Wedging in Holiday Traditions – Christmas Tree Edition

As my kids get older, the calendar only gets more challenging. We still want the same family holiday traditions, but it takes more planning. For instance, we always buy a Christmas tree from the nearby Optimist Club lot. It’s a mere five-minute drive from our house. Easy peasy, right? Until we start looking at schedules.

We definitely wanted to get it done this past weekend, so we’d have time to enjoy the tree before it came back down. We couldn’t go Friday evening, because my husband had to work late. I was scheduled to work all day Saturday. Then my daughter had a thing Saturday evening. Sunday, I’d promised to buy some supplies for my mom and take them over in the afternoon. And there was a meeting I needed to attend in the evening. Meantime, my son had a collaborative homework project he had to schedule with some other kids.

I looked up the hours for the Christmas tree lot and discovered it opened at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday. There it was – our time slot. Arrive at 10:00, 15 minutes to look over the selections and make a choice, whole thing decorated by noon, and we had time to get our other stuff done. My daughter even dialed up an internet Christmas music station for us so we could listen to carols as we hung the ornaments.

Voting for Shut-Ins

I helped my mom vote today. She’s probably the reason I’ve never skipped an election since I turned 18. I’m following her example. She always, always voted. I remember going into the booth with her when I was little, back when they had the machines with levers.

I don’t know how it works other places, but I discovered that in my county, they will send poll workers out with ballots to allow shut-ins to vote. Pretty nifty and civic. Still, she wanted me there to help her read and fill out the ballot. Possibly she didn’t trust the election ladies (?)

I admit I had to bite my tongue on a couple of her selections. But I managed not to try to influence her vote. With tremendous self-discipline, I only marked what she wanted me to without comment. As if she’d let me. She still reads the newspaper, and she’s allowed to vote differently from me if she wants to. I wasn’t there to tell her how to vote, only to help her exercise her right as a citizen.If nothing else, it’s extra motivation for me to get out to the polls next Tuesday, so I can cancel her out on those couple of ballot items. Since I also believe in a secret ballot, I won’t mention which things or people we disagree on. I’m happy to share my opinions, but not hers.

It made me very happy to know my local government is serious in helping people cast their votes.And the poll workers were as nice as could be.

Letting Go of Childhood a Piece at a Time

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.” – Barbara Kingsolver

I took a load of – I hate to call it clutter – let’s say I took a load of personal history to Goodwill today. It needed to be done. Outgrown clothes and some Zumba hand weight thingies I won as a door prize one time. Those I won’t miss.

But my kids both sorted through their books a while back and put a stack in the give away pile. I sighed and pined as I stroked the cover of each book before putting it in the brown grocery bag. I even skimmed through a couple of them. I miss the days when the kids and I read together. Goodbye Enid Blyton. Goodbye Boxcar Children.

As hard as it was passing on the books, the real wrench came with the toy shopping cart. My husband and I gave it to our daughter for Christmas the year she was three. At the time, I had little faith in its durability. I thought she’d play with it for three or four months and then get tired of it or it would break. I’ve never before or since given anyone a gift that was such a hit. It was the first package opened, and my daughter used it the rest of the day to deliver items to people. After that, the cart often went with us to the grocery store, where my little girl would do her shopping right next to mine. It delivered our “extra mail” sometimes – pieces of scrap paper or real junk mail that I gave her so she could do her postal rounds.

When we moved from our old house to the one where we now live, my daughter was eight. We did a severe pruning of goods at that time, but the shopping cart survived the cut. My son was barely five, and he still played with it sometimes. In fact, my daughter did, too, even though she towered over it by then. After a while, nobody pushed it around anywhere, but it sat in a corner of my daughter’s room, where she used it to store craft supplies.

A couple of years ago, she decluttered her room and finally moved out the shopping cart, telling me she was ready to let go of it. So I placed it in a corner of my and my husband’s bedroom, where it remained for another two years. I kept thinking I couldn’t give it to just anyone. I was waiting for the right child to come along. I wanted to know who got it and perhaps see them play with it. But that never happened.

This morning I stopped kidding myself. Since I was taking several things to Goodwill anyway, I knew I needed to include the cart. My daughter is 17, for goodness sake. It’s time for some other child to discover it and get some joy from it, even if I never know who that child is. I had to dab a tear as I put the shopping cart in the back of my van. I know for the next year or two, I’ll keep my eyes open at the grocery store, hoping to see some little kid pushing a blue and pink cart down the aisles.

Trying to Be Home for the Holidays

Thanksgiving will be here before we know it. Not to panic anyone. My oldest brother and his wife will be coming in from out of state, and we will bring my mom out from the nursing home for part of the day. It should be great. I’m looking forward to it. There’s only one ~~slight~~ major problem: accessibility.

frontsteps — Front entrance to our house.

front porch — A different view of the front entrance

We also have a side door, but once you step inside it, you immediately have to go up stairs to get to the main level. And our parking area is behind the house. What we really need is a back door.

back room — We could use a back door, about here.

And a wheelchair ramp from the there to where we park.

parking — We could use a ramp along here.

So we’re having it done. Dispensing with our usual do-it-yourself mode that can make projects stretch out for months, we’re hiring a contractor my husband knows to put in a back door and build a ramp. He says he can have it done in plenty of time for Thanksgiving.

Putting aside my anxiety dreams about Thanksgiving arriving to find a half-finished project and unusable guest room in a still-inaccessible house because something’s sure to go wrong, we have to pay for this thing. Since the contractor is a friend, we’re getting a good price, but I’ve discovered nobody wants to loan you $4,500. They’ll happily loan us ten times that much, however. It’s crazy.

So we’re refinancing the whole shebang, trading in our old mortgage and rolling the cost of the project into a new one. Man alive, has that meant a lot of form filling out and information tracking down.The good news is how much interest rates have dropped. Our payments will be a lot lower.

The construction materials should arrive Friday, and work begins next week. We’ve talked about making the house accessible since we moved in nine years ago, but it’s never risen to the top of the to-do list until now. I’m happy to know we’ll have an ADA compliant entrance.

Oh, about the back room where the door is going – I mentioned it’s our guest bedroom. My son helped me move out the furniture already. It’s scattered in other places throughout the house. There’s a tight squeeze to get to my home office at the moment, but I can still make it.

In Which I Miss Something Important

In the seven months since my mom arrived in town, it never occurred to me to wonder if I should be receiving Medicare statements. I’ve been getting statements from her supplemental insurance.

Then I received an email from my oldest sister, with whom Mom lived before we brought her here. She’s been receiving the statements. And now they’re changing the prescription drug part of it. She said she’s not sure if the new insurance provider is based on mom’s old Ohio address or her current Missouri one. She’d mail everything to me in one big envelope.

Well. Hm.

The envelope arrived today. I’ll open it tomorrow. I couldn’t face it this afternoon. I thought we’d got her address change registered with Social Security and everyone. Her checks are being deposited to the correct bank account, at least.

So I have a project for next week. It’s always something. But I supposed if it weren’t always something, then it would nothing. And who wants that?

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.