Langer Loksh

Even Though

On Sunday, Jeff took the kids to Davis Farmland for hours so that I could clean the attic. It was my wildest fantasy come true and I was panting with ecstasy the entire time. And I'm totally not kidding.

I found a bag of stuff that made the move from my mom's attic to my own, including my vintage 80's Itty Bitty Booklight and letters from my old boyfriend. I threw them away without peeking. I don't think I can handle all that sweet blushing youth.

Then, last night, I watched The Lake House, in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves send each other love letters through some sort of tear in the time/space continuum.

So I left Jeff a note by the door:

Dear Jeff,

I don't feel very close to you right now and I feel sad about that. I hope that we can work on it. I love you.

Love,

Jill

First thing this morning I tiptoed over the cold tile to find his reply:

Dear Jill,

I still love you even though you have ringworm.

Love,

Jeff

P.S. I am  hilarious

Heidi in Reverse

I am not entirely certain that it was necessary to pre-empt Oprah to show live coverage of... nothing, for 40 minutes, while we waited for the Red Sox to deplane, and then caravan to Fenway, with OJ-style aerial shots of the buses crawling along the highway. I would rather have just watched Oprah and then seen the two-minute clip of the players arriving at Fenway on the news. If at all. Really. I could have waited.

But hey--free couch!

MY COUCH IS FREE!

And the Boston Red Sox have won the World Series two times in my five-year-old daughter's lifetime!

The Second Biggest Mistake?

Avid readers may recall that I ruined my life by inadvertently pulling the plug on my free cable. Yesterday, I stayed home for six hours while the Verizon FIOS man hooked us up with 200 channels for just a little more than we were paying Comcast for seven. The FIOS came with a wireless router so I'm writing this from the comfort of my almost-free couch. Wahoo!

It took only moments to realize, of course, that again I have made a terrible mistake. Last night at bed time, Jeff, Summer, and Charlie were all glazed out in front of Independence Day, in which, I assume, iconic skyscrapers are blown up and the apocalypse ensues. "I'm going out with Maureen, guys," I told them. "Guys?"

"Guys?"

And my built-in defense against the copious wretched children's programming--"We don't have that channel"--is gone. Now I have to actually set limits.

Crud.

Meanwhile, good job on the comments people! I am stoked! Just a few more days to NaBloPoMo.

Portmanteau

Jeff, Summer and I were all snuggled in bed early in the morning. I told Jeff about how cute it is that Summer now says the Pledge of Allegiance every day at school. "And they say 'under God,'" I said. "I thought they'd taken that out." Jeff said he thought people had been fighting about it but it hadn't been taken out. "I think it should be out," I said. Jeff disagreed. "That's the way it's supposed to be," he said. I told him no, it wasn't originally in there. "My mom remembers when they put it in," I said. "Well maybe Summer's teacher just does it that way," he said. I said, "But it's not her teacher--it's over the PA system." He said, "We never had a PA system."

Then I told him about how the woman on the PA system does the bus dismissal: "Your attention please. It is time for walkers and children being signed out by their parents to be dismissed. Your attention please. Please clear the lobby for bus dismissal. The first bus is bus four. Bus FOUR to the corridor, bus FOUR to the corridor, followed by bus ten." I told him that Summer thinks she's saying "corner door" instead of corridor. Then I explained it to Summer: "Corridor is another word for the main hallway."

"That's silly," she said. "I know, no one really says that word outside of school," I agreed. "That reminds me of when I was in elementary school and we went outside to play. One of the teachers told us to stay on the macadam, which is a funny old word for blacktop."

"Macadam?" Jeff sputtered. "Are you serious? What the hell is that?"

After we finally hauled ourselves out of the big cozy bed, Jeff Googled macadam and found out that it was a type of pavement used before the invention of cars. (I guess this particular recess monitor of mine must have been ancient.) Cars moved so fast that they sucked the dust out of the road, so people started spraying tar on top of it. That's how we got the word "tarmac." Bet you never knew that! And we also found out that doing that--a new word made from parts of two other words--is called a portmanteau.

Kindergarten is so educational.

Do it For Your Mom

Even if you're not a mom, you probably have one. Or maybe your friend just had a baby (Hi Annie Rose!) or your cousin is expecting (Hi Shar!). Today I'm asking you to call your U.S. Senator (Hi Teddy!) and ask them to support legislation that would provide education about, and funding for research on, post-partum depression.

After Summer was born, they told me I would have "baby blues" for about a month while my hormones reorganized themselves. About five weeks later I was still quite frazzled. I called my nurse practitioner and said "Is this normal?" "Maybe not," she said. "Why don't you come in and we can see about putting you on something."

I FREAKED OUT! All I could think of was that woman Susan Smith who sent her two beautiful little boys into a lake, strapped into their car seats in their mini van. "I don't want this!" I panted on the phone to Sarah, who arrived at my house before I even hung up and began feeding me scones and hard boiled eggs.

"This" is post-partum depression, and it is a very serious condition that cannot, unfortunately, be cured with scones and hard-boiled eggs. I was lucky; I was just an anxious rookie mom.  Many many moms have a much harder go. Click here to find out more and to add your voice to the call to action.

Thanks!

[Edited 11/15/07 to add:]

After watching that guy Drew Peterson on the Today Show--who is obviously a sociopathic killer and I could not believe what came out of his mouth about his wives being so beautiful and interesting before they had children and then they got all hormonal and started asking for divorces, I just sat there with my jaw down around my knees--I remembered that the woman I was thinking of after Summer was born was Andrea Yates, the one who drowned all five of her beautiful children one by one. Susan Smith was not suffering from post-partum depression; she was just a sociopathic killer like Drew Peterson. Is it a little scary to write that on the Internet? Is Drew Peterson going to come after me? And how weird is it that Drew Peterson has a daughter named Lacy Peterson?

Circle of Smiles: Because We Needed Some More Visual Clutter Here

Go Sox

Thank you for the comments. Keep 'em coming. As you can see, I put this year's NaBloPoMo badge up on the left. Last year, the gutter snipe who reviewed the "L" blogs did not choose me as one of the more "snarky" blogs. I don't know if I'm going for snarky, but I promise I'll write about something more compelling than whether or not my cat is in fact dying of cancer. There are treats in store, readers, delicious hypertext treats.

Also, check out the MOTHERS Act button over there on the right. More about that in the next post.

Now I must address one commenter personally. Jeff Z. I was trying not to say anything because I don't want to jinx it, but since you put it out there... FREE SECTIONAL!

Six Months to Transition

The meeting with the special ed woman from our town went well. She mentioned the same three options that I had in mind: stay at our preschool and receive speech therapy from the town; go to the town's integrated preschool (meaning typical kids and special needs kids together) where there are speech pathologists in the classroom; or go to a specialized preschool for kids with hearing loss. The fact that she even mentioned door number three was encouraging, but when I asked for permission to tour that school--even though this is still a free country the last time I checked, I need my town's permission to even set foot in any school they would have to pay for) she balked. "I'll have to ask them," she said, meaning her bosses in the school system.

Here's where it gets weird. I like the idea of the specialized school because the teachers all have years of experience working with children with hearing loss. It's like, if your child had cucumbers instead of pinkie fingers, you know he'd be OK at a school where the teachers had never seen a child with cucumbers for pinkie fingers, but there's a school one town away where the teachers have been working with the cucumber-pinkied for decades. You'd want the cucumber pinkie school! But since Charlie has just a slight speech delay--which we don't even attribute to his hearing loss at this point--I think the town is going to refuse to pay for the cucumber pinkie school.

While the special ed woman--let's call her Holly--was at my house, I found out that the other little girl in town who has microtia didn't even qualify for a special ed slot at the integrated preschool--she's there as a typical kid.

I asked Holly what the hours are at the integrated preschool. She told me the school runs four mornings a week from 8:15 to 11:00.

This could not possibly be more useless to me. I will not be awake when I pack him off to school. By the time he is back, I will be just about done clawing my way out of my morning haze. And what about the days I go to work? I guess I'd have to have Charlie take the bus from the integrated preschool to the day care where he is now. I fail to believe that such a short time in a room where there are speech pathologists--working with other children, not with Charlie, because he'd be a typical kid--could be more beneficial to him than staying in our fantastic day care.

So this is playing out in a way that I didn't expect. It feels weird to be asking for this expensive, highly specialized school, and then turning around and saying "if you won't pay for that, then I don't want anything." Well, not not anything. I'd take speech services.

This afternoon when I picked up Summer at ballet I was chatting with a mom whose daughter was in preschool with Summer. This little girl began to lose her hearing--it was the preschool teachers who noticed it--and got diagnosed with progressive loss at age three and a half. She got hearing aids in both ears. Her parents decided to keep her at our preschool and just do lots of speech work with her at home. "Everyone told us it was the wrong decision, which as a parent was hard to hear," said the mom. I will be calling her to talk about it some more, as well as the mom of the other girl with microtia who is now at the integrated preschool and getting speech services after school from the town's speech path, as well as another mom I remember from preschool whose daughter wears hearing aids.

We have six months until Charlie turns three, but time slips away, so I'm going to make those within the next week. 

Fast Talker

For "sharing" (show and tell), Summer wanted to bring the tchotchke Mary gave her at Catherine's house. I thought that was a good idea; she could tell the story of how it came from her great-great-aunt in Ireland. "Do you remember who that belonged to?" I asked her. She doesn't remember Catherine since she was a baby when Catherine died. Thinking of Padraig (which, you may recall, we pronounce "poor-rick") she said, "What was his name again? Bacon?"