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..."