Just got this year’s blood test results back… Shelby’s still a ‘low positive’ for milk allergy - .71 this year.
Last year was ‘low moderate’ at .99, so if that means anything (and I don’t know that it does), we’ve got some progress, anyway.
Allison’s away at radio camp this week. She DJ’ed on the college radio station today & sounded AMAZING! I’ll upload the clips when I get them at the end of the week…
Anyway, Annie wanted to call her at bedtime to say goodnight, like she usually does. So, I called her cell & put Annie on. She said ‘goodnight’ and ‘I love you’, then gave the phone back to me.
I chatted for a bit, then told her how one of the puppies got adopted today. As I wound down my story, she sighed. I said, “What?”. She said, “I miss you guys”
Sigh. I miss her, too.
It’s weird coming home & her not being there. It’s going to be hard when she goes away to college at the end of next school year. But, she’s thinking about going to the college where she’s at for radio camp right now, so that’s not too bad - only 15-20 minute drive away 
Shelby’s got a friend named Corey. We all like Corey. He’s a good kid.
Last night, after work, I was doing some things around the house & the kids were lobbying to go to the pool. I told them that we would, after I was done with what I was doing and after I had dinner under control. So, they asked if they could go in the tub, to cool off & wash their hair (I just taught them how to do it themselves last week & they’re really enjoying practicing, now). So, I filled the tub & they went in.
While they were in the tub, Corey’s mom called. She said that Corey had been asking her, all day, to call & see if he could come over - asking her to go to www.shelby.com to see if we were home 
I said, sure, we were home & going to the pool soon & he could come join us anytime at all.
I told the kids in the tub to get out & get their swimsuits on, because Corey was on his way over.
Annie asked if he could sleep over, too. I told her that I’d ask Corey’s mom about it when she got here. Annie said, “Good, I like when Corey sleeps over. It’s all shiny when he’s here”. I thought that was beautiful, so I asked her what she meant. She said, “The last time he slept over, when I woke up in the morning, the bedroom was shining & I was excited about having a good time playing all day.”
So, last night, at bedtime, she was having a hard time falling asleep. They all were - just too much excitement & too much talking still to do, with all four of them (Bryce had joined us by then) in the bedroom on the bunks. Annie came out to me in the living room & was sad because she couldn’t fall asleep. I suggested she sleep in my bed. She was resistant, because she wanted to sleep in her own bed. She wanted to wake up to the shiny feeling.
She eventually did sleep in my bed, Corey moved up to her bed & Annie asked me to bring her back to sleep on the cushion under her loft bed, when I went to sleep. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the usual bedtime promise that I have to make, to bring the kids from their bed to my bed, when I go to sleep, so that they can wake up by me or dad.
We ended up with a teenage cousin stopping by late last night, too, to hang with Allison & check out a new video game. He slept over on the sofa, because they were up too late.
I like having a house full of everyone It’s all shiny when it’s like that.
We got another batch of foster puppies from the rescue org last Thursday (I think it was Thursday, anyway - some time last week). Sweet dogs. All of them seem to be crate trained & paper trained quite nicely. In fact the big ones seem to know they are supposed to go outside & are holding it until then, for the most part.
The bigger ones are some kind of boxer, maybe? They are quiet, not possessive of food (but, they do get kind of frisky when there’s rawhide involved), none of that ear-biting, puppy-fighting stuff, except when provoked by the little black puppies.
The little ones are not from the same litter, at least as not as far as we know, anyway. The bigger one is poodly. He’s feisty & often challenges the other dogs, big and small. He & the other little one are a bit possessive of food, but nothing vicious, just some growling & yipping.
The tiny one is simply adorable. He was found in a river, weighing about two pounds. His foster family down south nursed him up to about four pounds. He’s probably around 5 or 6 pounds, now. Cute puppy belly, loves being scratched & held.
One of the big pups figured out how to jump the wall in the puppy pen. I came home the other night, after running errands, to find her wandering around the house on her own. She had peed & pooped upstairs, but, it was on the bathroom floor, so not much of a mess to clean up. I wonder if she would have used the paper in the kitchen if I had left it down. Either way, though, it was smart of her to go on the bathroom floor instead of on the carpet. And, she hadn’t chewed up anything in the house, otherwise.
Earlier that day, I had worked Market Day pickup & was telling the Market Day rep about the puppies. She told me that she had a dog crate that she wasn’t using & asked if I wanted it. Boy, did I! I knew that those big pups would be properly crate trained, but didn’t have a crate to put them in overnight (they were sleeping in the puppy pen - the little ones were in the crate in the kitchen).
So, actually, one of the errands that I had been running that night was to pick up that dog crate from the Market Day lady Lucky thing, wasn’t it? She called it ‘a god thing’ when she first told me about it. I call it a lucky coincidence.
I set the pups up in the crate that night & they did great!
Not sure how long we’ll have these guys. We’re going on a short vacation in a couple weeks, so they’ll have to be gone by then, for sure. Hope they find wonderful, loving homes one day soon!
I don’t think these kids have any idea what this song is about. Or, maybe they do. Either way, their video works with it.
This is it. This is the life that we have, that we know for sure about. Right here. Right now. Anything else is speculation, at best.
I am responsible for myself, my actions, my words. You can blame me for it, now. I accept responsibility for it now.
What happens after we die? We’ve heard it all. It could be anything. Stop worrying about that. We can’t know it.
All we know is now. Stop wasting any of now worrying about what happens then.
I don’t need you to tell me what you think is going to happen next or what you think the rules are in order to have the best thing happen after I die. I’m going to concentrate on doing the best with what I know, now, here.
And, thank God (ironic, isn’t it?) it’s all fatal. Life will end. For all of us.
Just a little flipping out in response to ignorance (and, I choose words carefully - I do mean ‘ignorance’ as in willfully choosing to not know or understand something) on Yahoo Answers…
On the parenting board, if someone posts a question, they are opening themselves up to people answering it. Some of those answers might be, “I think you’re wrong”. And, that answer is almost always accused of being judgmental (in a puty ’stop judging me’ kind of way).
Sure, no one likes it when someone says that they are wrong.
But, if someone says you’re wrong, but you know that you aren’t, it truly shouldn’t bother you.
For example… Tell me all the reasons why you think I’m wrong for being vegetarian. Or for co-sleeping. Or for loving The Flaming Lips. Or for being agnostic.
I can take it. Because I’ve thought these things over. I’ve lived them. I know that they are right for me. I even believe that some of them would be right for everyone.
No big deal.
I also know how it feels to be judged *when I know I was wrong* or when I realized that I was wrong after hearing the judgement. Ouch. Big ouch. Defensive. Crying inside. Angry defensive on the outside.
My sister was in the hospital a few months back. She lives across the street from me & I was watching her kids & her dog. It added a layer of craziness to our house, but I thought I had it under control. I heard her older son say, a few times, “I just want to sleep in my own bed”, and I would acknowledge that, thinking he meant that he just wanted mom home & things back to normal & would talk to him about how the doctors were doing the best they could & she (and he) would be home soon. The kids were free to go back & forth, during the day, from house to house. And, at our house, they were sleeping in my kids beds (they were sleeping in bed with me)
Another sister, who does not live across the street but who, instead, lives about 10 minutes away (and has kids of her own, too), called me to say that she had been at the hospital visiting & hospitalized sister had asked her if she & her teen would take turns every night, driving to her house (which was across the street from me -and- I have a teen of my own) & sleeping on her sofa, so that her son could sleep in his own bed at night.
I felt judged. I felt hurt. I felt like people were thinking that I was callous & cold to her son. That I didn’t hear what he was really saying. That I didn’t care enough to inconvenience myself & my family to have *us* sleep on a sofa so that he could sleep in his own bed at night. Like he and my sister were both afraid to tell me what they were really feeling, like they didn’t think that I was doing enough.
And, underneath my defensive anger, I did feel bad that I didn’t hear him - really hear him. I feel bad that I didn’t even think to offer that to him. I would probably like it if someone offered that for my kids, after all, if I was in the hospital. I arranged for my teen to sleep over there for him. And, my other sister & her teen took a night, too.
Or, even more painful… Ask me how I felt last night, when I was flipping out, after we got home at 7:15p, after running errands & I hadn’t fed the kids yet (Jim had dinner started, but it still needed another 30 min & I wanted to make some bread, too) & we had new foster puppies that needed taking care of (and who were having a barking challenge with our family dogs while Jim was supposed to be sleeping) & I didn’t know when Allison was going to call to get a ride home from the party she was at… And, I got mad at the kids for not helping me, telling them how frustrated I was & how it just made it worse when they were making barking puppy noises & asking me for drinks & to put games on & not doing what I asked them to, when I asked them to… And, at one point, I saw Annie putting her fingers by her ears & walking away from me with a sad, guilty look on her face.
Ouch. Big huge ouch.
She judged me without even trying. And, it was a good thing. Her judgement was the natural consequence of my bad choice, my inability to see that I needed a break & needed to put things in perspective.
I stopped. I said sorry. I hugged her. And Shelby. I said sorry to the dogs. I took a deep breath. We made it through the night.
Judgement that makes you feel bad is something that you should stop and listen to.
Jim posted this on his board last night…
“Subject: My kids aren’t all uptight about societal mores
Post: My 8 year just got back from swimming - after he took off his suit he decided he need to go outside to catch a bug he had seen - I had to say “dude, don’t go outside naked” he said “oh yeah” and went to get clothes.”
Ok, well, not exactly, but…
Long story & I’ll try to summarize the main points here…
He’s in 2nd grade. Last day is technically Monday, but that’s only a 15 minute day, so, in all actuality, it is today.
In the fall, at parent teacher conferences, his teacher told me that he was not a ’self-starter’, but he was (and continued to be) doing fine academically & behaviorally, otherwise. I kind of figured that it was an awesome thing that his teacher had figured that out about him and that, as a professional educator, she’d take that knowledge of his personality & use it when teaching him.
Instead, near the end of January, after hearing *nothing else* from her, her student teacher or his other teacher (teacher he went to for the advanced reading group) in the intervening time, she calls me to tell me that he’s inattentive, not staying on task, not completing his work in class -and- that this has been going on all year. Apparently, with no intervention on their part at all.
Various phone calls & emails started at this point. In most of them, in addition to talking about the inattentive, not staying on task & not completing work, the teachers *also* threw in little comments about how they thought he was ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’ - asking if he had any friends (he does - one even arranged with the teacher to bring juice to keep in her room so that he could sit with milk-allergic shelby at lunch); talking about his playing alone on the playground (maybe his friend wasn’t there that day); telling me how once, while the other kids were taking off their coats, he stood back from them, with his coat over his face & hit himself on the head (he later told me that he was not comfortable pushing his way through the crowd of kids at the coat hooks & would rather wait until he had more space around him). Just all kinds of ‘that kid is weird’ allusions without really coming out & saying it.
It all culminated with a ‘PPS Meeting’ *months* later (and, in the mean time, apparently, no changes to their daily classroom patterns in order to accommodate a student who they are clearly not motivating). At the meeting they, again, told us the same things that they had told us months ago. The only difference was that we were face to face, now & there was a school psychologist present. During that meeting, they often said how he was ‘not normal’, not falling within developmental norms. The most obvious indicator that they could show us was the results of his ‘math facts’ testing.
Math Facts are addition & subtraction problems. 100 of them, on a sheet. The kids are sat down with the test & a timer is set. I’m still not clear on the time limit - sometimes when we’d talk to her about it, she would say 3 minutes, sometimes she would say 5 minutes. (And, ironically enough, during the PPS meeting, she made a point of saying that she didn’t understand how Shelby would have a problem following her verbal instructions because she is naturally an organized person… But, the 3 min/5 min thing was not the only time during the school year when she got things wrong, contradicted herself, sent home instructions that were unclear even for an adult to understand, sent home work with no instruction at all, etc… but, anyway…)
The kids are expected to complete, correctly, all 100 math problems in that time limit. They just keep repeating the test until they get it right. I totally understand the idea behind it. The kids need to practice doing simple math quickly so that, when more complicated concepts are being presented later, they won’t be slowed down figuring out 3+5.
Shelby, on the other hand, wants to take his time & make sure the work is right. It’s not slowing him down immensely, it’s just being careful. And, we didn’t really care if he was fast. We wanted him to be proud of his work.
But, at the PPS meeting, they showed how he still hadn’t completed the addition facts test in the allotted time limit & told how all of the children were required to complete both addition & subtraction facts in the allotted time limit or they would get a ‘3′ (not meeting expectations) on their report card at the end of they year. Whatever. I don’t really care if he gets all 3’s, as long as he’s learning & being polite. He was, by the way. In addition to being in the high reading group, he was also in the high math group - working on understanding multiplication & division concepts - just not doing adding & subtracting fast. And, he never got a ‘red mark’ (her system of behavior control) during the entire school year - always earned lots of ’store dollars’ (another layer of her behavior control system) every week.
Anyway, the PPS meeting came & went. He, apparently, met with the school psychologist, but we never heard back again from either the psychologist or the teacher regarding any of this. At all. Nothing. Not a word.
Sometime in April, Shelby finally completed the addition Math Facts test in the allotted time period. Hooray! He then moved on to the subtraction Math Facts test. But, kept bringing them home at 70%, 80%, occasionally something in the 90% range.
Yesterday - two days before the end of the school year, he brought it home complete - 100% finished & all of them right. He told me that, when he knew it was his last chance to take the test before the end of the school year & that he knew he’d get a ‘3′ if he didn’t finish it, he knew that he had to get it all done this time. So, he tried a new way of doing it (I didn’t remind him that this is what dad & I had been telling him to do all along). He was just going to concentrate on doing them fast & not worry about whether they were right or wrong. And, he did & he finished it. Just as he could have all along, he just didn’t care enough to do it then.
To me, even though I’m sure it was not intended on his part, it feels like a great big ‘Fuck You’ to his teacher. Kind of like he could have done it all along, just didn’t see the point in getting all worked up about it until it actually mattered *to him*. It’s a sarcastic, “Yeah, two digit subtraction, that was *really* hard” *eyeroll* “Did you see how fast I did that? Did it make you all excited inside?” :-p
Ahhh, I can’t wait til next year. I hope he has a teacher who actually gets excited teaching a kid who loves to learn - not just someone who’s going through her checklist, making sure each kid passes all of the tests they’re supposed to pass & fills out all of the appropriate worksheets each day.
