Why I married him

OK it wasn't EXACTLY this self-centered (but partly!) ...
Tonight I discovered that the reason I couldn't find my phone earlier this afternoon was that it wasn't anywhere in the house, or car, or stroller. All evidence pointed to the fact that I had somehow lost it at the park this morning (yes, another school-at-the-park day). I shared this info with Tim (why can't I react as calmly and amiably to Ian's absent-mindedness as Tim does to mine?) and then returned to my computer, where I sat feeling rather anxious over my, oh, fourth lost item of the month, and wondering how early I would need to get up tomorrow morning to go find it before leaving fr our morning fieldtrip. Well, guess who emerges a few minutes later with reflective vest and headlamp, ready to sally forth into the dark deeps? Sure enough, not 15 minutes later he returns, phone in hand. He had called it from his phone while walking to and through the park, listening and watching for the blinking screen to shine as a beacon in the dark, and and rescued it from peril on the steep hillside where I had been manhandling the stroller about 10 hours ago. What a guy! :-)
(Incidentally, I am reading a most enlightening book now called A Mind at a Time, and according to Dr. Mel Levine I'm not absent-minded; my brain has trouble with spatial ordering. Which is basically the exact opposite of Tim's brain. So there we go.)

Reading Aloud

On a totally different note from yesterday's post, I wanted to share this neat thing that happened very spontaneously at the park yesterday morning. I was reading aloud to the kids from D'Aulaire's Leif the Lucky while pushing the two girls on the swings (Ian can finally pump on his own now). I realized that the grown woman sitting on the fourth swing, smiling to herself and swinging very softly back and forth, was blind. And since I had to read loudly enough for the two older kids, who were both swinging, to hear, the woman could doubtless hear too. I found myself hoping she was enjoying the story too. :-)

Off to pack up the car for a weekend at the Texas coast! Looking forward to relaxing a bit, I hope ...

The test results

Well, I don't have so much time right now so will have to continue this later, but I know some of you have been wondering about the testing results, so I'll give a brief summary here and then try to elaborate later.
We met with the psychologist this morning, finally -- the appt. had been rescheduled a couple times. She had obviously put a lot of time into compiling and interpreting the results for us. After her initial description of how Ian handled the testing, she made the observation that she does believe he "qualifies" (for lack of a better word) as gifted. In fact, she noted when presenting the various components of his IQ test that she has never had a child score as high as he did on the Verbal Comprehension scale. Not surprising, if you know Ian. He also was sort of "off the charts" on the Rorschach test in terms of creativity and imaginativeness. And he scored very well on the Visual Perception of the IQ test.
So, that was the good news.
The more difficult news was that both the subjective observations and her objective ratings pointed to a clearcut clinical diagnosis of ADHD, with possible Sensory Integration Dysfunction to boot (I know Jenny may be the only person reading this who understands what all this stuff is, but anyway). He also just scored average on the Working Memory and Processing Speed portion of the IQ test (both of which have to do with attention and focus), which incidentally affected his composite IQ score -- not that that matters much, but still interesting. I guess none of it was really a surprise at all, but still, I'm kind of reeling.
It does sort of explain why people who meet Ian usually think two things: 1) Wow, he's very bright (because of the high Verbal ability) and 2) Boy, kind of a handful! (Although most people are too polite to say that out loud. :-))
She had some recommendations, from a social skills training group to parent training group to discussion of meds with his dr. (low on our list) to .... here's the biggie ... school. Believe or no, kids with ADHD tend to do best in highly structured environments (kind of counterintuitive, no?), and she recognized that not only can that be hard to provide at home but also it can stress the parent/child relationship to have to provide that level of structure while homeschooling (yup). So, she recommended that we at least consider private or public school.
I went to the interview feeling that I should go with an open mind, not closed to anything and yet not taking anything as gospel either. I still feel that way. I am not ready to make any changes without a LOT of prayer and discussion with Tim, but I also realize that I shouldn't reject the idea of change out of hand.
A verse from Proverbs keeps coming back to me in these days, about trusting in the Lord with all my might, and not leaning on my own understanding, but acknowledging Him in all our ways so He can direct our paths.

Nothing wrong upstairs

That Caroline. She's a toddler with Big Plans, as was obvious today. Here's her latest: I was getting ready to go tutor for an hour, and Tim and I had a brief conversation about my sister, Kristen, picking up Ian from his taekwondo class to bring him home (we only have one car). Next thing we know, Caroline has Tim by the hand: "Daddy, I want you take out my carseat." Not quite following her but feeling obliging, Tim removed her carseat from my van before I pulled out of the driveway. Now, background: yesterday Kristen came to watch the kids while I was working in the afternoon (my regular tutoring time). Caroline, as usual, clamored to go for a ride in Aunt Kristen's car, but alas, her carseat was with me in the van and therefore she was denied the coveted ride. So today, when Kristen showed up with Ian, guess who was waiting for her, fully equipped with carseat in hand? You got it! They decided to reward her resourcefulness and Caroline got to have her very own playdate at Aunt Kristen's house for nearly two hours! Another friend who was coming for dinner picked her up and brought her home. Quite the independent little socialite, at 22 mos. already! We may need to get her a Daytimer to keep all these plans organized soon. :-)

Freeze the Moment

I just passed the sliding glass door that opens onto our back patio and then the yard, and witnessed what appeared to be an idyllic moment ... all three kids, digging away in the sandbox under our huge oak tree. Now, granted, had I been up close and able to hear the conversation, there's a possibility the moment wouldn't seem so idyllic, but I choose optimism in this case -- and distance. Ignorance is bliss, right? It was one of those moments I wished I could have stuffed in a bottle and preserved, just so, for playback when they're teenagers, or off to college, or just, you know, being not-so-idyllic. :-)

Yesterday was a red-letter day for Ian -- he earned his first stripe on his tae kwon do belt, for doing some particularly challenging activity in class. For the belts, and the stripes, the teacher (a woman, interestingly enough) emphasizes character development just as much as athletic skills, which I'm all for. He was *very* excited, which should provide some momentum for moving forward. Yea! Incidentally, while watching him outside the door of the class, I had the interesting experience of meeting the mayor. Yup, the mayor of Austin -- a very nice man named Will Wynn whose daughter, unbeknownst to me, is one of Ian's classmates (and this is a pretty low-profile place, mind you, so I didn't exactly expect to find that the dad I was chatting with was the mayor!). He told me that she wants to be a Jedi knight and if she gets all her homework done at night, they battle with light sabers. OK, I'll vote you for next time around! :-) I happened to know that he was one of the people whom Al Gore trained to give his very cool, pardon the pun, Inconvenient Truth slideshow, so I asked him about it and we had a chat about how fascinating that whole subject is. He goes around to various companies and organizations in Austin giving the show during lunch hour. He also informed me, with good humor, that the newspaper is coming out with a story about how he's doing this lecture instead of doing his job as mayor (which I doubt) ... I guess being in politics gives you pretty thick skin.

Rollercoaster

The thing about blogging is, there's a certain inertia to overcome once you've been away from it for a few days. In other words, the longer you procrastinate writing things down, the less appealing it seems to do at night when you (yawn) just want to veg.
So there's my excuse.
But, there's also the fact that it's so much easier to write about smooth, pleasant days than it is to describe those when you spend much of the time fighting tears, sometimes unsuccessfully, because there are things than just can't be described in a paragraph or two. And today was the first smooth, pleasant day I could write about, the first day of the past several that I haven't found it necessary to attempt escaping from my kids so I could just sob alone in the bathroom -- just for two minutes, people, two minutes! OK, one minute! :-)
Don't get me wrong, it's not all doom and gloom here in the nest, but I seem to be experiencing a confluence of stressful life situations -- they never quite come one at a time, do they? And when the prizes are given out for grace under fire, I won't be in the running, that's for sure.
Rather than go into the nitty-gritty about every one of those life situations, I'll just recap a bit of yesterday morning. At 10:15 a.m., we're out in the backyard, chores and "morning lists" successfully accomplished with a minimum of nagging on my part. We spread out the blanket for chapter of Family Under the Bridge, which is Caroline's signal to nurse (I've concluded that she simply won't ever wean as long as I read aloud to the other kids). But I can deal with that, because it keeps her quiet and happy, and it's pleasant in the shade, and Ian and Eliza are listening with a decent degree of attention. After that, we do some spelling and letterhunting for Ian and Eliza, respectively, on the patio with sidewalk chalk. I feel generally good about how things are going.
Except for the fact that Ian is obsessing about the Calvin and Hobbes book that he left at Oscar's house next door, and feels compelled to run over there every five minutes to see whether anyone's come home or left it out on the doorstep for him (I forgot to use Anne's technique of having him visualize locking those thoughts in a room for a few hours). I let him do his independent reading in the treefort Tim is building, but still, he only makes it through half a chapter before disappearing next door for a good 5-10 minutes (not sure why it takes that long to check a doorstep). The relative calm in my soul begins to ooze away and Mean Mom arrives to take me hostage, puppeting herself through my mouth with gems like, "It's taken NINETY MINUTES for you to get thirty minutes of work done this morning. I was HOPING to get a couple errands done before lunch, but how am I going to get that done?" Introducing the crotchety second grade teacher, here to sap any ounce of joy out of the learning experience! On top of that, I spend maybe ten maybe more, hauling out paints, water, brushes, and butcher paper for the girls to work on the patio, and they spend maybe ten minutes actually using the paints before losing interest and finding a way to smear some of it on my clothes. Then, my sister calls to discuss, nicely, a little "oops" I had made during a family discussion online and to apologize for not communicating better, but the conversation sort of escalates and next thing I know I'm melting into a puddle of tears behind my bedroom door while Caroline bangs on the other side. For the rest of the day, I feel like I'm constantly on edge, either trying not to cry or feeling helpless as Mean Mom hijacks my voice, if you know what I mean. If Mom sets the tone for the home, then life at our house yesterday was definitely being played in a minor key.
The reality is, stress compounds everything, and kids just don't put their needs on hold when you're preoccupied with trying to care for other people, so things like the paint and the Calvin and Hobbes book and everything else, even the phone call, should not have been that big a deal, but all rolled into one, they were. I told the Lord that I seem to have a long way to go before I really know what it means to roll ALL my burdens on Him.
So today seemed like a gift of grace from Him. My father-in-law had breakfast with us and read to Eliza for a while before leaving for work. Then a good friend came and picked up Caroline for the morning as she was hosting a playgroup at her house. That gave us two hours for the three of us to sit in the treefort and read (St. George and the Dragon, which they LOVED, and more F.U.T.B.) and play a good long round of a math game (Ian announced yesterday that he didn't really like math, so I'm trying to mix it up a bit and back off on the "boring workbook"). As much as I adore Caroline, the experience of being able to truly focus, to sit in one place for an hour or more and exchange full attention with the older two, felt priceless. Tomorrow may be rough again, and today wasn't perfect, of course. But it felt like a gift, and I'm going to savor it.

To Boston and Back

So last week I let it slip about my frustrating childhood habit of losing track of things, and how I see it popping right back up in the gene pool. Well, guess what? I'm not over it yet! On the flight to Boston last week, I apparently lost my iPod, which is very sad since it's not like I'm going to rush out and buy a new one (it came free with Tim's laptop last year). I had loaded the first ten chapters of Our Island Story onto it for Ian to listen to on the flight, and sure enough, just as I suspected it would one day, the compactness of the thing did me in -- it must have slid to the floor as we prepared to land. No luck in the JetBlue lost and found either, and no emails from any Good Samaritans who have discovered it and noted the contact info engraved on the back (my husband knows me well). On top of that, yesterday I lost my debit card at Central Market, and I left my camera in my mom's car when she dropped us off at the airport! YIKES!

But on a happier note, the trip went very well and we enjoyed the time spent with my parents. For anyone who doesn't know, my dad was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in April 2002, and has thus already outlived over 75% of patients thus afflicted. He gets around in a power wheelchair fulltime now, and breathes with a BiPAP during daily naps and nighttime. Despite the grim inevitability of the future, we just feel so grateful to have had the extra time, and to be able to snatch a long weekend every couple of months to get together with him and my mom. This trip brought up some important discussions about caring for them as the burdens grow greater in the next few months. It wasn't all serious talk, though. We also took walks to the nearby Animal Rescue League (where the kids ended up in a photo shoot with a Great Pyrenees for an upcoming charity gala, LOL), stopped for ice cream at the same place we always went when my siblings and I were wee ones, and explored the incredibly bucolic Walden Pond (The highlight of this famous landmark for my kids? Not the groovy Thoreau vibes, not the chance to splash around in their clothes, but watching a horse urinate in its paddock. Yup. Caroline says to me approximately twenty times a day, "Know what, Mom? "What, Caroline?" "I saw horsie go pee on ground!" Sigh ... even at 22 months, it starts so young.)

I hope we were able to be helpful, or at least minimally burdensome, and at the same time, it seemed like an abrupt change of scenery for a few days helped get me out of the rut of anxiety I seemed to be spinning my wheels in beforehand about our homeschooling (can't elaborate now). In the meantime, I've been inspired from recent reading to spend more time, as much as possible, outdoors with the children, and to present to them a feast of ideas rather than a litany of facts. I often wonder how we're doing with respect to that W.B. Yeats quote about education being not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.

And so I'll end with a brief note of what seems to be stoking the fires this week. We've all been hooked on Jim Weiss' Arabian Nights -- sometimes we sit in the driveway with the car on to hear the end of a story, and I actually listened ahead last night on my way to my support group meeting (don't tell the kids!). Books we're reading and enjoying: Shadow Spinner (Ian and I), The Family Under the Bridge (all of us), and Shadrach (Ian alone).