Take back what you said in my imaginary conversation!

Do you ever do that thing where you argue with people in your head, and then turn all sorts of hostility on the actual person when you see them, all the pent-up anger from that argument, and of course they have no idea why you're so steamed since they were not, technically, there inside your head? Bad habit, that, and one I have a hard time breaking.

It's easy to have that sort of inner wrestling match with someone on an internet e-mail list, because if you blow off steam at them inappropriately you never have to see them again. But I'm doing it lately with a couple of real-world combatants, particularly one woman who works with my son and has been pushing my buttons lately, and I'm starting to lose track of whether the hostility I'm feeling is based on actual behavior or virtual behavior. I think it's kind of a vicious circle: She seems a little snippy to me, and so I fight with her in my head, and then when I see her, I'm a little hostile, which makes her a little snippier.

It's bad for my son all around, and I should probably find an appropriate way to iron things out with this person so I can stop being vaguely mad, but then I might find out for sure that she dislikes me as much as I imagine, and hmmm, maybe I can do without that.

Don't do me any favors

Is there such a thing as party favor etiquette?

My son had a perfectly nice birthday party yesterday, everybody seemed to have a good time, there were no behavior problems from either the birthday boy or his friends, and I should be feeling all successful about the whole thing. But something keeps rankling me: When we handed out the party favors -- a little plastic car filled with candy, because my son loves cars, tied to a "road" of a flat pack of gum -- one of the moms came back to me, said her daughter didn't play with cars or eat candy, and since my son likes cars I should just give it to him.

And ... well ... okay. I know I'm taking this too seriously, and why should I care. It's not like I went to huge effort and expense on these favors, or that the mom did what she did in a particularly rude way. It's just ... you don't do that, do you? Give back a party favor? Maybe you take it home and throw it in the trash, or maybe you "accidentally" leave it behind at the party site, but to go up to the party-giver and specifically reject it? Am I oversensitive (YES!), or is that bad form? Hmph.

New-style birthday

It's my son's birthday today! Happy birthday, guy! You're a teenager now! And your mom won't be sleeping well for the next ten years or so. But today, we celebrate. Then we celebrate again on Sunday, when he has his birthday party with friends -- a dozen kids from his special education class descending on a bowling alley. Fun times, for them. For me, it's making sure that boys do not go into the men's room together, because they'll certainly do what my son is constantly crowing about as "the new-style flush," which involves hitting the handle with your foot. This is, of course, ever so much more fun when you have an audience and can show off your extreme prowess at kicking plumbing. Are teenagers supposed to find such things so overwhelmingly hilarious? He's thirteen in years, but still a kid at heart.

If you have a lot of it, it must be a collection, right?

My son has been loving keys since he was a teeny tiny little guy and still loves them now when he's a big heavy almost-teenager (tomorrow, yikes). You could call it a collection or you could call it a mess on the floor of his room, and I've done both. But for the purposes of the About.com Collectibles site, which just ran a nice little article about my guy and his keys, we're calling it a collection. Does your child have a collection, or a mess of something that you could call that on a good day when you were trying to put the happiest possible face on things? Take this survey and let me know whether I'm the only one readying a pile of junk for the Smithsonian.

C is for cookie, that's good enough for me

I seem to be on a cookie kick with my kids these days. I got a nifty standing mixer for my birthday last June, and it's been sitting there on the counter looking all cute and underutilized, so all of a sudden I'm making cookies every weekend, and eating cookies every week, and wearing cookie-fat now and forever. It would be great if this was some sort of bonding exercise in which I helped my kids learn to bake, but I'm way too much of a control freak in the kitchen. What they mostly are learning is how to get things out of the closet for me. But the cookies are yummy. Mmmmmm, cookies.

This weekend, we're doing oatmeal raisin. Not the nut-free, egg-free, dairy-free, wheat-free recipe that was on my About.com site this week, but if your kids need any of those -trees, you might give it a try. We'll be making the one printed under the lid of the Quaker Oats box, with vegetable oil subbing for shortening since I'm transfat-free. Let me know how yours turn out.

What's scarier, the movie or who's watching it?

What's with young kids going to scary movies and playing scary video games? Lately I've had a few young classmates of my kids talk about their favorite R-rated movies like watching this stuff was the most normal thing in the world for a 12- or 13-year-old. When I say something unbearably fuddy-duddyish like, "Isn't that rated R? You shouldn't be watching that!" they seem genuinely bewildered. I can't quite decide if their parents don't know what they're watching or don't care, but man -- kids that young just do not need that stuff in their brains.

I was explaining this to a sixth-grader at my kids' school, a big fan of the movie "Training Day," who was appalled that I not only did not let my son play violent video games like "Grand Theft Auto," but that when a friend had brought it over, I made them stop playing and remove the offending game from the machine. "Wasn't your son embarrassed? Couldn't you have just waited until the kid went home?" No. And no. One viewing of that stuff is too much. And a boy like my son, who regularly sucks his fingers, jumps, and flaps, is probably beyond embarrassment. But it's true, too, that his friends know me, and know what Mama don't allow. Am I the last nay-saying mom around?

The miracle would be me staying awake

I tried to watch ABC's new reality show Miracle Workers last night, since it featured two stories that were right up my Parenting Special Needs alley: a child with scoliosis and a teen with Tourette syndrome. The show features two "host" teams, each with a doctor and a nurse, who find specialists to make miracles come true for people who need dramatic treatments. I made it about halfway through, to the point when the girl with Tourette's had had a hole drilled through her brain and some sort of probe inserted, and the boy had weathered an operating-room crisis that started with, "Oops! He's paralyzed for life!" and ended with, "No, wait, never mind." I really wanted to see what happened -- wanted to see footage of the boy walking straight and tall instead of leaning leftward, and the girl speaking freely without constantly hitting herself in the head. But I nodded off, as I tend to do whenever I sit still after 9 p.m. (Oddly, though, I was able to stay awake for the entire episode of "Grey's Anatomy" on Sunday night at 10 p.m. Maybe if "Miracle Workers" included some subplots about the complicated romantic lives of those doctors and nurses ... no, no, that would be wrong.)

Uneasy rider

I was reading a lot of discussion today on a parenting e-mail list about riding bikes, and the terribleness of your child not being able to manage a two-wheeler, and it made me wonder if I'm deeply scarring my kids in some way by really not caring much about bike-riding one way or the other. I didn't ride a two-wheeler until I was 16 years old, my husband never learned, and so it's hard for us to feel real tragic about our son's failure to launch. Our daughter learned to ride fairly easily, but since we don't encourage constant and energetic bike riding, she doesn't get much practice. And the little guy just can't manage without training wheels, and we can't manage to get out there with him and work on it.

Is this bad parenting? Some sort of oblique child neglect? I don't know. When I was a kid, bikes were a major form of transportation. Kids rode bikes to school (me, too, on those training wheels, well past the age at which it was social suicide to do so), but today my kids' schools forbid that. I needed my bike badly for college transport, but I don't think that'll be an issue for my two. My son's friend needs his bike to do really dangerous stunts involving stairs, but we're not going there for gosh-darn sure. Exercise is important, and I'm trying to get both kids to walk more, but bikes? Seem like an accident waiting to happen, to me. But then, I'm not a biker. And passing that down, apparently.

Sure it's dangerous work, but no IEP meetings

Pop quiz: What's tougher, leading the police force in a war-torn nation, or teaching special education in middle school? Beatrice Munah Sieh is in a position to say. She left a career in Liberian law enforcement when she fled the civil war in her native country and found work in the U.S. as a special-ed teacher in a Trenton, N.J. middle school. Liberia recently elected its first female leader, and she called on Sieh to come home and become the West African nation's first female police chief. Sieh's fellow teachers had no idea they were working with a trailblazer: "None of us knew she was involved with law enforcement in her country," one is quoted as saying. "We just thought we were all educators together."

This whole story just amazes me. Can you imagine your child's special education teacher all of a sudden, one day, announcing, "Sorry, can't finish out the year, I'm going to go back home to lead the police force." I mean, you have to be tough to deal with some of these kids, but that tough? 

Does somebody really READ all this stuff?

My daughter has state standardized testing next week, and boy, it makes me long for the old days when standardized testing involved filling in bubbles with a Number 2 pencil and not much else. These days, the kids have to write essays, and long ones, too, if the amount of pages listed in the sample book is any indication. I don't think I had to face four blank lined pages in a test exam booklet until I was in college, and even then it sent cold shivers. Even if I didn't have kids with learning disabilities, I'd think the folks behind all this testing have gone a little nuts. As it is ... well, I'd laugh, if so much importance wasn't placed in this stuff.

No gambling in my blood

I went to my first big-time Tricky Tray on Friday night, and boy, was that a trip. For those of you who've never been to a Tricky Tray -- and up until I moved to the Northeast, I'd never heard of them -- it's basically a super monster mega raffle for which you buy a lot of little tickets, drop them into containers in front of a variety of fabulous, semi-fabulous, and really-not-very-fabulous-at-all prizes, and then sit around for a few hours listening to people read numbers to see if you won anything. Some folks get heavily into this, spending hundreds of dollars to buy tickets to invest in winning what is mostly, essentially, junk. My husband and I just aren't in the spirit, though. We bought some tickets because it benefits the school, played them fairly half-heartedly, and lost everything. Not even the smallest basket of potpourri or paperbacks did we manage to bring home. I'm happy that the school made money, less happy that we spent one of our very rare evenings out together in such boring circumstances. As with so many fund-raisers, I'm left thinking: Can I just write you a check so that I don't have to participate?

Eye contact? Don't push it

Luke Jackson's "Freaks, Geeks and Asperger's Syndrome: A User's Guide to Adolescence" is one of my favorite first-person accounts of dealing with neurological impairments, told as it is by a kid dealing with the puzzlements and not a parent trying to solve them from the outside. There's a passage about eye contact that validates everything I've ever felt about not wanting to force my son to do it -- I'd rather he listen and not look than look but not listen -- and I'm excited to have gotten permission to post that excerpt on my About.com site. You can also read my review of this entirely nifty book, and my own advice on eye contact.

Me and my big mouth

Yesterday, while we were in the car driving to Ash Wednesday services, my son popped his fingers out of his mouth and said "Oh, no! I broke my contract with Mrs. B!" What contract is that, I asked? "I'm not supposed to suck my fingers." You have a contract about that? said I, blood pressure rising. And he confirmed that he had indeed signed a contract with the classroom aide, and that the teacher knew about it. And I probably should have remained calm and kept my snark to myself and not immediately complained to my husband that people at school cannot just set up behavioral goals at whim and institute contracts and this is something we need to discuss as a team and I had just talked at the last IEP meeting about why finger-sucking was not a good behavior to target, and ... and ... I've been through this kind of thing before, you know. I've had aides take this kind of thing in their own hands before. And I gear up quick.

By the time we got home, though, I had calmed down, and I wrote the lightest-possible e-mail to his teacher, leaving the largest-possible margin for this being a misunderstanding, and hoping that I could get some information without stepping on toes. She called me shortly after, and we had a nice long conversation about the fact that the "contract" was a joke that my boy took seriously, and there was in fact no stealth behavior modification program being employed. And I felt all good and happy and skillful to have dealt with the situation without having to throw weight around or burn bridges. Just the way it should be, no?

Except that this morning, my son marched into his classroom, went right up to the aide, and said, "My mom said I don't have to do what you say! I don't have to listen to you!"

The teacher called to let me know, because I've asked to be notified when he says inappropriate things, and I declared that I never said any such thing, because I didn't, exactly, though sort of, but not to him, but in his earshot, but not in those words, but ... oh, man, if I'm going to live with this little parrot boy, I'm just going to have to get myself a soundproof room, or learn to speak in code. If I can't even rant in the privacy of my own home, wherever shall I rant?

Inspiration and fun, in one

I'm like an old dog with a new trick: This weekend I put a Javascript game up on my About.com site, and it is so cool! I'm unreasonably excited about the fact that, even though I have no idea what all that gobbledygook code does, I was able to place it correctly and tweak it a bit and get it to work in only, oh, I don't now, three or four hours! It's a memory game in which you click on hearts to find matching pairs of messages underneath. The messages are very upbeat and inspirational, so if anybody catches you playing, you can say you needed some self-help confidence building. Yeah, that'll work. Anyway, stop by and try it. I'm so proud!

The media didn't medal

So the Olympics are over, and even after hours of viewing, I still haven't figured out Curling. It's a surprisingly mesmerizing sport to watch, though. Bravo should get going with some sort of Celebrity Curling show, seriously. Wouldn't you just love to see your favorite TV stars frantically brushing the ice and yelling ... whatever it is curlers yell? Bring it on!

I've read all the wrap-up stories about these games, and apparently I'm supposed to have been disappointed in them. No big moments, the pundits say, performance below expectations. Maybe I'm just easy to please, but I found plenty to be inspired by. Ski jumps, both simple and twisting. Snowboarding, and the laid-back kids who practice it. Joey Cheek, giving his medal money to charity; seriously, put that boy on a Wheaties box. That Chinese pairs skater who picked herself up, dusted herself off, and kept on skating through what must have been unbearable pain. I don't think there was a day I watched the games that I didn't see something I didn't know humans could do (or, frankly, would want to). Are we only allowed to be inspired by winning -- and for that matter, only by winning gold?

If I'm disappointed by anything, it's by the media coverage that built huge mountains of hype, yammered about how much pressure that hype put on the athletes, and then pounced on anyone who didn't measure up. In sports where there are so many variables, from the weather to other athletes to the very unpredictability of the human body, how dare we put out those expectations -- especially knowing how much those expectations can affect the outcome by messing with people's heads. I'm willing to cut the athletes more slack than the journalists and the corporations. How 'bout next time, we don't hype anyone until they actually do something, 'kay?

Between the physical crashes and the PR crashes, I come away from these Olympics with a profound sense of gratitude that my children will likely never become serious sports competitors, and save us all the agony of having their mistakes analyzed by know-it-alls on national television. Would you want your child to compete in the Winter Olympics? Take the poll on my About.com site and show your (lack of) spirit.

Inspirational Olympic moment

Oooh, I love this. This is my favorite Olympics quote of the day. I think it speaks beautifully to our wishes for kids to overcome their particular limitations and challenges, and find something they can really be passionate about. It's from a short news item about Helen Resor, a U.S. women's hockey team member, and her excitement about seeing Michelle Kwan in the athlete's village.

"I tried to say something to her, and I think it came out halfway coherent," said Resor, an aspiring figure skater herself before she grew to 5-feet-10 and discovered she loved hitting people.

Find your dream, kids, find your dream!

Olympic impressions

I've been watching a lot of the Olympics with my daughter, which is fun, because I used to watch a lot of the Olympics with my mother. My girl's favorite sport so far is luge, which makes sense; with her language problems, she has trouble with games that involve planning and strategy, and the luge just looks a lot like holding on while gravity pulls your idle body to the bottom of an icy hill at terrifying speeds. Yes, I know, there's more to it than that, there's steering in imperceptible small ways with a twitch of a shoulder or leg, and if you really just hold on and do nothing you will ride down the hill on your face. But for a kid who has trouble understanding rules and the sort of unspoken communication that goes on among teammates, a sport in which you just lie there must look pretty appealing.

I enjoyed the snowboarding a lot. One writer described it as the last sport that hasn't been Olympi-cized, so that the competitors are still really just going at it for the joy of doing a thing you love well, and not to jockey for endorsement deals or ego room. That's why I liked it, I think; they just looked like a bunch of kids in baggy pants having a cool time. I loved reading that, in between turns, a lot of the American snowboarders grabbed their boards, hopped a lift, and went snowboarding for fun. Can't quite imagine a figure skater saying, "Hey, I have a couple of hours before I'm on and I saw a frozen lake down the way -- let's just go skating."

Figure skating was the big viewing event for my mom and me years ago, but I've had a hard time watching it in recent years because the emphasis on bigger and badder jumps and throws has resulted in bigger and badder crashes, and at some point it just breaks your heart to see all that effort done in by a bad blade angle. I'm loving the new scoring, though, especially as it seems to allow skaters to crash spectacularly and still do okay. What I like most about it, though, is its inscrutability. Not even the commentators -- not even the athletes -- seem to know what those numbers mean, and that eliminates a lot of unhelpful second-guessing. I mean, you see a 5.8, and it's easy to go, "No way! That was totally a 5.9! Unfair! Lynch the judge!" But you see a 79.7, and just like a ski jump or snowboard stunt or other judged event, you kind of go ... "Oh, okay. It looked good to me, but, whatever. Good show!" All the layers of difficulty and different point allocations lend the whole thing an obscurity that makes the sport more enjoyable, I think. Works for me, anyway.

The crash of that Chinese pairs skater, as tragic and painful as it was for her, must just have the execs at NBC Sports doing quadruple salchows. They were in a human interest crisis with Michelle Kwan's departure, and now they can just rerun footage of Zhang Dan flying through the air, crashing to the ice, bashing into a wall, and rising to skate again, again and again. If some sort of dramatic injury like this hadn't happened, NBC would have had to send Dick Button down with a lead pipe to make it happen. Oh, the human drama! It was pretty impressive. I don't know if Chinese athletes do endorsement deals, but somebody needs to put that girl's face on a cereal box, or maybe a bottle of pain reliever.

The medal ceremony for that pairs competition was amazing -- I've never seen so many glum faces on the winner's platforms. People, you won! Look alive! Both Chinese couples had skated through significant injuries and pain, so I guess I can give them a pass for looking so desperately unhappy, but the gold-medal-winning Russians had no excuse. The woman looked so ticked off, and gave such an ungracious answer when asked about the Chinese skater who was injured, that you just wanted to ... where's that lead pipe, now? Talk about endorsement deals: Sign this one up for Emerald Nuts -- Eschewing Mercy, Elete Russian Athlete Lobs Disdainful, Negative Utterances at Tortured Skater. If you can learn how to do all those fancy jumps and twists and landings, you can learn how to smile and to win with grace.

Dance fever

My son went to his first middle-school dance on Friday and it was, um, I don't know, a moderate success? My husband and I went as chaperones and basically tailed him the whole time he was there, grabbing him away when he was bugging kids and probably making him look even weirder then he looks all by himself, though, hmmm, maybe not. Anyway, 45 minutes into the 90 minute dance he was pretty overstimulated by the music and the noise and the lack of structure and it looked like a good time to end things on a semi-successful note instead of a note of disaster, so his dad took him to the store to get a couple of Matchbox cars and he went happily home. Half a dance -- better than none? I'd feel a lot more sure saying that if the music wasn't so oppressive, and ill-chosen for middle-schoolers (did they really have to play Candyshop?) and the dancing by the girls so provocative. Maybe next time, we could just take him to the toy store and skip the dance. No? That would be wrong? Okay. We'll shoot for an hour this time.

Be careful what you wish for

At the beginning of this school year, when every one of my daughter's teachers expressed a goal of bringing this sweet, quiet, sometimes timid girl out of her shell and getting her to talk and interact more, I told them sure, fine, good luck with that. But quietly, to myself, I said: Be careful what you wish for. Because, while the goal of making a language-challenged kid more social and outgoing is laudable, doing it in 8th grade when peer behavior is at its worst is a big gamble. And sure enough: The experiment has been so successful that she's had two detentions in the last three weeks. The first was a detention for the entire class, but the second was due to going to the bathroom to talk instead of tinkle, and being late for class as a result.

I'm not making a big deal about these detentions -- they're the milder after-school variety, not the serious Saturday ones. But when I see her English teacher at her IEP meeting next week, I'm going to mention that, hello, if a quiet kid wants to be more talkative, she's going to gravitate to the kids who talk all the time and get in trouble for it. Some of the conversations she's reported having, and some of the shiny new words she's picked up, make me think that perhaps sociability isn't the best goal at this point in time. Now that we've brought her out of her shell, can we stuff her back in a little, please?

Love Notes for Special Parents

I haven't posted much lately due to a book deadline and IEP meetings (one partially down, one to go). But I did manage to complete a little project over on my About.com site that I'm pretty excited about. I took some inspirational sayings I wrote last February for Valentine's Day and did them up with nice lettering and posted them in a gallery. You can click on each design and get a larger version that's nice for printing and framing, giving, or tacking up on the refrigerator. There are 28 sayings in all. Check it out and give yourself a little early Valentine's present.