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.

yesterday was my birthday and, while it started with a sputter, it ended with quite a bang.  to my ego.  i came home to a surprise 'party' hosted by the munchkins, complete with balloons and cake and handmade signs wishing me the happiest of birthdays.  my spirits however the constant chanting of  'YOU'RE 36!  YOU'RE 36!' certainly did not allow any escape of my disappointment in my inevitable aging.  the party abruptly ended after beatrice, upon poking my chest, announcing 'YOUR BOOBIES ARE MORE SQUISHY!'

we spent the rest of the evening in quiet reflection, eating icing from the jar and generally contemplating age.  ok, the kids played wii and i sulked on the coach.  at least i can say that my birthday present was the knowledge that my children are both thoughtful (they threw me a party!) and blissfully unaware of time.

meterologist

after months of being towel manager, chair manager, and office runner, hardie was finally given the best job in his class: meteorologist.  why is this job the single most awesome position?  because hearing a lipsy 4 year-old say the word meteorologist is probably the funniest freakin thing i've ever heard.  also the fact that his whole job is to stick his head out the door and announce to the class 'the weather today is ...' is also amusing.

mee-to-wol-a-giss says: the weather today is waining.

why i run

this weekend i ran the dallas marathon in, um, dallas.  at the expo (which is where you pick up your race number and then exit the gift shop of running gear), there was a both set up where you wrote down your answer to 'why i run' and then filmed a short video about it.  the videos were played on a loop at mile something or another to inspire runners as the passed and while i DID see the video on the course, i managed to catch about 2 seconds of footage and was not, in fact, inspired.  but i was glad at least to put down on paper the underlying motivation behind my endless running:

one day i hope they ARE proud or at least forgiving of my long sunday evening runs.

gooooooooooal. or bassssssssket. or scoooooooore.

yesterday was bea's very first basketball practice.  ever.  i decided to give it a try since she would always try to play at hardie's practices and - much like her dear old mother - prefers indoor, air-conditioned sports.  so far, bea has shown little more than a placating enjoyment of soccer, ballet, and running so i figured i'd keep trying things until she seemed excited or angrily rebelled.

basketball...success!

we got to the gym early and shot some hoops (see how hip i am to the lingo?), just the three of us.  i taught bea how to throw the ball and aim for the basket as best i could.  [disclaimer: i am terrible at basketball.  i made all of three, um, goals? baskets? last night and was pretty proud of myself until i realized that i was shooting at the basket that was lowered for small children.]  anyway she seemed to enjoy herself and i was glad that i'd decided to practice a little before practice, hoping that it would give her a confidence boost if she knew a little bit on how to play.  she was initially reluctant to join her practice since she is the only girl on the team but once she got past that (after about a minute) she played and laughed and ran and dribbled and made a basket on her first try (this feat would not be repeated).  she started to cry at one point at having been denied an opportunity to shoot but i steadfastly refused to comfort or even look at her.  i felt horrible but i want her to learn to control her emotions and not depend so much on me to be there to comfort her at every little perceived slight of the universe toward her gentle soul.  for the record, she doesn't have a gentle soul she has a keen sense of manipulation and knows that any time she so much as makes a whimper, i will run to her and hold her.  not that she isn't sensitive, but i'd say i'm dealing with 30% genuine sensitivity and 70% sneaky.  eventually she went to the coach - who very firmly but fairly did NOT tolerate her fit - and told him that she was upset at not having her turn to throw the ball.  it was a complete departure from the beatrice i know who refuses to open her mouth or confront her fears.  she was upset, she told the person who made her upset, he didn't budge and she went back to playing (and maybe still crying a little).  it sounds small, but this is a HUGE step for my once shy little munchkin.  at home, she took off her jersey and excitedly asked me to wash it so it would be ready for her game on saturday.  later i told her that i was proud of her and that she was gaining confidence.  then she asked what 'confidence' meant and i had an awkward time explaining this and we totally got off the subject and chatted about jewelry. 

hopefully the enthusiasm will continue throughout the week and hopefully someone else will explain what it means to be confident.

i couldn't get a shot of bea but here is spiderhardie playing
basketball with a mask.  and a volleyball.

gobble gobble hey

i'm not sure when, exactly, i started hating thanksgiving but at some point in my life i decided that spending an entire day shoveling food into my mouth shouldn't be considered a national holiday.  i can do that any day.  in fact, i do that most days and with a lot less ceremony.  since we don't have a lot (any) family here, i wanted to make a tradition for the kids that was meaningful or at least memorable so i signed us all up for the houston turkey trot and spent the morning running the streets of houston with thousands of other people not at home cooking.

the trot included 3 different races, each with different starting times.  there was exactly 1 hour and 30 minutes between the start of the 10k and the kids' run so i figured i could run the ~6.2 miles and make it to run with the kids.  my worst case scenario would have me finishing at just an over (leaving a whole 1/2 hour to get to the kids) but i ended up hitting a PR and finishing in 51:56.  clearly i need to put my kids at the finish line of every race.  the munchkins did very well in their races, both running MOST of the time.  hardie took a cone to the face and spent a minute or so howling in pain but got back down and finished.  i still don't know whether they actually enjoy running.  they are both so! excited! before the race and claim to have fun but seem grumpy before and just after.  admittedly, lining up for a race is terribly boring and finishing is a little anti-climatic so i guess i can't really blame them for not being super happy yay at those moments - i just wish i knew whether they honestly enjoying themselves or just placating me.  

my second attempt at creating a thanksgiving tradition was taking the kids to the houston uptown lighting...thing.  i had a vague notion of what this event was, fostered entirely by a flyer i got in my turkey trot race packet.  it seemed to be a ceremony wherein santa claus would arrive and magically light a twinkling winter wonderland of christmas decorations.  i envisioned blinking trains and animatronic elves and maybe even an ironic window display.  i pictured walking hand-in-hand with my babies, oooohing and awwwing while sipping hot chocolate and discussing what a fantastic new tradition this was and how lucky they were to have such a mother.

this is what the event ACTUALLY looked like.  tens of thousands of people milling about the street and waiting for...yeah, i never quite figured out what we were waiting for but i'm pretty sure it was the 10 minutes of (admittedly nice) fireworks that were half blocked by a building despite the three of us having fought our way through this crowd to get a 'good' spot.  the lights?  a series of trees aaaaaaaaaand that's it.  there were no elves, no trains, no irony.  just a couple dozen cone trees wrapped in white lights.  i am never trusting a flyer again.  we made the most of it and by 'most' i mean the most sugar.

sugar

more sugar

a picture is worth at least 2-3 words

since i clearly didn't learn my lesson with the color run, this weekend the kids participated in a 1K on the beach in Galveston.  they both seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves but i suspect this was due in no small part to the proximity of the water and the repeated promises of post-race donuts.  they both finished middle-of-the-pack and i like to think they get their competitive edge from me.  yay team average!

post-race, post-donut, post-winter-swim, we carbo-loaded because, um, we were hungry?  i like to justify over-eating by reminding everyone around me that i run a lot.  i'm pretty sure that i'd have to run a marathon every day to compensate for the dozen cookies i sometimes eat for breakfast but, meh, i'm happy.  and i love cookies.

i thought bea was trying to make a heart...
but she was making right/left with her fingers.
so much for that touching moment.

legit touching moment

the color of running

saturday marked what i expected to be the highlight of my ~7 years of parenting - the moment that my interests and my child's merged together in some magical cosmic swirl of happiness.  bea and i ran a 5k. 

sort of.

the race was the houston color run and the whole point of the run was to get splashed with dyed cornstarch while shuffling about the streets of downtown houston.  while the 'race' wasn't timed, there was at least a vague expectation of jogging between cornstarch throwing stations (each ~1k apart).  i can knock out a 5k in about 25-26 minutes on a good day.  it took us over an hour to reach the finish line.

bea was only able to run about a quarter of a mile before getting a stitch in her side and spent the remainder of the run apologizing to me.  it was pretty much the lowlight of my ~7 years of parenting.  i have become one of those overbearing mothers that eventually get featured on a tlc reality show berating their daughters for not excelling in something they (the daughter) clearly has no personal interest in.  bea hated running but i think she hated disappointing me even more.  we managed to cheer one another up after some hugging and crying on an overpass and played in the last cornstarch station, yellow.  i am presently googling child-friendly salons in houston for a mother/daughter manicure outing - i figure its only fair to do something that i don't like but would make the beazle happy. 

o beautiful for spacious skies

election day is here at last and the munchkins and i voted this morning (early voting is for non-ceremonial suckers).  it was a little nostalgic since hardie was just a few weeks old and bea a mere toddler when we voted in the 2008 election but that nostalgia quickly gave way to regret as i tried to wrangle too pop-tart-infused kids through the crowded polling place.  both kids kept trying to push buttons and run around and peek at what other people were doing and run around and sit on the floor and run around and run around and run around.  i managed to keep their attention long enough to have them vote on a local school bond issue and then the three of us pressed the big red 'cast ballot' button together.

yay democracy!

where oh where has my little blog gone

since robby's iraq visa has been stalled for weeks, i haven't had much need to update my little blog here.  doesn't make sense to document the kids' life for their dad when he is around, right?  thing is?  i miss it.  i miss being able to reflect on our lives and sometimes maybe have a poignant insight into...yeah, who am i kidding - i like posting pictures of my children.

i'm also having a bittersweet morning since last night i said goodbye to the last vestige of babyhood - hardie now sleeps in big boy panties.  i didn't attempt overnight potty training with either of my kids, figuring the financial cost of pull-ups to be less than the physical and emotional cost of waking up to take a sleeping baby to the bathroom so they don't wet the bed.  i figured i'd just let it go and eventually it would work itself out, hopefully before junior high.  with each, i waited until i could no longer remember a wet pull-up in the morning and just stopped bothering with them.  so last night, a Very Excited Hardie got to sleep in big boy panties.  while i'm super excited to save the cash and cabinet space by not requiring giant bags of disposable underpants, i kept help but look around and see nary a single baby item.  no diapers, no pacifiers, no bottles, no sippy cups, no tiny utensils, no tiny plates, no clothes with snaps, no alphabet blocks.  my kids watch cartoons with plots and brush their own hair and ride bikes without training wheels.  they lose teeth and tie shows and tell each other secrets.  they still come to me when they get hurt or want to be held but, mostly, i am slowly drifting away from the center of their universe. 

i applaud their independence but a part of my heart aches knowing that i will never again inhale the weird cheerios breath of my newborn baby.  i guess i'll have to make due with awkwardly sticking my nose into babies who do not belong to me.  i apologize in advance, present and future new mothers.  

big boy with flashlight

Hiatus

Since I keep this primarily for the benefit of Robby while he's overseas, I am taking a brief hiatus while he is in the states and I am stuck in Fort Worth for work.

Be back next week.

world 8

in an effort to break the kids of their wii habit, i try to keep them out of the house as much as possible.  sure - it would be easier to just stand my ground and NOT allow them to play while we're home but there is only so much screaming and thrashing one human being can take before caving.  thankfully, the kids have made it through 8 of the 9 worlds in mario.  my fingers are crossed that they save the damn princess within the next week and slowly lose interest.  hopefully.

since i like to prove that my kids' intellect is not rapidly deteriorating with every bleep and bloop of video games, i try to squeeze in actual knowledge around the mundane tasks of life.  over dinner, i tried to explain halves and fourths using our food.  i'm pretty sure the take-away from this lesson is that one half of spinach equals zero because hardie doesn't like yucky stuff.  otherwise, i am pleased to announced that bea has mastered the four cardinal directions.  while taking a bath, she made a pirate ship, complete with compass, and then explained which direction each pirate's sword was facing.  i tried to explain fractions using spinach and tilapia, bea explains north and south using weapons.  clearly we are never ever ever going to make it in regular school. 

freebirds etiquette lesson

a lesson in itchy foilage

counting black beans

the arts: literature and fashion

weekend wrap-up, now with more napping

this weekend was both busy and profoundly lazy.  saturday was the last bout of the derby season (yay) and the kids came with me to see the game.

i'd like to say that this was the end of the night, but this is pretty much what the kids did while i skated.  after the game bea woke up enough to congratulate me on my win but went right back to sleep.  i don't think hardie woke up at all.  they are so supportive, those tiny people.

no one was interested in church sunday morning.  no one.

but things got a little rosier at breakfast. 

i'd like to say that we spent the balance of sunday being active and not watching tv or playing wii but i would also like to say that i don't lie so, um, yeah.  in an effort to not feel completely useless, we did have two really bad science lesson.  the first was dissecting a wasp's nest and the second was popping popcorn.  in both instances i was learned that, for the most part, i am science dumb.  i also learned that writhing wasp pupae are universally creepy.  next week i will either look up actual information before exposing my kids to 'um, yeah...the popcorn...gets...hot? and then explodes.  it makes a cool noise.'