in which i apologize for not blogging and then likely not blog again for months

i think the last post i maybe talked about bea's brain (i could go look, but, meh).  so we're a few months into Experiment Medication and i'm not sure it is making much of a difference.  it seemed like it was at first - bea was calm and she was able to focus and do chores but lately..she doesn't smile anymore.  she freaks out and hides if i talk about her.  she hides in the bathroom for 20 minutes reading a book  she leaves a trail of forgotten crafts.  i bought her some beads after she successfully made a few bracelets at summer camp.  i figured she was finally able to concentrate enough...i came home to find the bucket of 5,500 beads on the floor and bea no where in sight.  no bracelet was made.  no explanation given.  'oh yeah...no, i don't want to make anything.'  at school the reports aren't much better.  she spends too much time reading instead of working.  she's gone to the nurse and been sent home twice for pretty thinly legitimate reasons.  she's lost her water bottle (first day) and her homework folder (4th day).  i've tried to talk to her teacher and the principal but no one seems willing to follow through.  i get a lot of hopeful 'we will get on this!' but days turn into weeks and now months and nothing.  not a phone call, not an email, not even an acknowledgement of previous conversation.

remember my kid?  the one with the issues and the stuff and the 'please help'?

nope.

i don't know what to do without being labeled the crazy mom.  let's be honest - i am only now shedding the reputation as the crazy mom and i am not looking forward to being her again.  but who else?  who else will advocate for my kid?  i am afraid that she is not going to get the curriculum she needs because she won't complete the assessment correctly.  she won't be given time or accommodations and she'll be stuck with work that is beneath her and that she will inevitably hate and not complete.  thus completing the cycle of failure.  but maybe she won't.  maybe i'm being all DOOM DOOM DOOM when it is unfounded.  but i want her to succeed.  i want her to excel in school.

 i want her to be happy and i don't think she is happy.  she doesn't talk about school in an excited way.  school is the chore that she isn't terribly fond of but sometimes she gets to go to the park and that's fun.  tomorrow is tomorrow.  we'll see how that goes.

i've got something in my pocket...it belongs across my face...

those lines seem sinister when taken out of context.

anyway today wasn't very excited or insightful.  we woke up late for school and both kids were cranky and uncooperative and just generally crappy all morning.  bea's been taking stanford testing all week so i want to make sure she has a good night's sleep and a good breakfast...i'm lucky she got to school with shoes on.  she keeps getting lost in books.  specially, three books that she reads over and over and over and over again.  it feels weird to fuss at her for reading but she gets so focused on it that she has trouble doing anything else.  she will just stand there and read.  there can be activity all around but she's just...standing there and reading.  i don't know how to balance read=good with read=good sometimes and bad others.

at home i tried to get her to do homework which she did and did quite well.  she wanted to write a book which usually entails folding a hundred pieces of paper into book form, writing one page and abandoning forever.  after page one she got up to go play and i told her that she needed to finish.  i removed most of the pages and left her with a total of 7 back to back and told her to just manage those.  she wrote a great book with a few pages of a story and then illustrations.  it took a few reminders to stay on task but what she finished was finished.  she was proud of it and brought it to girl scouts to show her friends and i think she is starting to maybe find of sort possibly grasp the benefits of completing a task  maybe. 

otherwise we went to girl scouts where bea is decidedly NOT the shy thing who started the year but is the sort of obnoxious, loud, farts-are-funny girl.  she has a hard time staying on task but right now i'm choosing to celebrate the victory of her overcoming shyness to worry about fixing the behavior.  she wouldn't talk the first few meetings.  she would just sit in a corner and cry and i spend every meeting wondering what about this experience was drawing her back for more.  i'm glad we stuck with it and it is nice for bea to have a group of girls who are more or less forced to be friends with her. she has 12 girls that are bound by a code of scouty ethics to be nice to one another.  also i get to talk to other moms and bitch about our children and compare tattoos.  it isn't a bad life.

i haven't heard back from the special ed coordinator but i've asked bea about her tests and she reports that she finishes them, that she doesn't leave her seat without permission, and that she doesn't feel distracted.  so.  that. 

i leave you with excerts from today's novel: Angel the Squirrel.  I can't turn the images because i am lazy.  enjoy.

gimme an A...gimme an D...gimme and H...gimme another D

and what does that spell?  failure. failure to provide my daughter with the set of genes NOT predisposed to mental illness. 

a few months ago, at the urging of her pediatrican and teacher, i scheduled neuropsych testing for beatrice.  her doctor expected to see adhd at a minimum, i expected to see nothing except gifted and talented indicators, and her teacher probably expected to see unicorns because the man is insane and quite possibly legitimately mentally disabled. anyway i didn't really think anything would show up.  maybe some notes about beatrice being headstrong or cleverly manipulative but i wasn't prepared to hear was low processing speed. low learning ability. low visual -motor coordination. low cognitive flexibility. average general intellectual ability.  IQ - average. 

average.  low.  i know that i should be thankful that she has even that and a million other 'could be worse' scenarios but this isn't another scenario.  this is mine.  this is mine and mine to burden and mine to mourn. 

her full diagnosis is: adhd, mixed inattentive and hyperactive types; depression; anxiety with related somatic symptomatology.

i feel like things were just getting better.  bea had a ballet recital on saturday.  she danced on stage without a flutter of stage fright that anyone could see but me, but only because i know the way her eyes start to dart around the room and widen.  the way she sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and furrows her brow.  but it was all in an instant and quickly forgotten by the immediate tasks of tap tap twirl jump twirl point point turn.  she left the stage proud of herself.  she left the stage having had fun.  and she left the stage not once considering that there should ever be any other to be than confident in front of others.

today she had swim lessons.  this is our third month and bea has gotten nowhere.  she can't focus long enough to accomplish anything and we switched instructors and...she swims.  she's learning the strokes and can do them in a close enough approximation of correctness that i knew she was doing the breaststroke from 25 yards away.  she listened and she focused and she saw what she could accomplish. 

we work every day on finishing what we start.  its an uphill and losing battle because we're all bad at it but i'm trying.  i'm trying to fix this thing that my body broke.  this thing that i don't want to be a thing.  this thing that i want to be a footnote in bea's life.  like 'oh, yeah - i have adhd and that's why my room is so clean and organized' not 'and that's why i take medication and can't cry an

ymore/sleep all day/hate you'.  i'm going to try and i'm going to try to fill in the gaps of her learning.  i can schedule her summer to include play play pool play play nap learn play learn pool.  if she is average, she can be average but i know she isn't.  any kid who writes letter in japanese - completely wrong, not even close to an actual japanese word - deserves some recognition.  she is creative.  she is boundless.  she has no idea yet that she is anything less than perfect and unfettered.  the whole is hers and i want to keep that moment there as long as i can.  and if i can't...i guess medication. 

but here i'll track my efforts and my successes and my failures and my fun.  today was a success.  we had a swim lesson, i taught bea how to cook eggs, pancakes, and sausages.  the full deal (though on the griddle).  she stirred and whipped and poured and burned and i have never seen a more unappealing meal in my life but it tasted great and she did it all by herself.  she likes the respsonsibility and i like giving it to her.

adding photos does not seem to be working now so, um, here are some words that are not as cute as photos but are lovely anyway.

locomtion

this weekend was a study in movement.  specifically, the ability to move from one place to another in the most dangerous manner possible.

bea perfected riding a bike without training wheels, while hardie perfecting falling over on his bike and bleeding. with training wheels.

bike rider

bike faller

after such a successful run outside, the kids practiced their roller skating and roller hitting-with-a-baseball-bat.

they did this for 100 laps around the house.  i counted.

next week, we conquer flying.

in which has a dream and invades hardie's privacy

before leaving for the field trip, i did get to spend a few minutes in bea's class during which time i checked out her last few journal entries.

'I had a dream that my father and me found a door and my brother went to the bathroom and there was no door so I saw him'

every morning when i wake the kids, i ask them three questions: did you sleep well?  did you dream well?  what did you dream?  the last one is because i am totally fascinated with what their little minds process during the night and just what a child dreams about anyway.  usually i don't get an answer and if i ever do its a short, one-word description - you, superheroes, lunch - so my search for insight is largely fruitless.  UNTIL i found this journal entry.  now i know - bea dreams about accidentally seeing hardie on the can. 

'Last night my mom's sink was broken so I had a plan that I should hold [no idea] and my mom should go faster then the pipe broke so my mom [again, what the hell?] the best and fix it and that also was my dream.  MLK had a dream that people should be treated equally no matter what color their skin is.'

i appreciate that bea chooses to segue between my mad plumbing skills and the vision of martin luther king, jr

the sound of one hand high-fiving

clearly we haven't done much better in our quest for organization and/or time to complete basic tasks like blogging or, um, showering.  yesterday was my last day at my former job so i took the opportunity today to spend the day with bea at school.  i meant it to be an opportunity to watch her work and learn more about how her day is structured in hopes of helping her be more successful in school.  in reality, i managed to get suckered in to chaperoning a field trip to a park in humble, texas.  the park was pretty neat - it featured a 19th fully functioning (and staffed with kids in period costumes) settlement.  we got to see black smithing, and fabric weaving and then a weird musical...performance?  i also took several of bea's friends around the woods on a hunt for geocaches.  the first one we found was a pretty big box with a ton of random gifts inside.  the fact that i led these girls to actual buried treasure?  they loved me.  i spent a lot of time fighting off various kids who just wanted to hold my hand and be a part of my awesome.  i'll go ahead and ride this high for as long as i can remember that i did something cool.  probably i will forget by tomorrow morning.

on the bus, eating flowers

soon, these children will worship me

seriously, i was like a god to these girls

settlers cooking 'hoe' bread.  heh heh.  hoe.

in unrelated news, hardie is a pirate

there and back again

the holidays have ended and life is slowly returning to normal.  slowly.  so very, very slowly.  it is taking some adjustment to get back into any semblance of a routine and so far our sacrifices have been primarily in the subjects of food and hygiene.  since i am far too tired to do much of anything else, i give you: January, in photos.

bea is a baller

and really really REALLY likes icing now

hardie made this face

bea painted mickey mouse

the kids cheered me on during the houston marathon

bea read nabokov

hardie also painted mickey mouse

bea ate spaghetti

bea waited

hardie ate spaghetti

that about sums it up.