Cardboard Genius 2.0

Sometimes I wish Keaton would just ask to be a pirate or Spiderman or, I don't know, an astronaut for Halloween instead of a volcano, Harold the Helicopter, or the entire space shuttle ("and make sure the orbiter is attached to the external fuel tanks, Dad.")

On the other hand, watching my man turn a pile of boxes into various flying objects is pretty entertaining:


And so it begins...

You'll Wish You Had Your 5 Minutes Back After This

What? We all get blogger's block sometimes and I have it, okay? It's not that there isn't anything happening, it's just that it seems like there is a lot "in progress" which means I cannot tell a story in it's entirety which bothers me.

So in lieu of anything worth your time, I am going to just throw a bunch of random updates out there:

Keaton:

Sigh. Keaton is now in all-day kindergarten, and I was so hoping to be able to come here and say, "Everything is great! I can't believe we were ever worried! That IEP we put in place for him last spring? Didn't even need it!" But I can't say that. I couldn't say it week one, so I waited for week two, and then weeks 3, 4, 5, and 6. I think we are on week 11 at this point and we are still having problems, although I have to say the real problem here is with the school/teachers and not really with Keaton. Yes, he has Asperger's. And yes, he can be a real handful here at home. But when he is put in appropriate environments with trained teachers, he thrives. The problem is that he (and all of his neurotypical peers, really) are put in absurd environments and expected to do absurd things by teachers who have no clue how to handle a child with special needs.

Don't get me wrong -- his "main" teacher is a nice person who I believe is really trying to figure him out, but it scares me that someone with 20 years of experience calls me and says, "I can't get him to stop humming while he colors -- what do YOU do at home to make him stop?"

Ummm...I don't make my 5 year old stop humming while he colors at home. I also don't make him each his lunch at 10:20 am when he isn't hungry yet, keep him indoors until 2:30 pm, and then make him stand with his back to the fence in "time out" during the one 30 minute recess they have because he "laughed inappropriately at another student". Did I mention they aren't allowed to speak during portions of lunchtime? And that they only get ONE RECESS A DAY?!? And it's at the END of the day? And that my kid has an autistic spectrum disorder? You know, that one that makes him unable to see things from another's perspective and unable to process all the sensory overload that he encounters for 40 hours per week.

Never mind that he is reading at a second grade level and has figured out how to sit still for 2 straight hours on instruction in the classroom, let's berate the little twerp for getting up at lunch to throw his cheese wrapper away. Seriously.

So yeah. I hate sending him to school everyday. It sucks, because I know if he had teachers who knew how to set him up for success, he's be, well, succeeding. Boone and I had a rather unpleasant "Oh no you didn't" kind of meeting with his teachers and special education coordinators last week and we are hoping that some of the things we did there will help him once he adjusts, but in the meantime I am counting down the days until we can get him to a better school environment.

I suppose I should say that we have some wonderful people on our side who love Keaton and are working hard to educate his teachers. His speech therapist, the autism coordinator for the district, and his in-school resource teacher who checks in with him a few times a week are wonderful women and a great support. The way we feel about these people who defend Keaton tirelessly is hard to describe, so I won't try, except to say that Boone and I cry all the time when we hear about the way they treat our son. They are remarkable and we love them.

On the flipside, the few people who truly dislike Keaton just reinforce what I said before -- it says far more about their lack of character than it does about my little man. So those people can suck it.

Here's the little imp having a story time with his stuffed animals when he is supposed to be sound asleep:


And here he is on his very first day of kindergarten. If you didn't just fall in love with him you need to go get yourself checked out.


While I am at it, here are the requisite first day of school photos of the other munchkins way back in in early August. Rylan and Branik are both doing well in school, which we are grateful for, but it means that I don't have much to say about it. Still, I don't want them to get all complex-y when they read this and think I was unfair, so...

Rylan is (still) a genius -- an emotional, dramatic genius who seems to be increasingly bored at school and apparently told her teacher, "My mom said I am too smart for my homework, so I didn't do it." (I may have said something like that, but I didn't know she left an assignment incomplete over it.)

She went with her dad to get a haircut 2 weeks ago and chopped about 8 inches off. I need to get a photo but she was really excited about it. I was a little surprised at how short it was, but we have less tears in the morning over hair now (see "emotional" and "dramatic" above) and I'll take that any day of the week.


And Branik started preschool 3 mornings a week which means I have (drumroll please) 12 WHOLE HOURS A WEEK TO MYSELF!!! I can't describe the awesomeness of grocery shopping ALONE, or Target shopping ALONE, or going to the gym and staying longer than 2 hours if I feel like it, because I am ALONE. And I don't feel guilty about it at all, because when he is not at school he spends his day whining about wanting to go to school. So it's a big fat win-win. Here he is on Day 1. It should be noted that this was BEFORE he realized he was not getting on the bus with his siblings. It wasn't pretty.



Fun story about Branik -- about 2 weeks ago he was finishing up his breakfast when the bus came, so I dashed outside in my pajamas (and pajamas = braless) and left him at the table. About 90 seconds later I jiggled back down the driveway and found myself locked out of the house. And there was Branik, grinning at me through the window to the side of the door. I tried for about 10 minutes to coach him on UNlocking the door, but he got bored and just walked away. I'm pretty sure he booted up the computer and played Curious George games because I couldn't stop him. Because that's normal for a 3 year old, right?

So I went across the street, used my neighbors phone to call Boone at work, and spent the next hour picking weeds in my front lawn until Boone could finish up with his patient and drive 20 minutes home. I would have put Branik in time out for 17 hours for walking away from me in my time of braless need, but he burst into tears when I came through the door so I just hugged him instead. And now I take my keys with me to the bus stop (but I still leave the bra on the doorknob).

The End.

My Gimpy Leg:

I broke my leg just over 6 months ago now, and I am happy to say that after months of inactivity, a cast, a boot, and crutches, I ran a mile outside tonight pain free! I ran 3.75 miles yesterday on the treadmill with four different .25 mile walking breaks sprinkled throughout, and by "ran" I really mean "jogged slowly", but still. I am really excited to get back to distance running and hope to run another half marathon by February or March. Progress has to be very slow and I am admittedly paranoid about my leg, but I think I may finally have turned the corner. Which is great, because it has been absolute TORTURE to watch all my friends train for events while I sit on the sidelines. I was never meant to be a cheerleader.

Girl's Weekend:

I credit my recovery to the magical healing powers of eating cheesecake in Las Vegas with girlfriends and hiking the Narrows in Zion National Park 4 days after I got my boot off. My orthopedist probably would have shot me if he knew what I was doing, but I like to justify it by saying that I effectively iced my leg for 6 straight hours and it never hurt me for a second. So there.

Here are a few pics that amply demonstrate my sick, sick talent of taking pictures of myself and others without cutting heads off. What can I say, I just rock like that:

Seriously, this was the first shot, no lie. Oh, and these are my girlies from our Ohio days. We try to meet up at least once a year in one way or another, but the girls only trips happen every two years. I think we're about to fix that;)

That last shot was just the sunset on the way to our play, but it was so dern purty I had to throw it up there. So there you go.

Anyway, while I was out there, I remembered (again) how much I like not sweating like a hog every time I go outside. Sometimes you forget what that even feels like when you live in the South, but then you visit somewhere like Utah or Idaho or Nevada and you can't believe how un-perspirey you are.

Well, that glorious lack of humidity got my wheels turning about where to live (again) and I came home begging Boone to look just once more at practicing dentistry out west. Not that he didn't want to move back, but that we haven't seen much available since we started looking. Well, as luck would have it this time was different. Nothing is concrete yet, but we are flying to Denver in less than a month to check out several practices in the area. We are really excited, but also totally overwhelmed at the process we have to go through before we even set foot in the Front Range. I'll keep you posted as things progress, but I'm sure nothing will be certain until the spring.

Which sort of brings me to my last point for tonight...

The Future of this Blog:

I'm not sure what to do about this little hiccup so I'm just gonna throw it out there. I have never wanted to make my blog private because, well, I just don't want to. I am not throwing my address out there for everyone to see, but I use our real names and post pictures of my kids all the time (did you notice?).

However.

It has come to my attention that once Boone is in private practice, it probably would not be the best idea to have his/our personal lives available for his patients to examine. I mean, if you just paid $1500 for a root canal you probably wouldn't be happy to see "Look at our pictures from Hawaii!" posted on your dentist's blog.

I also have a somewhat separate dilemma that I'll throw out there just to make some people mad (or maybe because I'm being honest): I don't love to read every detail about other people's children. Unless we are family or close friends, I have no desire to read about your vacations, your kid's potty training, or every SINGLE gift Santa brought to your house this year. I just don't. The problem is that I know that sometimes I am that kind of blogger, and although I have family all over the country who WANTS these pictures and details, I know that some of you see it and click out. And I don't blame you.

There are blogs out there that make me think about my postitions on issues, that make me reflect on my own life, that make me laugh out loud, and make me cry for people I have never even met. I aspire to be the kind of writer that can talk about important things and share details of my life that are difficult to talk about face to face. Sometimes I am mad, sometimes I say things that some friends and family don't want to hear about.

In short, my blog is having an identity crisis.

I really want to keep my family updated on the kids and this is the only way I have been able to chronicle our adventures in any sort of real way. I do not and never will scrapbook. I am about 10,000 picures behind on photo albums. I suck at keeping hand-written journals. But I have at least kept up an outline of our lives with little snippets of humor and grief through this blog, and I don't want to quit that just because I want to be more than a mommy blogger.

But how do I mesh that with the political issues I want to discuss? What about my life beyond being a mother? Maybe it's an extension of how I feel in real life -- that although I love my children desperately, I have a real need to be my own person and not just so and so's mom. I had a life before children, and I'd like to write about some things that I just don't want "mixed" with all the family stuff.

So taking into account that I can't keep using our real names in a public blog much longer (for patient confidentiality reasons), what should I do? Make this the "family" blog and make it private? Start another blog where I talk about non-mommy stuff and use fake internet names? It seems to make sense, but then I get all "My real life IS a mixture of motherhood and politics -- of religion and frustration -- of traveling and spouting off. So why should I try to separate one part from another?"

Anyway, that's where I get stuck and give up and quit blogging for weeks on end. And at this point, you probably wish I'd just stayed silent, eh?

Well too bad for you. Here's one last picture that has nothing to do with anything. I saw this as we were driving home from North Carolina last month and thought, "Oh racist rednecks, how I will miss you when we leave Georgia..."

My big "Manventure"

Anyone checking this blog post expecting some witty commentary on Target or charming story about adorable children, please save yourself some time and stop reading now.

This is no nonsense, stinky, dirty, boring talk about sleeping outside and eating bad food. For what purpose? So that a couple of dudes could walk 70 miles from one of our cars to the other.

So Sean Spittle and I decided that since we have never really taken time just for ourselves we would take a few days and head up to the Great Smoky Mountain National park and hike the Appalachian Trail from the south end to the north end in five days. We chose to go in October so that we could see the leaves changing, and according to historical weather records, October is also the driest month of the year. So we stayed at a romantic little bed and breakfast on Tuesday night before hitting the trail Wednesday morning, the 6th of October.



We started at Fontana Dam at 9:00 in the morning full of enthusiasm and self-assuredness, headed up the trail with 40lb packs on our backs for a 17 mile, 3000 foot elevation gain day. At 6:00 p.m., 9 hours and five black bears later we stumbled into our first shelter of the night thoroughly exhausted, and no sooner did we stop than I started a fit of uncontrollable shakes and chills, and the two of us were barely able to make it down to the spring to refill our water bottles and cook dinner. We knew it was going to be a difficult day at the beginning, but I don't think we had any idea how physically and mentally challenging this trek was going to be. The last three miles we both ran out of water, and we weren't eating at regular intervals like we should have been in order to maintain our energy levels. Lessons learned.











That night about 10 minutes after we and nine other hikers had bunked down for the night, a 350lb black bear that had been watching us cook and prepare for bed from about 200 feet away sauntered into the shelter to check for leftovers. He licked the benches, grabbed a piece of some one's camp stove, and wandered off to stare up at the backpacks that we had strung in a nearby tree. We read by headlamp for a bit, popped in earplugs, and slept surprisingly well for the rest of the night.


Day two was another beautiful, sunny day, and our spirits were high having only 500 or so feet of elevation and just shy of 14 miles to cover. We learned that 500 feet net could still mean 3000 feet or more of up and down as we summitted and descended mountain after mountain. Day two treated us to some of the most spectacular views of the trip, 360 degree panoramas of mountains, valleys, fall foliage and clear blue skies. Day two is why the mountains call to me.



This was our shelter on day two and typical of the shelters along the A.T.



This was the spring where we got our water. The spring was literally weeping from the rocks, and at each spring there was a pipe to direct the water from the pool more easily into your water bottle.


This is the camping stove I made from Diet Coke cans and a Red Bull can. My stove and I became the stuff of legend along the trail, just sayin'.


And this is the view from the pooper. I thought it was quite lovely.



Sean and I were the only ones in the shelter that night. Don't we look content? We had no idea how our trip was about to change.



So when we woke up on Friday morning for day three, this was what we saw.



Oooohhh, clouds. The thing about clouds is that they are pretty wet. And these clouds were accompanied by a bit of rain. Booooooo! We had about 15 miles to do day three including summitting Clingman's dome, the highest peak east of the Mississippi.



Here is the thing about hiking up mountains in the rain. We were working so hard that we were dripping sweat and hotter than hot, but the driving wind and unending rain were soaking us from the outside and chilling our extremities. So the dilemma was whether or not to wear rain gear and sweat inside it or just abandon the rain gear and go with the "wet is wet" philosophy. Either way is fairly miserable, but let me say that the no rain gear option can end in hypothermia, see? As soon as we stopped hiking our core temperature dropped, and because Sean is generally too warm to begin with he had been wearing only a technical t-shirt all day and was unaware of how chilled he had become. Within minutes he became a bit foggy mentally and had chills so bad he could do nothing more than curl up in a ball in his sleeping bag. I made him cup after cup of broth, and after an hour or so, he was feeling much better. We were both grateful that we didn't have to resort to naked cuddling.


Day four was the big one, and we had been nervous about it from the beginning of the trek. We had to do more than 20 miles and summit six mountains in the process. We got up at 5:30 and were on the trail before sunrise knowing that we would be hiking all day. Thankfully we had learned a lot of lessons the previous three days including, staying as dry as possible, eating with regularity whether you were hungry or not, and drinking every time you thought about it even if you didn't think you were thirsty. Saturday morning was the coldest day yet with more heavy cloud cover, moderate winds, and continuous, unrelenting rain. The trail was one big mud puddle, and there was no point in trying to keep your feet dry, because it wasn't happening.



I had a particularly tough morning mentally as I was wet to the bone from perspiration within the first hour of hiking and chilled continually from the wind and rain. And I knew I had at least another eight hours on the trail. Fortunately, we changed some clothing mid-morning, made some great time, and spirits lifted as we had done 10 miles by noon. We ate lunch at mile 13 in a shelter with some college student age hikers who seemed pretty cool at the time, and afterward powered on down the trail, surprised at how easily we were able to summit peak after peak and cover mile after mile. At one point we caught back up to the group of four hikers who we had lunched with, and as soon as we came around the corner into view of the other guys they jumped up off the trail and took off again. Four miles later and 10 hours after our morning departure we rolled into our RESERVED shelter to see 12 bodies already there. About 10 minutes behind us were two more hikers with reservations for a total of 16 bodies looking at 12 bunks.

Here is the thing about the wilderness, there is no enforcing an unprovable reservation, and no ranger within 8 miles we could call upon for help. Sure we could have yelled and freaked out, but short of getting into a fist fight, nobody was getting up to make space for those of us who were legitimately supposed to sleep there that night. It was at that moment that we realized why those 4 dudes were literally racing down the trail ahead of us. No reservations. Nice, d-bags. Sean immediately said, let's just go. We had no tent, no tarp, sleeping pads that were only half body-length. We were unequipped to sleep on the ground, and so after thinking on it for a minuted I agreed that we should just hike out the last 8.5 miles. So at 5:15, 90 minutes before sunset, and still raining, we decided to finish the trek.

We ended up hiking the last four miles in the dark, hoping we wouldn't miss a turn off, slip on a rock, or run into a bear. And you know what, we did it. We powered up another 2200 foot mountain summit and finished up at 9:00 pm, 14 hours after we started, having covered 29 miles in one day. Sean and I have cute, matching black big toenails, I have tendonitis in both of my knees, IT band issues in Sean's right leg and complexion problems from hell. Awesome!!!


We both said that this was the single hardest thing we have ever done. 72 miles and a total of over 18,000 feet of elevation in four days. Do I want to run back up and do it again next week? Nope, but I hear Glacier National Park is nice in August!