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I am not famous for my driving prowess. I compensate by being quite cautious, knowing my limits, and sticking mainly to driving places that I have been many, many times before. It seems to have worked pretty well so far. In my ten years of driving, I have never had a traffic ticket or been in an accident where I was at fault. I do not speed. But look what my daughter is turning in for homework! She wrote this for a school assignment in which she was supposed to reflect on what it had been like to pretend to be a 1950’s child for a week (no television, no wearing of pants, yes to eating dinner with the family every night, yes to daily outdoor chores, etc.) One of the Time Swap requirements was not to drive anywhere over forty miles an hour. She reported the following:
Even though we usually go at least a little faster than forty miles per hour, I actually got places faster. When we are going faster than forty miles per hour, there is less time to think through where we are going to go, and how to get there, so it is much more probable that we will miss a turn someplace, and it will take longer to get home. When we are going fast, the driver of the car has to concentrate, and so we cannot talk as much, because if we do, than whoever is driving the car, cannot concentrate and makes a wrong turn. But because this week we had to go slower, there were less wrong turns, so we got places faster. Then, because there was much less prospect of making a wrong turn, we talked together much more in the car this week, and had fun, because we made jokes, laughed, talked, got to know each other more, and had meaningful conversations together.
Do you ever wish you could include a rebuttal with your child’s homework?
Amelia’s school assignment: “Invent” something using chocolate.
Her mother’s intervention: How about chocolate-covered brown rice balls? (What was I thinking? Umm, Nestle Crunch, but healthy?)
Amelia: Thirty minutes before school, Amelia is fighting tears. Up far past her bedtime the night before, rolling balls of sticky rice and sushi rice in chocolate [no brown sticky rice was for sale at the Asian market, rats!] she now tries one. And they are peculiar. Peculiarly awful. There is no time to concoct a new chocolate invention. If she doesn’t take the balls to school she will get a bad grade [in Amelia's mind = death]. If she does take the balls to school, she will have to “sell” them to her peers [in Amelia's mind = death by humiliation].
Mother’s intervention: “Amelia–you’re just like Thomas Edison! You don’t think the first filament he tried for his light bulb worked, do you? Invention is about trial and error. Just take the balls to school to show that you did it and tell everyone you’ve experienced the “error” part of invention.”
Amelia: Rolling of eyes, weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. [I exaggerate, but you've got the idea]. Amelia prepares to toss the hated chocolate balls.
Duncan–to the rescue: Duncan breaks into tears. This is teacher appreciation week. He would like to give his wonderful teacher chocolates. Voila! There is a tray full of beautiful chocolates in the kitchen! But his sister is horrified at the thought of him giving the chocolates to his teacher. Worse, she keeps threatening to throw them away! He tries a rice ball and insists that it is delicious. If she is going to just throw them away, he wants the balls for his teacher!
Amelia: Ten minutes before school, Amelia continues to protect little bro by prohibiting him any access to the chocolate balls. She packs them for school instead–still quite upset. “What am I going to do? What if someone tries to buy one?”
Duncan: One minute before school, Duncan runs crying to the school bus, stung by life’s injustice.
Six hours later (testimony that prayer works–pray over your flocks, pray over your chicks): Amelia nonchalantly climbs into the car for the ride home. “A couple people bought them. It was no big deal. I marketed them as ‘trick chocolates.’”
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I haven’t blogged because I’ve been busy planning a mother-daughter book club. I was hung up on the guest list–not wanting to exclude anyone who wanted to be included, but worrying that it would get too big, worrying about different girls’ different reading levels, little sisters, etc. My new plan: I’ve simply invited every girl (and her mom) from Amelia’s fifth grade class and not any others. This way, they are all the same age, they all read on an advanced level, and no one is included or excluded on the basis of popularity.
I've been feeling like the library's best customer recently . . .
I assume that not all 12 girls and their mothers will want to participate, but a group with 12 mother-daughter pairs would be too large anyway. I think just 4 mother daughter pairs would be enough to make it a success, so I hope we will get that many.
If we were a well-established book group, I think it would be best to have the girls help choose the books. But since this group is just meeting for the summer at this point, and we need a jumpstart, I decided to just pick the six books (we will meet twice a month this summer) and let the girls and moms sign up if they were interested in reading those books.
I was surprised how difficult it was to pick the books! Each book needed:
1) to be relatively short, because we are meeting every two weeks
2) to provide good material for discussion
3) to be interesting and well-written
4) to be in print and available at both our local library and as a cheap paperback at Amazon
5) to include only material that was appropriate for 11 year olds to read and discuss.
(A further stumbling block was that my 11 yr old didn’t want me to plan any books she had already read–and she has read a lot. I ended up planning to read The Giver despite her wishes for new material).
The mix of books I came up with is heavily weighted toward realistic fiction; I struggled to find fantasy and science fiction books that met all of my criteria. These books have some challenging (yet appropriate) topics, but they won’t be a challenge in terms of reading skill. I figure it is better to err on the side of too easy rather than too difficult. These books are also a little on the heavy side–you can’t escape the “life is full of adversity” message in these books–I’m not sure if that comes along with the “good material for discussion” criterion or if the list turned out that way by chance.
Anyway, drumroll please! Here are the books I selected:
Listening for Lions Gloria Whelan (National Book Award winner), 2005
Rachel has lived in British East Africa her entire life, but when the flu epidemic of 1919 leaves her an orphan, she is forced to leave the only home she knows. Scheming neighbors coerce her into pretending to be their deceased daughter and send her to England. Can she undo their web of lies without hurting others? Will she ever be able to return to Africa? Will the mission hospital her parents worked so hard to build ever reopen?
Cousins Virginia Hamilton (Newbery Medal winner), 1990
Cammy loves her brother, mom and grandma—but has a father she doesn’t know and a cousin who is an enemy rather than a friend. She makes a terrible wish that she doesn’t intend to come true, but when it does, her family must help her learn how to heal.
The Breadwinner Deborah Ellis, 2000
Parvana lives under the harsh restrictions of Taliban rule with her family in Afghanistan. When her father disappears, Parvana is the only one able to get food for the family, but she must transform herself into a boy and risk her own safety to do it.
The Bomb Theodore Taylor (author of The Cay) , 1995
Sorry Rinamu lives on Bikini Atoll at the end of World War II. The Americans liberate Bikini from the Japanese, and life is good until the Americans select Bikini as the best place to conduct atomic tests. Sorry and his fellow Islanders are asked to relocate. Will they? Can the tests be stopped?
Out of the Dust (1998 Newbery Medal) Karen Hesse, 1997
This novel is written in free verse. Billie Jo lives in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Her father’s crops fail again and again, dust seeps into their food, their truck, and their piano, and it seems like things can’t get any worse. But then an accident takes her mother and baby brother and Billie Jo’s hands are left burnt and useless. How will she and her father find hope when life seems hopeless?
The Giver (1994 Newbery Medal) Lois Lowry, 1993
In a world with no poverty, no crime, no sickness and no unemployment, and where every family is happy, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen to be the community’s Receiver of Memories. Under the tutelage of the Elders and an old man known as the Giver, he discovers the disturbing truth about his utopian world. (Summary from Amazon.com)
Duncan discovered the crevice from which the ants emerge.
What do you do with a 6 year old who believes ants are worthy of encouragement?
OUR ANTS NEED NO ENCOURAGEMENT!
This is not a spill. It is a pile of chip fragments strategically positioned next to the crevice. A carefully arranged path of chips led from this crevice to under the dining room table.
Duncan has lost his chip eating privileges. Any other suggestions?
It’s been a good, tough week here at Pfamily Headquarters. Very tough, very good. The good news is that Kate’s spinal tap results came back and everything was normal as was her bloodwork. So, after more than $10,000 in medical tests–not hyperbole–we know that 1) She hasn’t had a stroke, 2) she doesn’t have a brain tumor, 3) there isn’t a hole in her heart, 4) she doesn’t have multiple sclerosis, and 4) she probably doesn’t have a neurotransmitter deficiency. This is very, very, very good news because I didn’t want Kate to have any of those things. The only problem is that she still has the tremor and we still don’t know why. This may be no big deal– an ”idiopathic” or unexplained tremor may simply continue–odd, worrisome even, but no ultimate harm done. However, it is too early to tell if/how the tremor will affect her handwriting and other fine motor abilities.
Since November I’ve been intellectually and emotionally consumed with worrying about Kate and the upcoming test or appointment or whatever. Now the tests and appointments are at an end. My anxiety has not yet met it’s end, but I hope it soon will. It would help if Kate’s tremor would lessen or disappear the way a person’s sore throat pain starts to ease as soon as they hear that it’s not strep. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen–I guess Kate didn’t get the memo.
Aside from my continuing anxiety about Kate, another tough thing about this week was the consecutive 504 appointments I attended at Duncan and Amelia’s schools. (A 504 appointment is a meeting with your child’s school in which you make a plan for dealing with the child’s disability). Duncan’s appointment was for speech therapy. Although I’ve been through the 504 process before, I was disturbed anew when I received the letter to schedule the meeting. I don’t feel like a parent who needs to meet with a special education liaison! I don’t recognize my child as being in the disabled category: someone who “has a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” Nonetheless, Duncan can’t make a few of the sounds six year olds should be able to make. More significantly, he has a whole word stutter. (Have you ever heard of a whole word stutter? Rather than repeating the initial sound, a child with this type of stutter repeats an entire word over and over. Before Duncan, I had never heard of it).
Of course, lots of kids are sent to speech therapy. It’s no big deal. I went to speech therapy as a child, and I say “lllll” very well now, thank you very much. I guess it’s just a little tricky in that I am used to academic tests in which one hopes to be in the 90th or 95th or even 99th percentile, so to hear that Duncan tests at the 12th percentile–it seems so low! But then I remember that this is just his ability to make the ”k” sound–not a measure of his abilities as a whole. However, then I remember the stutter and that seems like it might be a bit bigger of a deal. Will he ever be easy to listen to? The speech therapist says that they will teach him to take a breath and slow down before he speaks. Could that solve it? Waves of worry wash over me and then recede. The tide comes in, it goes out, it comes in again.
The fact that I find receiving these 504 letters, with their mentions of “special education,” disturbing doubtless suggests that I need to adjust my thinking regarding special education. However, recognizing this doesn’t make it so.
Amelia has had a 504 plan for years. Her 504 specifies that she be “accommodated” by being allowed to use a keyboard in class. She types everything because fine motor tasks are a challenge. Her 504 meeting this morning was a bucket of fun. Her good teacher was pressing the district to offer Amelia more “services” because although typing resolves many of her academic-related fine motor issues, the teacher worries that Amelia will have trouble accomplishing important basic life tasks (cutting meat, tieing a shoe, cutting her own fingernails). I understand this concern well, as it mirrors my own, but the notion that playing with putty (my cynical description of occupational therapy) twice a week for twenty minutes will help—-I’m painfully skeptical.
The whole meeting felt like a wound being reopened, poked at, examined. It reminded me that Amelia has real problems that do and will affect her life. They aren’t going to go away. I had wanted to forget that. Just as I’d like for Kate to wake up tomorrow without the tremor and for Duncan to be able to spit out his story on the first telling, I would like to see Amelia’s fine motor problems vanish. I know, I know, if wishes were horses . . . , but couldn’t my kids just be “normal” kids without the issues? Sometimes the unusualness of their respective problems bothers me– as though, if I could somehow meet another three year old with a tremor, or 6 year old with a whole word stutter, or 10 year old who struggled to tie her shoes, everything would be so much better.
What is normality and when does the moniker apply? Are most of us disabled? Do almost all of us face some sort of deficit that leaves us at a level less than the norm? Some issues are bigger than others. I recognize that parents whose children have cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for example, face difficulties far more daunting than the minor frustrations and disappointments I have faced with my children thus far. Also, from the outside looking in, it appears that some families have it all: they appear smart, athletic, healthy, etc. But I know that none of us will truly escape challenges in this life. And although there are many other sorts of challenges, the challenges we face often arise internally: social deficits, medical problems, mental problems, learning disabilities, etc.
It is likely that to be normal, one must be abnormal in some way. Can we take comfort in the normality of our abnormalities?
The principle: Mom is not going to fix different foods for each family member. We are all going to eat the same thing. Mom decides what that is. [For my defense: I am willing to listen to timely suggestions, but I didn't receive any suggestions before everything was prepared today. For my prosecution: By "fix" I mean reheat leftovers].
The scene: Mom is eating meat and potatoes for lunch. Duncan: May I have some [brown] rice for lunch? Mom: No. You can have what I’m having: meat or potatoes. Kate: [Enthusiastically points at an orange]. Mom: No. You can have what I’m having: meat or potatoes.
Result: Mom finds herself ridiculous. My children ask for brown rice and fruit and my response is: it’s red meat, starch, or nothing? What kind of mother am I anyway?
Ta-da!
My little boy is so big. He will be six in less than six weeks. I’m not ready. He is so excited to get older, to grow up, but I miss the sweet, obedient little boy he was before. I know that there is a lot to look forward to in an older child–Amelia has taught me that–but I also know that there is a younger child who will soon mostly be present only in pictures. (Note to self: Take more pictures!) I will miss him.
Duncan and I had a rollercoaster day today. We had a wonderful morning enjoying one of our favorite shared tasks: searching through piles of cookbooks in hopes of finding the perfect recipe. (Duncan is the only person I know who likes to look at cookbooks as much as I do). Duncan’s criterion was chocolate, mine was chewy. Finally, we found the January 2009 Cook’s Illustrated recipe for Chewy Chocolate cookies. We made them together and they surpassed our hopes: They were indeed chocolatey and truly chewy! A recipe breakthrough.
The afternoon brought an ugly metamorphosis. Duncan was so badly behaved–screaming, crying, carrying-on. It was frustrating after our nice morning. This wasn’t a day that warranted me turning inward and saying I must pay him more attention. He was badly behaved for no reason at all.
Fortunately, by evening, he was a happy little fellow again, entertaining himself and playing with Kate, glorying in the role of wonderful big brother. He does it so well! Then he exulted in the loss of his first tooth, giddy at the milestone met. Growing up can’t come fast enough for him. I just wanted to hug him tight and say, “Don’t leave me! I’ll miss you.” I did say something about not letting him get any older, and he just laughed and laughed. Silly mama.
I don’t know if she actually did; I couldn’t see. But Pdad thought so. After she got Kate’s IV in, I did hear her say several times, “That’s why I’m an adult nurse!” I think she actually did a great job. The IV went in on the first try. We all held our breath–last week Kate had to be pricked a third time after a vein collapsed, so we didn’t want to tell her that it was over and she was done, until it was over and she was done. But the vein performed and the test continued.
The nurse was under pressure. Kate is young (not yet three) and little. We had mentioned last week’s three tries with the IV. It seemed like a whole room of people was looking on. I couldn’t have put a needle into Kate, but the nurse’s tenderness still surprised me. None of us want to hurt a defenseless little person who has to trust us.
At an earlier point yesterday, the lights were off, the high tech monitor was on, and the specialist studied it. I lay next to Clara in the bed, trying to give comfort with my presence and my touch, wishing I could see, but knowing that I wouldn’t be able to understand anything I saw. Pdad and the two technicians watched the specialist. I could see her face as she studied the monitor. I wondered if she would be able to see what she needed to. I wondered whether she would be distracted by all of us watching her. I wondered if she would have to order further, more traumatic tests to be able to see better. I wondered if Kate would have to be sedated again today, whether it was truly safe, and whether we were making the right choices for her. As the specialist silently scanned the screen, I wondered whether she had the ability and the experience to make the right call. I had never met her before that morning; she seemed both competent and compassionate, but I didn’t yet know if she deserved my trust.
The day before, our pediatrician had called me from home on his day off to recommend these tests. I was baffled. Our medical odyssey began with the intermittent tremor we noticed in Kate’s hands and arms. Last week the focus was her brain. Thankfully, the MRI didn’t reveal any obvious bleeds or tumors. So why were we now looking at an echocardiogram of her heart? The pediatrician had a difficult task. He wanted to reduce my anxiety by explaining that there was no cause for concern and that the tests likely wouldn’t reveal anything that wasn’t normal. At the same time, he wanted to communicate urgency for performing the tests. The contradiction gave me anxiety.
A too-brief midday conversation with Pdad confirmed our shared mental status. The pediatrician wants more tests. Are we certain that seeking more medical intervention and study is the best course for our daughter? No. Are we certain that it isn’t? No. Do we trust that our pediatrician knows the best way to proceed? No. Do we trust that he cares about her and wants what is best for her? Yes. Do we trust him and go forward? . . . ?
It is curious to me how our situation as parents in the hands of the medical system mirrors Kate’s. To a degree, we are helpless. We can only trust or not trust. Our situation is different than Kate’s though, in that we know a little more, and we have the aching burden of decision by proxy. Perhaps that nurse could shed a few tears for us too. Perhaps she already did.
P.S., Kate’s heart looks great! It is normal and healthy. There are no holes. She was very brave in getting her IV and was miraculously cooperative and even sleepy through all the procedures which allowed her to avoid sedation. We appreciate your prayers. We are very thankful for good test results so far. The plan now is to simply wait for our appointment with a pediatric neurologist near the end of January. The good test results have done nothing to explain her tremor, so the mystery and a reasonable dose of anxiety continues.
My 10 year old daughter moved to a new school this year. She has a great teacher and she claims to be much happier at her new school. She finally feels like she fits in and she loves all of the projects they do. The problem is, school is stressing her out. Another problem is that her school is stressing me out.
In retrospect, it is obvious to me that Amelia needed a change last year. If your child is reading a couple books a day during school hours, something is wrong. Kids need to be challenged. If there is no challenge, changes must be made. On the other hand, if a child has so many challenges at school that she doesn’t have time left for other activities, or if she has little time for being a 10 yr old, something might be wrong there too.
It is tricky to be the parent of someone who has the option of being challenged too much or too little, but no obvious third option. I’m not the teacher; I can’t adjust the homework load. I can’t make the curriculum just a bit easier for her. I can help her to streamline her life, I can try to help her see that she doesn’t have time to do everything demanded at school, retake her science test until she gets a perfect score, swim every afternoon, go to chess club once a week, go to Activity Days (a bi-weekly church group for girls), enter the Reflections contest (PTA arts program), and study for the spelling bee, etc.
The problem is it makes me sad to encourage her to scale back on the non-school activities that are also an important and enjoyable part of her life (and let me be honest: our life. I am mourning the loss of time to study spelling, because it was something I really enjoyed doing with my daughter). For example, dropping swimming would save the most time, but after her fight to make the swim team, I would hate to see her leave just when she is reaping the rewards of her hard work.
Because of the stress that her homework assignments put on our family, I am often tempted to encourage her to go back to her old school. It can’t be worth it! I say. But despite the stress she evidences and the anxiety I feel, how can I send her back when she says she is happier at her new school and wouldn’t go back for the world?