Year: 2007

Edda’s new haircut – inspired by Dora.

She’s eating a pancake breakfast, which I usually consider too fancy for the weekdays, but if you use pancake mix, you just have to add water. How complicated is that? I don’t know why I reserve it for the weekends, I think it’s just that the syrup is too sticky and messes are to be contained to the weekends.

But for us now, everyday is a weekend. Ruby is so confused, every morning, she waits by the door to go to the park or on a hike and I have to explain to her, no sweet doggie, I’m sorry, it’s Tuesday and we aren’t going anywhere even though it’s 9 am and everyone is still at home. Her ears go limp. Sheez, I wonder if I could teach Ruby PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) or how to use some sort of computer-talking device that Stephen Hawkings uses, I bet she’d be really good at it, maybe she could tell us her thoughts on our management of the family. “You guys are just not alpha enough, look at Vince, he leaves crumbs and messes everywhere he goes and Edda gets whatever she wants by screaming her head off, is that discipline? You know I’m a total softie, but you guys have to step up to the plate.” We had a small therapy session with Edda today with her PECS, she just laughed at us like we were idiots and refused to tap the cards. Grrr, so frustrating.

Besides getting paid and being able to pay your bills, having a job also allows one other nice perk – you get to not spend every waking moment with your spouse. Even though Jeremy and I get along as well as Bert and Ernie, we still do have a need to spend some time apart. Hence, I found myself alone at the local Target looking at cool crap and not being able to buy anything because of our new budget of – shelter (mooching off my generous and wonderful parents), food (eating all the stocked food in the pantry and the freezer) and clothing (only if it’s completely worn out and you will be on the street naked or freezing without it). So basically our budget is zero.

It’s been an emotionally draining 4 days. This was suppose to be the QUIET year! Oh well, I’ve been eating too much for my own good. Mmmmm, carbs… yummy.

Being a mother doesn’t come naturally to me. When I had Vince and Edda, it took me a long, long time (years actually) to get used to being touched so much, to not have my own personal space or my own personal time. You know on Friends, when Rachel had Emma and she could put Emma in the next room for what seemed like days at a time and she still looked fabulous in her clothes and she could still go out and have dinner dates and work long hours at Ralph Lauren and then every once in a while, she’d go pick up Emma and they would coo at each other and that would be that? Well, I seriously believed that Hollywood lie. But now, 5 years after my first mother’s day, I’m finally comfortable being the mom. Hooray for the mothers! Hold your loved ones tight, and give them a kiss good night!

For mother’s day, we climbed Burger Hill.

We went to Coney Island with Emy yesterday.

Our first stop was Nathan’s hot dog stand – in operation since 1916 at the same location. Every year on the fourth of July, they hold a hot dog eating contest. How many hot dogs do you think you can eat in 12 minutes? Well some Japanese dude can eat 53 3/4 hot dogs! Puke-o-rama.

We had chili cheese fries for lunch.

Went on some kiddie rides:

Went to Emy’s apartment in the hip Williamsburg area of Brooklyn (you can pretty much see her whole apartment in this photo).

Then we went to the playground in her neighborhood (Emy had never noticed it before – it’s huge).

And had italian ice.

It’s kind of exciting around here. We are excited and nervous to start new things, I haven’t worked in 5 years and before Jeremy got riffed I was going to do find some work, something not too hard/stressful, something maybe part-time and work around Jeremy’s career, but NOW, I’ve got the opportunity to find something exciting and challenging and interesting. Hmmm, I wonder how it will go? All these years, it hasn’t been me who has been taking the family all over the world, it’s been Jeremy, I’ve always been the one who has followed him. We’ve actaully fallen into very traditional gender roles even though it’s nothing that either of us had invisioned when we got married. So Jeremy laughed at me yesterday and said it was my turn to support family and take us somewhere interesting. Ha ha! We’ll see, we’ll see.

I feel a kind of lightness and happiness, things were getting a bit stale at Jeremy’s work, but we were kind of reluctant to give it up since he had such a history with it and he made pretty good money and with Edda’s diagnosis, we wanted to settle somewhere for a few years at least. But now we have a little gift of time, Jeremy’s got a bit of severance package, the health insurance also continues for a little while and we have my parent’s empty house to move to. So now we have a chance to start fresh and clean!

Yesterday, less than 24 hours after Jeremy lost his job, I was at the IEP meeting in New York which was kind of strange. The IEP meeting is the yearly meeting for special needs kids to determine the services for next year – all the occupational, physical, and speech therapies as well as the school and the type of environment that you’ll have. Will Edda have a 1-on-1 aide? Will she have physical therapy everyday? Will she be integrated into a class with typical kids or will she be in a class with only special needs. That type of stuff.

The IEP meeting was in the afternoon and that morning, I went to an ABA school which I saw and I liked and I had heard some rumors of people not really “believing in the philiosphy”. ABA is Applied Behavior Analysis which is a fancy way of saying that there is a lot of 1-on-1 tutoring where the teacher places flash cards to teach.

So you can teach the alphabet, you can teach how to talk to a friend, you can teach how to perform any task. So let’s say Edda is going to learn how to read, you would put flash cards in front of her and have her choose the letter “A” correctly 10 times. That’s the trial part. So it doesn’t look very much like preschool, it looks like rote training. The parent advocate at the IEP told me that she cried after taking a tour of the school. It’s very little interacting with typically developing peers, very little “free play”. My dream is to have Edda communicate effectively enough to participate in mainstream class by kindergarden or first grade, but I feel like she has to make some progress with the communication. All the people at the IEP looked at me as if I had an extra nose for wanting to go to this ABA school. But it all doesn’t matter because we won’t be here.. Ha Ha!

Yesterday was my last day of work at A**. This coming October would have been my 10th anniversary. While the timing of my departure was not voluntary, I have thought for quite a while that 10 years was long enough to stay in this industry. I am proud of what I accomplished and the way I accomplished it. I learned a lot about one version of “the real world” and I am pretty sure another 10 years there would not have been as satisfying as the first. Of course I am also annoyed, insulted and shell-shocked. But since we have no roots or commitments here in Albany and we are in good shape financially and mentally, it seems as good a time as any to move on. As soon as we can make our arrangements we will get our gypsy caravan on the road again and head south to Maryland. We will look for new careers in new fields with all the attendant excitement and anxiety. Doris is excited as well, and the kids seem game, so here we go!

Today I tried to visit another preschool. Because I’ve been speaking many, many people and making many, many appointments, I got confused about where this particular school is located and I ended up on this dead-end residential street with no way to get the correct address. I had the director’s phone number and I left a garbled, apologetic message about being confused and unable to make the meeting and she didn’t call me back. I wasn’t impressed with this school for a bunch of reasons, so I think I’m not going to bother rescheduling.

Edda’s IEP is going well I think. It’s like I’m writing a thesis again. I’m trying to envision an educational program that’s appropriate for her – basically what I want the school to work on for the next year. It sounds simple, but it’s basically convincing the school district to spend money on your child and it’s hard because there, of course, is a limit on the total budget. Of course, what I’d really want is for Edda to be able to do everything a typical 3 year old can do and forget about this IEP, but that’s how it goes.

And we are looking for a house. I liked 3 of the real estate agents who were hosting open houses on Sunday. We are going through the Buying Houses for Dummies book and doing all the things that they suggest even though I must pick up the phone and ask perfectly good strangers for answers. We asked a million questions to 3 agents, then asking for references from the agents and then asking those people a bunch of questions.

For dinner tonight, we BBQed indoors:

Vince’s hair in New York reminds me so much of Donald’s hair all through elementary school. The hairstyle screams “I washed my hair last night and then went to bed and I forgot where I put my comb.”

Big cycling news! It’s definitely amazing how Lance beat the bejesus out of all these guys who were doping… I’m not saying he was doping, but damn, a lot of the top guys are there…

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