Feeding Teenagers Is No Joke

Feeding teenagers is no joke. Above is this week’s receipt from the grocery store. And I guarantee I will make a couple of fill-in trips before next Friday. I’ve had longer receipts. When I remember, I take my own reusable bags. As I walked out of the store today, I really and truly thought these words: “Cool! It all fit in eight bags!”

I have two kids. My parents raised six. At one point, they had four teenagers. Grocery day was a major event for my mom. I’m not sure how she managed. I recall large containers of rice and mammoth boxes of powdered milk in our kitchen.

In other news, I’ve inherited some of my 14-year-old’s outgrown clothes.

Oh, about the elephants – I have a thing for elephants. That’s why I keep toy ones on top of the filing cabinets in my home office.

“You’ve Just Crossed Over Into the Twilight Zone”

Cue Rod Serling. Cue the intro music everyone knows. Today I entered another dimension, with a completely surreal experience at my mom’s nursing home.

The first unusual aspect of the day: I made cookies. I only do this a couple of times a year, because I’m not all that domestic. However, last night was one of those times. My family at home ate most of them. But I took a couple in a sandwich bag for my mom, and then another small tin of them for the staff who would be working on Labor Day.

I decided to bypass the main door because I only had enough cookies for people down on my mom’s wing of the building. (It’s a big facility.) I entered instead through a door closer to her room. It opens into a small entry foyer, which then leads to a living room area with the nurses’ station, a large-screen TV, a piano, several recliners and a couple of end tables. That’s the usual set-up. Today, I came around the corner, ready to hand the cookie tin to whomever I saw at the nurses’ desk, and…there was no desk. No desk, no recliners, no tables, no piano, no nurses, no old people. Only an empty room.

What was this? My first thought went to movies, of all things. I recalled the movies and television shows I’d seen with plot-lines centered around an elaborate con, where the grifters set up a fake business. Inevitably, the conned person shows up at the office somewhere near the end of the movie, only to find it vacant. Surely nobody ever set up a fake nursing home. Right?

I looked around for clues. Oh hey, the flooring looked different. Where there used to be carpet I saw laminate. Aha! I proceeded down the hall to Mom’s room. She was there – whew! – and verified the residents had been told to stay out of the living room area while the new floor was laid. Then a nurse came in to put drops in my mom’s eyes. Good. Still in business, then. No taking the money and doing a runner.

Mom and I visited for over an hour. She was having a bit of a muddy day, cognitively. She’d start to reminisce about a family story, and then have to stop and get it straight in her mind how the person involved was related to her. This marked the first time I’ve seen this particular confusion. I mean, she calls me by my siblings’ names, but she always has. There are a lot of us and I’m the youngest. And really, I think she knew how the people were related, she just couldn’t conjure up the right word. She also asked me what those rolling things were called that people sit in and use to get around. “Wheelchairs, Mom.” Hmmm…Still, we managed to have a good chat.

When I got up to leave, I thought I’d have to track down a staff member somewhere to hand off the baked goods. I looked down the hall, expecting to see the empty room at the end. But instead, there was a nurses’ desk, with a nurse. And a room full of recliners, with old people sitting in them. The entire world changed while I was in with my mom.

“It can happen that way in the Twilight Zone.”

Falling Behind

Well, my son’s school year is off to an inauspicious start. He attends one of two schools in our district that still don’t have air conditioning. So far, they’ve dismissed at 11:30 a.m. six times due to excessive heat. And, in the second 5-day school week, my kid has been out sick since Monday with a bad cold. It’s an eerie repeat of last year. I hope this isn’t how it will be every year from now on.

I’m pretty sure he’ll go back to classes tomorrow. I hope we can manage to figure out what work he needs to make up. I know how he’s spending Labor Day weekend – doing homework. I feel bad for him, and also a little for myself. Because I know I’ll have to help him organize it all and keep him on task. (Manifestations of auditory processing disorder can be similar to those of adhd.)

And where have I been lately, instead of blogging? Serving soup and cold medicine, wallowing in a mid-life crisis, sighing about how tired I am, opening my eyes to how many things I’ve let go around the house and trying to make myself take care of some of them. Yes, I actually chose scrubbing a shower over blogging. But I’m still so far behind on house stuff. Behind on blogging, behind on household chores, behind on some personal goals.

Oh, and I’m writing a novel. I’m about 65 pages into a new novel. And not getting through as quickly as I want to.

Maybe if I could make myself limit the number of things I take on, it would also limit the likelihood of falling behind on some of it. This is what I find myself thinking. If only I’d give up writing – blogging, poetrying, noveling – I could maybe keep up with other stuff, the stuff I’m “supposed” to do. Sometimes I think maybe I should give up this writing thing. But in the center of my being I know giving up on writing, for me, would be equivalent to giving up in general. Giving up on a meaningful life, giving up on being a person other people can stand at all, because I would be dour and grumpy without writing as an outlet. Giving up on myself.

Maybe the drive to try to “catch up” is what keeps me going.

Highway 504: Next Leg of the Journey

My son starts 9th grade tomorrow, and my daughter begins community college classes next week. I have many feels (as my daughter would say.) I have started and deleted a couple of blog posts. There are so many different things on my mind and I can’t seem to settle on one as a focus. Finally, I decided to give a piece of advice to parents of kids who have IEPs or 504 plans.

My son has a 504 plan due to auditory processing difficulties. The process of diagnosis, plan development and interaction with various school staff will make for a book some day when I have time to write it. Right now, I’d like to share one of the most important things I’ve learned through hard experience.

Get. It. In. Writing.

Let me put that another way for emphasis: GET IT IN WRITING!

When you’re sitting by yourself as your child’s sole representative in an IEP or 504 meeting, it can be hard to steel your nerve and speak up. You want to seem reasonable. You want these people to like you and your child. But when a staff member says a specific item doesn’t need to be written into the plan “because it’s a service we can offer to any child,” this means they’re not going to do it. Unless you get in in writing and they’re legally obligated to. If it’s something your child needs, don’t worry that they’ll call you a helicopter parent or that they’ll think you’re too demanding, or not nice. Be polite, of course, but also firm that you want it in writing. If it’s something that’s no problem to offer, then why can’t they put it in writing?

My hard experience came with the verbal promise that a teacher would be assigned in my son’s eighth-grade year to go over his agenda with him each day to make sure he knew what his homework assignments were. This has been something that nearly drove me mad in his middle school years – trying to help him figure out what homework he needed to do and whether he’d done it. Often the assignments are told to the students at the end of class when everyone is packing everything away, creating lots of distracting noise – noise my son can’t filter, so he needs another way to know what’s going on. Some teachers were great about communicating and posting everything on-line. I love them. Others posted almost nothing. One teacher repeatedly posted things on-line and then changed the instructions verbally in class, so my son was spending time working on stuff that got him no class credit. I was literally in tears a couple of times from the frustration.

So when the junior high counselor sat in our 504 meeting and said, “We can designate a teacher to collate his assignments and check in with him each day to make sure he knows what they are and whether they’re getting done,” I felt as if I’d been handed a winning lottery ticket. I saw hours of work and worry lifting from my shoulders. When the counselor asked if it was something I’d like them to do, I didn’t hesitate. I said, “Yes, let’s put it in the plan.”

Hmmm…I should have been more suspicious when a different school staff member jumped in with “We don’t even have to put it in writing because…(chorus) it’s a service we can offer to any child.” They assured me they did it for lots of students and they’d do it for my son. They’d let me know if he was getting behind.

The school year started, and it was such a relief not to have to be an inadequately informed micro-manager any more. I kept thinking, “I really can let go of some things. It’s okay. I don’t have to do *everything.* Sometimes I really can leave it to the people who get paid to do it.” I did ask my kid sometimes if he knew what he was supposed to be doing, and he’d say “I’m pretty sure I do.” I did see him doing homework. I was tempted to check in at the school and ask, but didn’t want to be called names, you know, like “helicopter mom.” I figured I hadn’t heard anything and they’d let me know if he was behind.

Then, about four weeks into the year, I casually asked him which teacher was doing the homework check for him. And he was all like “What are you talking about?”

“You know, they said they’d assign a teacher to check in with you every day whether you know what your homework is from all the classes and whether you’re doing it?” I prompted.

Nope, nobody was doing anything like that. It hadn’t been done once. So I went to his 504 case manager (one of the school counselors) and asked what was up. And she was all doe-eyed innocence, like “We do that for some students, but it’s not in his plan anywhere.”

And I was all like “But you guys promised.”

And she was all like, “He does have all sorts of accommodations. I just don’t see that one written down in the plan anywhere.”

And then I realized the verbal promise wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. And the “all sorts of accommodations” remark? Intended to deflect attention away from the issue of them breaking a promise by making me feel bad about being overly demanding. Suddenly the “service we can offer to any student” had been transformed into a request for the sun and the moon. I haven’t asked for the sun nor the moon, I’m here to tell you. I’m starting to think maybe I should.

To get on with the story – I checked in with all of his teachers and discovered he was missing at least some work in every single class, a significant amount in a couple of classes. And then I had to negotiate terms of catching up. The process of catching up consumed every evening and weekend of our lives for the next month or so. And then I was back to sitting down next to him every afternoon with his school binders and the computer logged in to his school account, trying to help him figure it all out.

I have since talked to enough parents in similar situations to find out empty promises are distressingly common. I don’t want to paint with a broad brush, because we’ve dealt with some truly wonderful teachers over the years. But there are a few school personnel who, with no intention of following through, will promise almost anything in a meeting (verbally) simply to get you to stop talking about it.

This year, at least, I’m not lulled into a false complacency. My son was doing a better job by the end of the school year last year of knowing how to get the information he needed on his own, and I hope he’ll continue to improve and move toward independence this year. But I know I need to be right in there right away to help him get off to a successful start. At least this year I know.

One more point. I’ve decided the use of terms such as “helicopter parent” is nothing more than an attempt to control parents through humiliation. Keep us in our place. I’m not falling for it any more. I’m doing the best I can to help my kids grow into independent adults. But even independent adults sometimes need advocates. I’m going to do what I believe is best, without being cowed by the fear of a label.

And I’m getting all promises in writing.

Poppy Fell Over!

I’m not the only sandwich generation mom on my block. On one side of us is an apartment building. On the other side lives a couple in their early forties, plus their 4-year-old son and the man’s elderly father, who uses a wheelchair.

The 4-year-old loves to come over any time he sees anyone from my family out in the yard. He and my 14-year-old son have had a couple of adorable sword fights with harmless play swords. The “fights” consist of the little one swinging away, while my big guy blocks his blows for several minutes until he decides to end it by letting one land and conceding defeat. The neighbor boy also loves to follow my husband around while he’s doing yard work and attempts to help him. When my husband finishes one task, the kid will ask “What are we working on next?”

This morning, I decided to go all domestic and make blueberry pancakes for the fam, since I had a pint of fresh blueberries in the fridge. As I was flipping the last one from the electric skillet, I heard a knock on the door. I still needed to unplug the skillet and attend to a couple of other details, so I hollered for someone else to answer the door please. My daughter went.

As soon as she opened the door, I heard the 4-year-old’s voice saying “We need help! Poppy fell over.” That got my attention.

I ran to the door and saw him standing there, barefoot and still in his PJs. I said, “Tell me what happened.”

“Poppy fell over and he’s laying on the deck and he can’t get up, and my mom’s hurt, too,” he told me. That really got my attention. I couldn’t imagine what might have happened that his mom and his grandfather would both be hurt. Or, I should say, I could imagine too many different things. I checked my pocket to make sure my cell phone was there, grabbed his hand and said, “Show me.”

The poor kid had run across the gravel part of their drive barefoot, but I carried him over the that stretch on the way back. They have a deck on the back of their house, with a ramp leading up to it. They also have a large privacy fence, and it prevented me from seeing anything until we got through the gate and came around to the back yard. Relieved doesn’t cover what I felt when I saw his mom standing on the deck, looking…okay. His grandfather, however, was lying there next to his wheelchair.

My neighbor (the mom) quickly told me what happened. Her husband was gone. Her father-in-law had been out on the deck and decided to try to get back inside by himself, rather than calling her for help. But there’s a threshold between the deck and the inside floor. When his wheelchair hit the threshold, it tipped over and he fell out. She said she took off at a run as soon as she realized he fell, and something pulled in her leg. Thus her son telling me she was hurt, too. Her father-in-law did not hit his head, and he could move all of his limbs. Nothing appeared broken. Mostly, she needed another adult to help her lift him back up into the wheelchair. With the two of us, we managed it, one under each armpit.

We got him back into the house, and her settled with some ice on her leg before I went home. She was calling her father-in-law’s doctor as I left to see if there were any symptoms she should look out for that would indicate a more serious injury than we could see. I checked on them later in the day, and they all appeared to be doing okay.

I suppose it takes a village not only to raise our children, but to care for the older generation, too.

All of the Bells, But Not All at Once

One thing you don’t get in a skilled nursing facility is a lot of space. My mom’s shared room reminds me of my dorm in college, including the bathroom that’s also used by the residents in the next bedroom over. Mom has the bottom half of a two-tiered wardrobe for hanging clothes plus whatever can sit on the shelf below them. She also has three dresser drawers, some counter space, her bed, of course, a recliner, a two-drawer nightstand and a high shelf attached to the wall. We provided her a footstool that doubles as a storage bin.

Mom has very few of her possessions actually with her. Many are at my house, and others are with my oldest sister. Since I’m nearest geographically now, I got custody of Mom’s cherished bells.

She’s collected bells for years. You never had to think too hard on gift-giving occasions. If you couldn’t come up with anything else, she’d always love another bell. Some are glass, some porcelain, some pewter. Some commemorate places or events. I think she owns around 100 altogether. She and I decided she had room for three on her shelf. This is not only an issue of space; it’s also an issue of keeping track of things in a setting where all sorts of people are coming and going and the door to her room remains unlocked. I’ve used permanent marker to put her name inside each bell. If one does wander away somehow and then turn up later, we’ll know it’s hers because it’s labeled.

When we were first getting Mom settled and discussing what she could/should have with her in the room, my sister was the one who pointed out to us that Mom could still have all of her bells, just not all at once. It could be a rotating collection. Brilliant! I work in a library. I’m familiar with this concept.

Every couple of weeks I dig into the boxes in my spare bedroom and bring Mom a different bell, then take one from her room back to my house. This gives us something to talk about, too. She can tell me what she remembers about where she got each one, or who gave it to her. We’ve taken some nice strolls down memory lane, prompted by a starting bell.

Soft Foods

No, not soft foods for my 87-year-old mother. She’s still able to enjoy a pretty varied diet, with some restrictions. The soft foods prompting this post are the ones I’m feeding my 14-year-old son. He had a tooth removed a couple of days ago.

His top left front tooth has been a problem for years. When the permanent tooth came in, the baby tooth never came out until we took him to the dentist to have it pulled. Then he fell on the jungle gym on the school playground when he was in third grade, chipping and traumatizing the same tooth. It’s been crooked and severely out of place, a problem we hoped would be fixed by his braces. Nope. That tooth stayed in place, and all of the other top teeth moved up. As it turns out, the thing was ankylosed (it had fused to the bone.) And when they looked at it with the super duper fancy 3-D looker atter, it was crumbling beneath the surface of the gums. So off to the oral surgeon we went, and now the tooth is gone. He’ll get a placeholder until he stops growing, after which he can have an implant put in.

Meanwhile I’m trying to figure out how to keep this kid fed on soft foods for a week. For those who have never lived with a 14-year-old boy, they eat A LOT. His typical bedtime snack would be an entire meal for me – a whole apple, a large bowl of ice cream, and add in a plate of cheese and crackers. This is a kid who can’t afford to lose weight; he already looks as if he’s made from clothes hangers. I’ve been shoveling oatmeal and applesauce his way. I made a huge batch of mashed potatoes. Despite the heat wave, he seems okay with soup, so whew! We’re stocked up on pudding cups, ice cream and frozen fruit bars. He likes yogurt.

Oh and I’ve been doing this over and over:

I Sent Forth My Minions

I find myself incapacitated by a summer cold this week, and thus unable to visit my mother at the nursing home. Nobody there needs to catch what I have.

Yet she needed some things. For instance cough drops. So I sent forth my minions to perform the labor. Or perhaps I should say proxies. Proxy is a nicer word than minion, isn’t i? The thing is, I discovered other people will step up when I’m sick. My husband and daughter went out to see my mom on Sunday since I couldn’t.

My husband came back telling me what an interesting visit it was. My mother told him all sorts of stories about her past. I called Mom yesterday and she, likewise, told me what a great time they had. I’ve never thought about it, but the two of them have never visited together without me there before. Maybe they should do it more often. They had a blast.

I guess the world can go on without me if it has to.

Things Don’t Go As Planned

This happened on Saturday:

Yep, that’s my family’s van. Nobody was seriously injured, a fact for which I’m still uttering a little silent thanks every hour or so. My husband and kids were about three hours away from home, on the verge of a planned float trip, when they were hit by a bus.

The plan was for them to have a fabulous time on the river (I’m not much of a water person) while I had an entire glorious day to myself. I had my agenda in front of me – a morning of catching up on housework with my own selected music playing at my own selected volume, followed by a visit to my mom, some exercise, a block of writing time, and an evening outing with friends from work. I got some housework done before the phone call.

It was one of those Murphy’s Law days where you have to choose whether to laugh or cry as you wonder what else could possibly happen, and then something does. I choose to laugh, because the things that happened were really small compared to the fact that nobody was seriously injured. My crew even decided to go ahead and do the river float while waiting for me to arrive.

Saturday afternoon I set out in our other vehicle – a 16-year-old Honda Civic with 178,000 miles – to find the middle-of-nowhere place where my family was stranded. The bank time and temperature signs I passed along the way displayed temps anywhere from 95 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit. To make the day extra special, my Civic decided to spring a freon leak, so I had to say goodbye to the air conditioning. The white mist pouring out from the vents made for an exciting special effect, however.

I got lost, but that’s not unusual for me. I build getting lost time into my travel plans, because it happens so often. I wasn’t overly lost, only a little bit. I probably added 15 minutes total onto the trip by missing a turn.

I arrived to discover my family had managed to lose the sunscreen, so sunburns all around.

Believe it or not, we managed to get the van back home. We decided to have my husband drive it, while I followed behind with the kids. Two windows in the van were shattered on impact, filling the interior with broken glass (which is the second time we’ve experienced this with a minivan; the first time was the result of an F1 tornado.)

By the time they were all done floating and we left the place, it was nearly 7:00. We stopped along the way for gas and food. Then we drove into…Severe Thunderstorms! So severe, we had to stop and pull off the road twice because it was impossible to see. This was on narrow, two-lane, unlit, rural Missouri highways with no shoulders, only ditches to each side. The first time, we found a private driveway to wait it out. The second, we lucked onto a side road that led to a commuter parking lot. (Commute to where?) And did I mention, the van is missing two windows? It got pretty wet. My poor hubster. Plus, the lack of a working compressor in the other car meant it was nearly impossible to defog the Civic’s windshield without turning up the temp on the blower to hot. The kids and I were *very* warm for a while. Trapped in a hot, little car, with teens who have already been sweating all day is its own kind of special. I have to give them credit, however, for being remarkably unwhiney through the whole ordeal.

The rain finally abated enough we could drive again. And my daughter remembered she had her iPod with her, plus a device to let it play through the car radio. She and her brother decided they’d feel better with music, specifically songs she had from “My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic.” So there was that for 45 minutes.

But we all made it home safe and well. As long as a tree doesn’t fall on our house or something. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

A Latte Experience

I love the activities director at my mom’s nursing home for the variety of ways she finds to expand the lives of the residents, from bringing in musicians to having a banana split social, to loading up those who are able to go for a country drive. One of the things I find depressing about the idea of nursing home residency is what I see as the shrinkage of a life. I compare my life – my ability to get in a car and run around town, shop for food I want at the grocery store (within my budget), go for a walk, have pets – to my mom’s situation of spending most of her time within the same building, her choices curtailed.

I see it as part of my job description to help her keep connections to the outside world and to help grow her life experiences into something bigger than the walls of one building. This doesn’t have to be a major undertaking on my part. Little things can go a long way.

Mom has her own phone, with large numbers, but she can’t seem to manage making a phone call on her own any more. She gets flustered by the need to dial “9” for an outside line, and then loses her place while dialing, forgetting which numbers she’s pressed already. It’s easy enough, when I’m visiting, for me to ask her whom she’d like to call today, and then put the call through for her.

Since she was unable to go to my son’s piano recital, I got permission to let him come play his pieces on the piano at the nursing home, so she could see him perform. As a bonus, several residents heard the music and managed to get into the piano area, so he ended up with an audience.

Most recently, I decided my mom should have the opportunity to try a latte at least once in her life. She’s never had much in the way of spare cash lying around, and spending on a frou-frou coffee drink was far outside the realm of anything she’d consider. But I thought she’d like it, so I drove through Starbucks on my way to see her and picked up one for each of us. See what I did there? That way it was us doing something together, rather than her feeling I was getting her something extra or expensive. She verified what I expected – she’d never had one before. But she liked it. She kept saying, “That’s so good.”

Finally, she admitted that maybe she wouldn’t feel too bad about the money spent if I wanted to bring her another one some time, though she insisted I should take it out of her bank account. I’m not going to take it from her money, and I won’t tell her how expensive it is. But I will be happy knowing you can still have new experiences at the age of 87.