The Po Show

Getting the Ball Rolling

So I have written a letter to our school district's Special Education Committee (actually, they are a SUBcommittee; I'm not sure under which committee they are subsumed), requesting a program review for Matthew. It's the first step in trying to get him into the gifted special ed. class they have in Irvington, about 10 miles away.

I had had a bunch of incorrect assumptions about how to go about this. I had assumed the program was part of the Irvington school district, so I thought if we moved there, we could get him in. Then I found out that it's a county program, administered by the Board of Cooperative Educational Services for southern Westchester. Kids need to be referred by their own school districts, after it's determined that they can not be adequately served by "regular" special ed. or by inclusion classes. I have the distinct feeling that it's going to be harder than hell to get our district to classify Matthew for this class. They can hide behind the notion that they are mandated to keep kids in the "least restrictive environment" possible (oooh, Ross HATES that phrase, which he says doesn't mean anything, which I guess it really doesn't), but they are gatekeepers of very expensive resources, so I understand the hesitation.

What I'd like to tell them is, if they classify Matthew for this class, they won't have to worry about paying for him anymore, since we'll move. There's no way Matthew could tolerate a 40 minute bus ride every morning, so we'd have to move there. I know that shouldn't change how the district proceeds, but I wonder if it would, if they knew that the Irvington school district would be footing the bill. Of course, if we did move, then we'd have to go through the whole process of having him classified as eligible for the program again by the new school district, but I'm guessing (hoping) that they would honor the determination of the previous school district, like how new districts have to honor your IEP when you show up, at least until they can assess your kid on their own.

I hate this, you know I hate conflict and I think this might become a fight. But I suppose I should feel fortunate that it's a possibility at all. There aren't many of these gifted special ed. programs, so I should be grateful that there's one nearby. This special ed. is pretty special (I can just hear Dana Carvey as the Church Lady on SNL saying "Welll, isn't that special?"). I was reading a description of the elementary class and OMG, all the kids sound just like Matthew! All quirky, spectrum-y kids who are really smart but can't write.

So here we go. Our special ed. subcommittee has to give us a program review, though they'll probably try to combine it with his annual review that should be in March or April, though it hasn't been scheduled yet. That's fine. We have a lot of authorities on our side: his therapist, his psychiatrist, and the school psychologist. I talked to her yesterday and asked if she thought that this class would be a good environment for Matthew. She sounded all choked up, and said she was conflicted about it. She said on the one hand, she has this fantasy about him graduating from our school. She's worked SO hard with him, lavished so much time and attention on him, dedicated so much to helping him.

And she totally loves him. She said he's her favorite, of all the students she works with. It never ceases to amaze me, how all his life Matthew has managed to become a favorite when he's such a pain in the ass. It's happened ever since he was 2 years old and in daycare. So the school psych. said she knows that she's also his advocate, that she has to do what is best for him, and she does think that he needs a different type of environment. She says that she's been very concerned about what happens to him next year (I think the 5th grade inclusion teacher is not the greatest fit for Matthew, as his 3rd grade teacher definitely was not), and she's really worried about middle school. So I think she'll really be on board for getting him in the gifted special ed. class.

They are called "twice exceptional" or "twice special," these kids who are so bright, but do lousy in regular education classes. That's my exceptional, special, frustrating, frustrated boy.

Flash Cards

Tessa came home with the following flash card words today:

astonished
spectacles
slavery
debate
refused
elected

And she could read and spell them all! She is six years old and in FIRST GRADE.

Color me astonished! :D

Snow

After months of bitching that we hadn't gotten any real snow this winter, after jealousy over the snowstorms of others, after ranting that it was cold as hell (isn't that a funny expression?), but when we actually got precipitation it always turned to rain, after complaining that they got more snow in southern CA than we did here, we got some real snow on Friday. It was that lovely fluffy snow that covers everything so magically, and turns the world into a winter wonderland (as opposed to a grey, depressing, seemingly endless monotony of cold). Tessa and I played in the snow for a long time, in the morning and again in the afternoon, while Matthew stayed inside and didn't want to come out (still the CA boy who despises to be cold). We made snowbunnies (a daddy, a mommy, and a baby snowbunny), with adorable little pine needle whiskers.

We went sledding on Saturday, which was really fun. It started out a little rough when Tessa kept hitting ice patches and tumbling off her sled and hitting various body parts on the ice. But then we moved from the big, slightly scary hill and over to a much smaller hill that hadn't been beaten down by previous sledders, and things went swimmingly. Matthew got too cold after about half an hour of sledding, but at least he had fun during that time. After all her complaining, Tessa complained even more bitterly as we were leaving and she wanted to come back after lunch.

We got home and she wanted to keep playing, so I stayed outside with her as Ross and Matthew went in. It started to snow shower again, and she sat in the snow and made snowballs. Man, she is so funny. She sat there and outlined this incredibly intricate set of rules for the snowball fight we were about to have, with extensive details about the "moves" we could make while throwing the snowballs, the shape and size of the snowballs we could use and the particular instances in which each could be thrown, rules for shielding oneself, including suspension of shielding and time limits and factors under which shielding could be done. Aren't kids just supposed to chuck snowballs?

I held out my hands and watched the tiny, brilliantly white flecks of snow settle on my black gloves. I watched the feathery flakes fall from the sky, and I marveled that we actually live in a place where it snows. After four years, I still can't get over it. How can be possibly live in a place where frozen water falls from the SKY?

Four years, and we're still just visiting, in my mind, as transient as the snow. But for Tessa, this is home, the only home she can remember. She's a true snowbunny.

Cheating

I am at a total loss on this one.

Back in Sept. of 2006, Matthew went through a slew of tests ordered by the pediatric neurologist that the Bad Child Psychiatrist insisted we go to see (not that her wanting him to see a neurologist made her a Bad Child Psychiatrist--that became abundantly clear later). One thing he had to have was an MRI, which I knew was going to be horribly traumatic for him. He ended up doing fine, because he had to take THREE FULL Valium before he could calm down, so he mostly slept through the MRI. But anyway, as an incentive for cooperating during the MRI, he was promised a major prize.

He wanted an Action Replay, which is this device that you hook up to a video game player (in his case, his DS) and it lets you download cheat codes. Matthew loves cheat codes. He loves getting huge advantages like unlimited money or invincibility to certain enemies. Which should be antithical to game play, but hey, he's a 10 year old boy who really, really hates to lose. Playing video games is his special niche in the world, the area in which he's comfortable, the ONE thing in the whole world he believes he's exceptionally good at. It's the place he goes when the world is too much; it's his way of coming back down off the high voltage constant alert that engages every time he leaves the house (particularly at school). It's self-soothing. And having the assistance of cheat codes lets him get past parts of games that thwart him repeatedly, gives him access to "special areas" that are locked without the codes.

The problem was, the Action Replay sucked. It was a bad product. It worked for about a month, then it stopped working. It stopped recognizing the DS. Circuit City wouldn't take it back because it had been over a month, and the manufactuer was useless as far as offering information. Geez, we did everything to try and make the thing work, but it wouldn't.

Fast forward to about a month ago. Matthew decided to try the stupid thing again, and it worked. For about three days, then it stopped working again.

Since then, he has really wanted to buy a new one, but we haven't let him. It was a bad product, we told him over and over again. I talked to a guy at our local game shop, who used to be the manager of Game Stop at the mall, and he basically said they were a piece of crap and he hated to sell them.

Today Matthew found a different cheat code product, that works in a different way, directly inserted into the DS. I told him he could only buy it if he didn't make my life miserable if it didn't work. I told him he had to go into his room if he got upset over it, and he agreed. It worked fine, but it didn't have the cheats he'd been hoping for, and there is no way to upload new ones into it, as you theoretically can with the Action Replay. He got online and looked at the Action Replay website, and saw that the game he'd really wanted codes for is now uploaded onto the site.

He's been in his room for about 45 minutes now, sobbing hysterically. All over these damn cheat codes. But I can't tell him to suck it up and get over it, that it doesn't matter, that he's supposed to play the games on his own without cheats, that that's the whole POINT of playing games. That it's not fun if it's not challenging. That he PROMISED me he wouldn't make my life a living hell if this stupid new thing didn't work.

I want to tell him all these things, but I can't. I could tell Tessa in a comparable situation, but this is Matthew. He's as fragile as glass, and this has been a horrible month for him, and this IS the most important thing in the world to him. I can't tell him it doesn't matter.

I don't know what to do.

Happy Valentine's Day

Tessa made me and Matthew scrolls at school, on red fill-in-the blank sheets. Each line starts out with "Love is" printed on the sheet, with lines following for the child to fill in.

Matthew's reads:

Love is when you help me with my video games.

Love is when you dress me up.

Love is when you hug me.

Love is when you kiss me.


Mine reads:

Love is when you make me hot chocolate, so sweet!

Love is when you hug me.

Love is when you kiss me.

Love is when you take me to the mall.

That last one had me in hysterics! That's my girl. And she really is *my* girl, since you'll notice that I didn't mention that Ross got a scroll :(. I asked her if she'd made one for Daddy, and she said she hadn't "had time." She is just not really into him, which is such a shame since he is such an awesome dad.

I got rubrum lilies last week from Ross, which were our wedding flowers :). He always gets me flowers the week before V-Day, since they jack up the cost so much right before the day. Four of the eight are still blooming and look lovely. How nice that they all bloomed, and we're still enjoying them more than a week after he brought them home. He also got me a Margaret Cho book, which rocks.

Happy Happy Hearts Day to all!

Stop the World

When I was a teenager, I was in a community theater production of "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off," a great musical that no one seems to do anymore. It was really dated, but then so are a lot of shows. Anyway, the main character goes through his whole life, and repeatedly, when things get overwhelming, he suddenly says, "Stop the world!" and everyone else on stage freezes, and he addresses the audience directly with some soliloquy.

I like the whole idea of yelling "Stop the World" and having everything and everyone stop. I would have done it several times in the last two weeks. as Matthew spiraled back down, for no apparent reason. He was sick and missed school for a couple of days, three weeks ago, and then went back and everything went to hell.

He wouldn't pick up his pencil in class. He screamed and raged at everything. He cried and kicked things. He threw stuff, sometimes at people. He was incredibly on edge, very anxious, with zero frustration tolerance. He asked constantly to go to the nurse, complaining of a headache, a backache, a stomachache. Wandering ailments, I called them, which disappeared when he went home. He ran around, stimmed, jumped about, fine. Then the next morning, getting ready for school, he would suddenly have another headache, or backache, or stomachache. He felt like he had a fever. He felt like he couldn't breathe. He made his first attempt at self-medication, which scared the shit out of me. He didn't know what to do, didn't know how he was going to get through the day, so he took two melatonin tablets last Wednesday morning, hoping that they would make him fall asleep at school, so he wouldn't have to deal with anything.

And he had been doing GREAT for several weeks. It was a horrible reversal, and no one could tell why it had happened. There was no big event, no change in what they were doing in school. He just said "School is harder now" without being able to say exactly WHAT was harder. He didn't mean the schoolwork was harder. Just being at school was harder, in some inexplicable way. His therapist tried to parse it out, saying they had to be "detectives" to try and figure out what was going on, but nothing definitive came out.

So last week I asked for a conference with his teacher and the inclusion teacher. His teacher asked the school psychologist to attend as well. His aide showed up also. This conference was today (though it was somewhat up in the air as to whether it was actually going to happen, since it looked like we might end up with school cancelled due to ice, and we did have a 2 hour delay this morning).

Ross and I walked into the conference, expecting everyone to be in crisis mode, and the first thing the special ed. teacher said was that things have been much better in the last two days, basically back to where he was before this recent downturn. Well, okay. That's great.

So the whole meeting ended up being about how they want to start, in slow, gradual increments, to make greater demands on him academically. He's been getting a free ride a lot of the year, as they've been working to integrate him into the classroom and work on social issues. So he isn't expected to take the spelling tests each week, or write the paragraphs that the other kids are asked to do, or write out explanations of how he solves his math word problems (that he does in his head and can't tell you how he reached the answer). They feel he is ready to start doing this, though it will be a struggle at first.

Well, okay. That's great that they feel he's ready to do this. Because really, if they gave letter grades, he'd be failing almost every subject at this point, because he won't write. As resistant as he's been to the afterschool tutoring he's been getting once a week (that we are paying for), apparently it's really helping his phonemic awareness, which has been the major stumbling block to his being able to spell.

So I thought we were on a downswing, but apparently we're on an upswing, but one that may result in another downswing as he is challenged more academically. I'm bracing myself for the screaming and crying to come during homework time.

Stop the world.

Earwig

I'm sure you've all seen this by now, but I CANNOT get the song out of my head!! And it's not really a song I can blithely sing around the kids, so this has been difficult :D. We first saw this on Sat., after it was linked from some economic blog Ross reads, of all things!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA5BnTrFAx0&feature=bz302 (sorry, technoweenie can't get this to hotlink!)

Flirt

I was reminded today that I used to be a really good flirt.

From about the age of 14, I was a Five Star, Grade A, Olympic-class flirt. I cut my flirting teeth on men farther over the age of consent than I was under it, teenage boys, old dudes (really, they were probably around 45, but that seemed like geezerhood to me), all kinds of guys. Not the guys in my own high school, who didn't see me as anything other than Professor (you were not allowed to simultaneously be the smart girl and the pretty girl, a harsh reality that has influenced way too many of my bad choices in life), which was their loss since I actually put out.

Flirting was instant gratification, even long after I was happily in love with Ross and settled in for life. I could flash that quick smile, that eye twinkle, and see a guy mirror back appreciation. Car flirting was the best, since it seemed so safe. Smile, see the guy wink, or wave, or just smile back widely. No way that anything could come of it, since we were on opposite sides of big metal machines in motion. (Actually, once a guy followed me on the freeway for miles, as I was on my way to see Ross at his dad's place. He convinced me to pull off at an offramp and stop so he could talk to me. I'm aghast that I actually did!)

In any event, it was (I felt) a harmless way to reassure myself that I was still attractive. I was CUTE, which I learned, early on, to work to its greatest advantage, as a way to compensate for not having much in the tits department. 

But what happens when you find yourself on the far side of forty? After a certain point, cute just seems inappropriate. Flirting starts seeming, unseemly. What, am I going to be some grey-haired old lady cackling "Shake that money-maker!" at poor hapless studs on the street?

Some old ladies can pull it off, but it's hazardous. Gertrude Stein was still spouting double-entendres near the end of her life, but I'm sure she just made people uncomfortable a lot of the time, carrying her little dog and all. 

I'm fairly sure that being a MILF is more trouble than it's worth, and I think you have to go to the gym a lot. Well, *that's* certainly not going to happen!

Damn Rodent

Well, Punxatawney Phil saw his shadow, so it's 6 more weeks of winter. Yesterday there was a huge storm through PA, so he wouldn't have even come out of his burrow. But today the sun was shining, and he made his prediction (according to his handler; how do we know that guy isn't in the pocket of the mob?).

Wasn't this supposed to be a La Nina year? Wasn't it supposed to be a colder than average November and December, and a warmer than average January and February? The cold Nov. and Dec. we had, but Jan. sure wasn't very warm. And if it has to be this freaking cold, the least we could get is some nice pretty snow. I can't believe that they had far more snow in southern CA (up in the mountains anyway) than we've had here, with our puny little dustings that then wash away in the rain.

Another funny thing about Groundhog Day. Matthew wanted to know the origins of Groundhog Day, and how long people have been celebrating it, so we did a little web searching. We found out that one of the earliest references in PA to the groundhog coming out and seeing his shadow, as a predictor of the coming of spring, was in 1841 (which made Matthew contend, "So it must not be the original groundhog! Even if it went through a serious mutation, which I doubt, there's no way it could live that long!" :D). However, since Feb. 2 comes exactly 6 weeks before the day that was the official start of spring on the Julian calendar, before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, that may be part of the origin of the whole thing.

Anyway, this led Matthew to muse that the origins of holidays may have roots in truth or myth. "You know, like the birth of Baby J....," he stumbled. "Jesus?," I supplied. "Yeah," he said, "you never know if what started a holiday really happened or not."

I commented that a lot of people probably wouldn't put the origins of Christmas and Groundhog Day on the same level of uncertainty, and didn't know what else to say. "Some people believe it happened, and some don't," Ross added helpfully. Oh man, his dad would have a major conniption fit over this whole conversation, but that's a whole nuther story.

In any event, enjoy the rest of the winter!