never stapled his arm, thank God, but he did often injure himself without seeming to care very much, and I really felt for the foster dad and his "We know what this looks like. We want you to know that we know what this looks like. But she just plays hard." Brought back memories of bringing my son to the ER, or even to school, after he'd, say, toddled too close to the swingset or walked right into the car's side-view mirror. Oh, that black eye? He slammed the door in his own face, really! At least he never begged people to punch him in the stomach.

With their compliments

My daughter the newly minted high-school freshman tells me that boys are coming up to her in the cafeteria during lunchtime and telling her she's hot and sexy. And what am I supposed to do with this information, exactly? I mean, it's better than people coming up and telling her that she's cold and ugly. She's flattered, and doesn't wonder, like I do, whether they're making fun of her. (And worse -- what if they're not?) Already someone asked for her address and phone number, which she rather horrifyingly gave them, giving me nightmares of prank phone calls and kids driving by the house and stalkers and fake MySpace pages. And, you know, maybe it's all innocent, and they really can tell that under the baggy T-shirts she wears, she's hot and sexy, and the guys are just being appreciative. Maybe they're all just stupid overwhelmed freshmen together. But, yikes. This is what I do with this information. I worry.

Welcome back

Isn't this just the best time in the school year? That week or two after school has started, but before homework gets intense? It's a little honeymoon is what it is. My daughter has transitioned nicely and is really enjoying high school so much that I can't bear to point out that they haven't done any actual work yet. My son has had a few behavioral blips but nothing that can't be written off to new classroom jitters. Next week we have back-to-back back-to-school nights, and then I suppose the year will start in earnest, with big assignments and hard tests and unsatisfactory marks in the behavior column of progress reports and homework blow-ups and phone calls to Child Study Team members and special-ed administrators. But for now, for these few blessed optimistic days, it's nice to be back to school.

Making the band

Oh, I'm a mean mom this week. Ohhhhh, I'm a meanie. This is the week my daughter starts Band Camp, a boot-camp-like two-week ordeal designed to whip freshmen in shape for high-school marching band. And I've got to think that most of the kids showing up each day for this abuse, many of them the second or third sibling or even the second generation in their families doing band duty, are at least semi-excited about marching onto that football field in uniform. Okay, maybe a few of them are getting pushed by their parents to give it a try. My daughter is probably not the only one moaning and groaning and wishing she didn't have to go, probably not the only one whose mom keeps cooing "Just try it. Just do your best." But since she's the only one I"m personally pushing, she's the one I feel guilty over.

You gotta love the way kids think, though. She was complaining about the lap-running and calisthenics she had to do all day, and how it was too much work, and I told her, as I so often do, that if she doesn't have to be in band she has to pick something else to be involved with. "Cross-country," she suggested. Yeah, now there's a less strenuous solution.

That's okay, I can see the snakes from here

I would never in a million years go to see a movie called "Snakes on a Plane," but I sure am enjoying the internet hype. It's sort of fun to be able to take in all the folderol around a cult film without actually having to see the film. I wonder, if I was younger, if I would actually feel a need to go and be part of the communal experience; I never have had a stomach for scary movies, but I did go to a theater to see "American Werewolf in London" and "Poltergeist" as a twentysomething just because they were cool. Maybe this is one of the nice things about growing older; you feel cool just knowing about what's cool, and so you don't have to actually go out and do it. You kids have fun with the snakes, now!

On a different level of horror, I almost spit out my pizza the other day when my daughter's friend was over for lunch and invited her to come out to his house next weekend and go see a movie -- "World Trade Center." My daughter said she hadn't heard about that and was really interested in it. Now, without making any judgments about the film or the need for teens to learn about and understand this subject matter ... man, you know, this is a girl who is shook up for days after seeing a particularly intense episode of "It's a Miracle," I really don't think she's up for Oliver Stone, even kinder gentler Oliver Stone. I diplomatically informed the kids that really, if my daughter wanted to see "World Trade Center" she should see it with us (ha!), and that seemed to satisfy her friend, who suggested "Zoom," the latest badly reviewed but presumably safe Tim Allen kiddie film, as a substitute. Whew! Guess I should be glad he didn't suggest "Snakes on a Plane."

My brain hurts

It seems clear that this blog is requiring more creativity from me than I have to spare these days -- every week I swear I'll write every day, and then the days go by. But blogging demands nowhere near the imagination my son is insisting I muster up for him on an hourly, if not minute-ly, basis. One fun thing about my guy is that he's really captivated by pretend play now, and that's great ... except guess who he's expecting to generate all that fun pretend?With him home so much now during the summer, our days are a constant stream of "Let's play pirate!" "Let's play baby gorilla!" "Let's play baby bear and Mama bear!" Followed by him waiting patiently for me to bring on the character goodness. The game of "Mama gets some work done while boy amuses his own self" is not high on his hit list.

Really, I'm delighted he wants to spend time with me. I'm happy that he likes the ideas I come up with. It's real flattering. But at the same time, oh goodness, sometimes I really do just run out of them. I can't think of what the other cars may be saying as we drive down the street, or what the dog might be saying, or what the car might be saying to the dog. My brain gets tired, guy. I'm old that way. I can't even come up with enough ideas to keep a decent blog going. But I do have a pretty good idea I can blame that on you.

Is that what I look like?

Eek! They just put up my new teeny-tiny picture on my About.com site, and it's freaking me out. Who is that woman, and what is she so happy about? Can I have some of whatever she's having? Or maybe she's been driven insane by her special-needs children. Am I just being overly sensitive, or do I look like some character in a Saturday Night Live sketch?

My former teeny-tiny picture, taken at a one-hour photo studio, was no great shakes. I had a shadow on my lip that looked like a mustache, and my hair as always was a mess. I had high hopes for this new pic, since it was taken at an About guide event and involved a stylist styling me and dressing me and a professional photographer snapping me, but I guess they're only as good as what they have to work with. Still, I'd have liked something that reflected a little more of the reality of life with special-needs kids. 'Cause most days, I look more like this.

Why I'm limping

Being my son's mom is dangerous business. When he was very little, he'd regularly bonk me in the nose with his very hard head. I got the worst of his biting phase, and often seemed to be in the wrong place when he lunged unexpectedly and poked or scratched or jabbed me. He likes to play all rough-and-tumble with me, which was dangerous enough before he got to be five feet tall and 90 pounds. But earlier this week, it wasn't even anything deliberate or exclusive to his disability that got me injured. It was a garden variety toe-stubbing against his stopped sneaker. Not sure whether he stopped short or I wasn't looking where I was going, but -- yowch! That's what I get for wearing sandals, a very black-and-blue-and-pink-and-purple baby toe. Those are summer colors, right?

No more backseat driver

Since each stage of a child's development brings with it new struggles, I've decided to abandon one of my old struggles with my now-teenage son: the struggle to keep him out of the front seat of the car. Oh, how he's begged me over the years to let him ride in front. How hallowed has that spot beside the driver and in front of the glove compartment been for him. How he has railed against the injustice of his sister and his friends and his cousins getting to ride in the front of cars while he has to sit in the lowly, babyish backseat. And over the years, I've held firmly, calmly, to "No." But now he's 13, so the "12 and under" admonitions on the airbags don't apply to him. And now he's taller than me, so it's hard to justify any sort of height requirement for the front. And so, because I know we will soon be struggling over deodorant and showers and acne medicine and all manner of teen traumas, I am giving in on this one. But just for short rides around town, for now. I have my dignity.

On the road again

Our speech problem has been resolved, with my son now seeing someone with whose level of English proficiency I am comfortable, and summer is finally settling in to a steady routine. And I notice now, maybe a little belatedly, that said routine has me getting into and out of cars on a pretty much hourly basis. On a light day, I have four pick-up or drop-off trips. If I went home during my son's speech it would be five, but for half an hour I'd rather just sit and read. My husband does the evening camp run, and we alternate picking our daughter up from work, depending on whether we're picking our niece and nephew up from camp. Then there are the days with music lessons, which necessitate at least one other out-and-in, and days when my son wants to go to Home Depot and look at keys. I think I was up to seven trips yesterday, and with the temperature pushing 100, that's no small feat. The kids are enjoying their summer activities and I don't miss the homework, but in some ways, it will be nice to get back to school with only one drop-off and one pick-up per day.

Yet another blog from me

Just for fun, and 'cause I apparently don't have enough to do, I've started a little link blog over on Bloglines to flag stories that amuse or amaze me. I'm always looking for things to write about, but sometimes I find something I'd like to share without adding more than, say, a snippy headline. If you also don't have enough to do, check it out. And for sure, take a look at those McDonald's commercials from Canada. Ha! 

We're doctors. We don't talk, we order.

It was interesting watching the TV series "House" the other night with this story and comment conversation ringing in my ears. There have certainly been a lot of stories lately about parents losing custody for disagreeing with doctors, and a surprising amount of opinion among parents that anyone who doesn't embrace conventional medical treatment is negliigent, and maybe I've become too cynical from repeated exposure to medical professionals, but I can't quite buy the "doctor is always right" line. So here I am watching "House," still a little stung by some of those blog comments, and darned if the plot doesn't revolve specifically around a mom who's resistant to the recommendations of House and his crew. Her son is brought to the hospital with seizures of a mysterious origin, and the medical detectives go right to work figuring it out. They come up with solution after solution to try, each time sure it's right, each time sure it's a matter of life and death that the boy gets the treatment, each time having to cajole or cudgel the mom into agreeing. House proposes legal action at one point, and at another tricks the mom into going along. Oh my goodness, what a pain it is to deal with these parents who don't immediately say yes! How thoughtless and child-injuring are they!

Except that ... um ... all but one of the times, the mom was right. Absolutely right, and the doctors were absolutely wrong. The doctors wasted time on a couple of wrong conclusions because they refused to listen to or believe her, and on one occasion only failed to give the kid a mistreatment that would have killed him because the mom dragged her feet long enough for new evidence to come in. She's treated with disrespect or something close to it throughout, yet it's the doctors who keep making bad decisions. And all along, I kept thinking: "You know, all they have to do is sit down with this woman, respectfully, and say, 'Your son has a really baffling condition. We don't know what's causing it. We're trying like crazy to find out. We're trying everything. We may make mistakes, but he'll die if we don't keep trying. We need you to understand that this is the only way we can help." But of course, they don't, because doctors are gods, right? Sheesh.

Don't speech therapists need to have good speech?

Be careful what you wish for. That phrase has been going through my mind as I've considered the speech services that have been set up for my son this summer. I've been fighting for these since January, when it became clear that the speech therapist at my son's school had fled and was never coming back, and that he and his classmates had been without speech since Thanksgiving. I had a lengthy series of conversations with the special-ed administration over a) getting a new therapist in there pronto and b) providing make-up therapy for my guy. And eventually, it was agreed that he would get services throughout the summer; I even got it officially noted in his IEP. It took a little more urging over the last month, but I finally got a place and time to bring him to receive these fought-for services. Hooray for me, right?

Well. It turns out that the therapists the district has lined up to provide these summer services -- how you say? -- don't actually speak English. Or if they speak it, they do so with such heavy accents that I can barely understand them. The ability to speak clearly and comprehensibly in the language of the child you are working with would seem to me to be a minimum requirement for a speech therapist, but apparently not. So now I'm fighting again, for an appropriate therapist, and I'm starting to wonder if I wouldn't be better off just working with him myself at home. Be careful what you wish for.

Why schools don't enforce dress codes

Reading the paper this morning, I came across a story that just made me wonder about the priorities some people set. A high school with a policy against intolerant or racially offensive messages suspended a student for three days for wearing a "You might be a redneck sports fan if ..." T-shirt. And okay, that may be extreme. If I was his mom, I might be mad, and call the principal to complain. But I'd like to think that after that, I might say to my child, "You know, this is unfair, and I don't agree. But we'll take it, and from now on, I'll look a little more closely at what you're wearing when you leave the house." Wouldn't you? Would you go to war over a shirt? Would you sue the school? That's what this family did, and though the young man in question dropped the suit a few years later, the school has since been ordered to pay his legal fees to the tune of $500,000-plus. Would you rack up half a million in legal fees to defend the wearing of a T-shirt? I've often joked about suing if my son's school put him in a dangerous or unsafe position contrary to the provisions of his IEP, and I can see parents pursuing cases like that. But a T-shirt? I just don't get it. Free speech is nice and all, but I don't think it should extend to stupid jokes on T-shirts.

My husband suggests that every time this school district has a budget shortfall -- can't afford new computers or books or music classes or sports -- they tell people to go complain to the folks who got half a million of district money over a T-shirt. You might be a ticked-off taxpayer if ...

High school horror

My daughter is getting her second high-school orientation today. The first, a few weeks ago, was just for special-education students, and was intended to give them a kinder, gentler look at how they'll find their way around the school and really enjoy being there. Today's visit, which includes all of her fellow eighth-graders, is the harsher, rougher version, designed to strike the fear of God in these prospective freshmen so they'll start the year ready to listen and obey. Considering the fact that my daughter was in tears even after the first low-key visit, this high-stress one should put her in major anxiety overload. I've been working hard on getting her a Perfect Attendance Award this year, but maybe I should have chucked all that and kept her home today. If there's one kid who doesn't need to be more scared of high school, it's her.

Whose ears are you calling old?

If it seems like your teenager can sense when the phone's going to ring before you even hear a thing, you may not be wrong. A new ring tone is available that can apparently be heard by children but not by adults. The technology for that started as a way to drive teens out of areas where they're not wanted by assaulting their ears with frequencies aging ears don't receive, but talk about your creative repurposing. The kids-only ringtone lets youngsters text-message without tipping off teachers with long musical ringtones. As infuriating as it is that kids are trying to sneak around, you've got to admire the ingenuity involved here. Now if only they could develop a ringtone that could only be heard by rude and inconsiderate people, going to concerts and movies and live events would be a lot more pleasant. Of course, then they'd still sit talking in their seats, or get up and disrupt things to walk out into the lobby. How 'bout a ringtone that renders them unconscious? Come to think of it, that would be handy for teens, too.

Do your homework

Homework is my daughter's specialty. She's super-conscientious about it. She's very organized. She writes assignments down in her assignment pad and on her wall calendar at home. She often completes the work well in advance of its due date. Whatever scores she gets on tests, her homework scores show a solid line of 100s. It's saved her grade average more than once, and also endeared her to teachers who are happy to see somebody, anybody, taking their assignments seriously.

In that, she appears to be in the minority. And I really don't get it. From what I overhear from teachers while volunteering in the school library and what my daughter reports from her classes, it appears that not doing the homework is the norm, and that a decisive majority of kids don't even bother. Now, I can understand kids with learning disabilities having trouble doing the homework (although my daughter manages despite that), and I can see kids with executive function problems or attention problems not doing the job, but surely that doesn't describe a majority of kids. Parents complain about too much homework, but are they really telling the kids to just blow it off? It seems so; or at the very least, they aren't going to the trouble of enforcing it.

If you're looking for a way to get your kid noticed in a good way by a teacher, though, or to give him or her a leg up on a passing grade, I'd sure reconsider that policy. The teachers I've seen are incredulous, too, at the fact that nobody takes assignments seriously, and fairly discouraged as well. Being the student who does, faithfully, complete that disrespected work has got to put a little plus in your child's column. It seems to have worked for my girl, anyway. We'll take academic excellence any way we can get it.

Three weeks and counting, fingers crossed

We're down to three weeks of school remaining, and though in past years I've dreaded the onset of summer with its disruptive changes of routine, this year I am eagerly counting down the days, hours and minutes until I can take a deep breath and say that, phew!, my son made it through his first year of middle school without incident. Surely he can make it through three more weeks, right? Or really, 11 days and four half-days. The half-days, inconvenient though they are, are especially wonderful because it means he doesn't have the one class that he could still get in trouble for. One of his friends, somebody my son imitates even though he couldn't pick a worse roll model, got sent to the principal from that class today. Please, please, little boy, dear son of mine, do not copy whatever particular behavior caused that to happen. Eleven days and four half-days, that's it, that's all, and we can call sixth grade a happy, successful memory. Counting down, man, I'm counting down.

Is it still inclusion if your child's in class remotely?

Now, see, yesterday I said I couldn't imagine any way my son could be productively involved in a mainstream classroom, and then I saw this item on Blogging Baby about robots that can take a child's place in a classroom, transmitting information between the teacher and classroom and wherever the student actually physically is. They're being used to allow bedridden students to still participate in their classrooms, but there's some thought that they could be helpful for autistic students who need a more controlled environment. And scoodgy boys! What about scoodgy boys whose behavior would be such a challenge in a regular class that unsupportable amounts of support would have to be dedicated to it, pretty much obliterating any actual learning? I could see my guy attending a regular class via robot. But he'd probably just find a way to make the robot suck its fingers, or make farting noises, or repeat the same phrase over and over and over ...

Is inclusion always "appropriate"?

Saw this article in our local paper this morning, and I guess it should have made me mad at the bad, bad school district who allowed this girl to graduate without actually educating her, but you know what? Instead, it made me mad at the family that pushed so hard for inclusion. It just seems to bring up so many of the significant and hard-to-manage problems that come with the enthusiastic embrace of inclusion for severely disabled kids, most especially of all: What does "appropriate" mean? Insisting on FAPE -- a Free and Appropriate Public Education -- is all well and good, but who's going to judge what "appropriate" means? For me, an "appropriate" education for my son with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder can only take place in the controlled, regimented confines of a self-contained classroom; inclusion, I think, would be massively inappropriate for him. Clearly, the parents of the young woman in the story felt the only appropriate place for their daughter was an inclusion classroom, and is now complaining that the school district didn't make that work for her.

Throwing kids into inclusion programs without the necessary support is a huge problem. Figuring out how to provide the necessary support in a less-than-ideal setting is another. I can't even begin to imagine how our district could make inclusion work for my son -- it would for sure take a lot of money and time and personnel, and in the end I think he would not get as good an education as he would in that smaller environment. I wonder if the same is true of the girl in the story -- whether she could have gotten the assistance and education she needed in a dedicated class for people with disabilities, and benefited more from that than from the nominal inclusion she received. I know, this is anathema for a lot of people. But isn't it possible that for some students, what's "appropriate" is a specialized program? And that mainstream services are specifically not "appropriate"? And that spending millions to try to make something work that is not ideal for anybody is the most inappropriate thing of all?

Playing IEP games, in a good way

Yes, I know, we're all fierce advocates for our children and take their rights and our responsibilities very seriously ... but sheesh, that doesn't mean we can't have a little fun now and then, right? I pumped up the "fun" quotient on my About site last week with the addition of a couple of IEP-related goodies: an IEP Meeting Alert Levels chart for gauging your risk of deception and stonewalling, and an IEP Matching Game that recreates the feeling you get when everything you ask for gets an answer of NO! (The difference is, of course, that with the game, if you play long enough, you'll win.) These join the Love Notes Matching Game, Alphabet Soup Quiz and Weekly Quiz in bringing a little fun and games to the work of special-needs parenting. Go ahead, play along, we'll be all serious again later, I promise.

Kathy Griffin is on my Z-List

I'm not someone who usually gets up in arms about non-reverential treatments of adoption. I don't protest when people talk about adopting dogs or highways or whatnot. I'm not really offended by Cabbage Patch dolls and their adopton certificates. A little annoyed, maybe, but there are bigger battles to fight, and I try to keep my perspective. But honestly, I gotta tell you, Kathy Griffin is really getting on my nerves. I watch a lot of Bravo for West Wing re-runs, and every commercial break, there's another appeal by Griffin to help her get off the D-List. She's asking viewers to help her pick which of four celebrity-enhancing moves she should make, and one of them is "Adopt a baby from Namibia." If enough people vote for it, she'll do it! Honest!

And sure, celebrities who adopt are easy targets, and I've been guilty of wondering about their motivations and unlikely home study success, but is this what we've come to? Adoption as stunt? I know, I know, she's kidding, it's a joke, get a sense of humor, get a life. And yet, it rankles me. It is, at the very least, a bad joke, and not even a necessary one -- clearly, the way to make the A-list is not to adopt but to have a baby with an A-lister. Look what it's done for those girls from Dawson's Creek!

You don't get what you pay for

I've been mumbling and grumbling for some time over the increase in product packaging that makes it harder to open a product than it was to earn the money to buy it. Most of my wrath has been aimed at the cars and multi-part toys my son buys that are tied into their packaging with so many plastic loops and threads and screws that by the time I free the playthings, he's already lost interest in them. We're talking about, like, a $10 traffic set; does it need to be secured as though it was made out of gold ingots rather than cheap metal and plastic? An article in Wired News today takes on another packaging nightmare, those impenetrable plastic "clamshells" that enclose electronics -- mostly the cheaper stuff that hangs on bars at Best Buy or Target. People have gone to the emergency room for injuries sustained trying to bust open the darn things, the article reveals. Some injuries have required orthopedic surgery. That plastic certainly doesn't cut easily, and manufacturers are only now getting the idea that they ought to give the consumer some idea as to how to get the product they paid for out of the package. The idea behind the tough casing is to keep shoplifters from slipping the goodies out of the box and spiriting them away, but when your precautions to foil thieves end up injuring your paying customers, it might be time for a re-think. And record companies, those CD wrappers that open with great difficulty only to reveal that every openable surface on the box is taped shut? Totally drove me to iTunes, dudes.

Music night musings

A few notes on the middle-school music program concert I went to last night:

+ When did it become okay for parents to just show up for the part of the show their particular child is in and then leave, often going in and out as other groups are actually performing? The lights in the auditorium were on the whole time, and I'm not sure if that encourages people to roam around, or if school administrators did it because people were roaming around anyway. But seriously, parents: Having a child in the music program means you go to concerts and sit there and listen to everybody perform. It's good manners, at the very least. Isn't it? Maybe people were that rude back when I was in school, and I just didn't notice it because I was onstage. But I don't think so.

+ So sure, "Tequila" is a great band song, and the sixth-grade band sounded great playing it, but there's something kinda disturbing about hearing 11- and 12-year-olds shout out "Tequila!" with such great enthusiasm.

+ Likewise, "In the Mood." The Madrigals sang it very nicely, but yikes, the lyrics, they are a bit racy for middle-school kids, no? Yes, I know, I'm just old. Okay.

+ I know what she was getting at, but when the orchestra leader said something like "90 percent of the kids in the group are on the Honor Roll, so you know the kids involved in music are the best kids," I couldn't help but bristle. Yes, my daughter's in music, and I do think kids in the music program are good kids, but not because they're on the honor roll. What about kids like my daughter who work hard and are conscientious and miss the honor roll due to learning differences? Are they just bringing the average down? Are they in the music program on a "mediocre-kid scholarship"? Too much emphasis on honor-roll all around, I think.

Photo op

My son's special-needs baseball team is being honored tonight by our City Council. The whole team will be there in uniform to get certificates and probably a handshake from the council members during a locally televised meeting. And in a way, you know, it's really nice. These are kids who don't always get a chance at recognition in ways that other kids do. How cool is it for them to be applauded for ... for ...

Hmmm. For what now? They haven't won a tournament or anything -- this is an everybody-wins kind of league. They're not at the end of their season, or the beginning. I'm all for celebrating kids' different abilities, but I have the sinking feeling, especially since we're dealing with local politicians here, that they're being recognized for having special needs, and for making a nice photo op. Fortunately, my son's disabilities keep him from being cynical and jaded like his old lady. I just hope those politicians don't notice him sucking his fingers until they're shaking that very wet hand.

Missions and mottos

There's an interesting post in the Special Education Law Blog on the difference between the high-flying mission statements schools create to trumpet their commitment to regular-ed students and the shoddy "doesn't have to be the best, merely appropriate" standard they stake out for special education. Can you imagine a school board member trying to get elected on that platform? "We think our schools should be just okay, the very minimum the law allows!"

Thinking about the inequity in mission statements, though, makes me think of the peppy mottos many schools have, and that in turn makes me think about how nonsensical they usually are. At my kids' elementary school, every day I walked by a sign -- something nicely carved and paid for, obviously without aid of a proofreader -- that read, "Today's Children Are Tomorrow's Future." And every day, in my head, I said, "No, they're not!" They're tomorrow's adults, tomorrow's leaders, tomorrow's taxpayers, but they're not tomorrow's future, unless you're talking about tomorrow as the day after today, and then they're today's "future" just as much. Like a note from the teacher full of grammar and spelling mistakes, that sign reminded me every darn day that the people educating my child could not see the ridiculousness of the future's future before they paid money for a sign. Hey, maybe the regular-ed kids aren't actually getting "the best" either.

How sad am I, mourning a TV show

I'm getting all weepy and nostalgic about the upcoming final episode of "The West Wing" on Sunday, going so far as to put a ticker on my computer to mark the passing days until the last idealistic politicians will float off my TV screen. I know, though, that while I will be mourning on Sunday, my family will be celebrating, because I will no longer be sequestering myself in my bedroom at 8 p.m. on Sundays, a time when we are usually just about to eat dinner. I've been eating alone in my room, with kids forbidden to enter or talk lest I miss these last few precious bon mots. Bad mom, I know. The least I could do is get a working VCR and watch it at a post-bedtime hour. But I'm kind of liking having one inviolable TV hour a week, just one, when once I had so very many. Maybe I'm mourning the end of that a little, too.

Of course, the end of a beloved series has been made a little less tragic these days by the fact that there are DVDs of past seasons to play over and over again. Don't suppose the family'd let me get away with watching them at 8 p.m. on Sundays, though. It's back to being family hour.

Products we never really asked for

This cracks me up. When I first saw a blog item on Play-Doh perfume, I thought it might be a joke -- but nope, there it is on Hasbro's Play-Doh site, part of the merchandising effort for the product's 50th birthday. Play-Doh perfume. Uh-huh. It's supposedly for "highly creative people who seek a whimsical scent reminiscent of their childhood." Now, I recognize those words, because I was once a copy-writer for marketing departments and had to find some cute way to sell whatever boneheaded product they'd come up with. I applaud the effort of whatever poor scribe got handed this project. But really ... Play-Doh perfume? We're to believe that creative types want to smell like Play-Doh? Oh, my.

So should we look forward to Eau de Baby-Poop for Pamper's corporate anniversary? They're discussing it in a board meeting somewhere right now, I promise you.

A mom can dream

What do you want for Mother's Day? I'm in a card-giving family, so I don't expect much more than Hallmark's finest. In the good old days, when my kids were in elementary school, I could at least count on some little artsy project coming home, but in middle school, now, not so much. It's not like I'm in significant need of jewelry or flowers or chocolates -- especially not chocolates, alas -- and my children will always be the best Mother's Day present I ever had. That doesn't mean I can 't dream a little about other perfect presents. Check out the sarcastic little wish list on my About.com site.

Torn between two buddies

It stinks when your friends don't get along, doesn't it? That's the challenge my daughter faces every time she gets all her buddies together. It's not like she has a huge number of close pals, and although she can sometimes arrange separate get-togethers, for things like her birthday party, really, everybody just needs to come and get along. That's hard enough for adults, I guess, and pretty near impossible for teen guys.

My daughter has two good guy friends who just Do Not Like Each Other, whether due to temperamental differences or territorialism or the law of new friends vs. old. One guy she sees all the time, the other has moved away but visits when invited, and they can barely be in the same room with each other. Each has a "second" who sides with him, so there's a nice factional feel to the proceedings. One group always splits off, leaving my daughter to either neglect some of her guests or figure out how to split herself in two.

I've tried to talk some sense into the boys, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it just is. Makes me feel bad, though -- my girl has enough problem learning the rules of social game-playing with kids who aren't her friends. With her friends, shouldn't it be easier?

Only a phone call away

I'm not a big fan of cell phones for young teens, but I have to admit they came in fairly handy at my daughter's birthday party the other day. She and her friends wanted to walk around our neighborhood unescorted, and while I know that's a fairly reasonable request for a bunch of 8th-graders, it's hard for me to flip out of constant vigilance mode. To help, three of the party guests took out their cell phones, gave me their numbers, and assured me they'd all be within easy reach. I did tail them their first time out, pretending to walk the dog. But after that, as they went out again and again, I comforted myself with those phone numbers. I guess a little roaming doesn't hurt.