Month: January 2015

Finals ended last Friday for Vince.  Yesterday was MLK day and today was a teacher’s professional day so the fine people who educate our children could do grading and pull together the report cards.  So it was a 4 day weekend for the children.

Vince and three of his pals suddenly realized – pretty much at the beginning of the four day weekend – that they had a project due on Friday the 23rd.  This project required 4 hours of community service and also a colorful presentation.  Frantically, the other parents and I scrambled to find somewhere where the kids could go (3 hours Monday, 1 hour today) to be somewhat helpful.  They ended up picking up a lot of trash in parks which sounded really dull and boring to me, but ended up being very entertaining because they ended up crossing creeks and climbing up and down large rocky mountains and getting muddy.  Sometimes this coordination effort that goes on behind the scenes, hidden in the dark corner of my email inbox, exhausts me.  I have no good reason for this, it’s only email and a few exchanges.  I’m tired and then Vince lobbied hard for a sleepover with the boys between the two trash picking up episodes.  His lament?  It’s been a while since the last sleepover.  A while?  It’s been like since FRIDAY.  It’s been two nights since a sleepover.

Anyways because I’m a pushover (and beacuse Jeremy gently reminded that the kids were on break and that they really had this time off) and Vince rapidly curtailed his eye rolling tactic into a sweet talk tactic (i.e. You are the best mother I’ve ever had!), I had three boys over at the house for over 24 hours.  It’s too long really, you can see their eyes glaze over at the 20 hour mark even though it’s only 3 pm.

Part of the sleepover deal was that they finish the presentation before everyone went home.  Vince complained when I stipulated this, because it’s due FRIDAY and it’s only TUESDAY.  But I was not going through another round of coordinating emails to get this sucker done.  Just an hour of concentration is all that I asked for.  And this is what happened:

This is such not a girls’ group project.  When I look at this, I just want to straighten everything and make everything evenly balanced.  Oh well.  Good enough.

Vickey came over and we went to the park.  A little chilly, but we went on the swings and up and down jungle gyms.  Edda got a new jacket with fake fur trim.  It looks arctic.

*******

Vince spent the day picking up trash in Rock Creek Park, part of the MLK day of service…

Dad was in town.  We went out for Greek food.  They set cheese on fire.

Vince’s finals are over.  He celebrated by making poached eggs.

Jeremy spent a lot of time this weekend trying to stop the infernal beeping of our verizon fios box.  When it gets cold, the closet gets cold, then the battery gets cold, then the battery stops working and then the verizon box beeps every 30 minutes.  He pried the speaker off the circuit board.  He warned me before doing it that he might destroy the circuit board and that verizon would charge us a lot of money to replace it and we’d be without Internet for a few days.

Vince at violin lesson.  I haven’t seen Kelly in many, many months.  Vince has been biking to lessons for a while now.

The awesome Linda giving the reluctant Vincent a haircut.

Jeremy and Edda at Sunday night dinner.  There was a dogfight (between the pugs) during the spaghetti course.

Donald.  Dessert: Cinnabons

Jane is 18!  Really.  She’s 18.

And this is why one should remember to print some photos every once in a while.  We went through a lot of 18 year old photos…  Lots of fun.

We had Edda’s IEP meeting this morning.  An IEP is an Individualized Educational Program – all kiddos who have special needs have this in place in order to qualify for special needs services.   Now that I’m almost a decade out from getting Edda’s diagnosis and now that I’ve attended a decade of these meetings, I was determined to be cheerful and optimistic at this meeting.  The goal was not to cry. Things are going great for Edda.  She’s in a good mood, she loves school and we all love the people who work with her.  There were the following eight people at Edda’s meeting:  her teacher, the assistant principal, school psychologist, occupational therapist, physical therapist, gym teacher, speech therapist, and augmentative communication specialist.

Even this report that I got earlier in the week did not deter me from my plan of cheerfulness and optimism.

A few months ago, they gave me a form in which I had to answer about 200 questions about what Edda could do.  I think the simplest questions were like “Can she sit independently?” and moved on to “Can she put on a sweater?” to “Can she follow two instruction commands?” to “Can she keep her room tidy?” and finally “Can she manage her frenemies? or “As a hotel concierge, can she make restaurant reservations while soothing an irate customer?”

I think Edda could only do one thing out of the 200 things.  There is no disputing that Edda is performing at an extremely low range compared to that of her peers.  But when you take a careful look at the numbers in the above report, none of the DATA made any sense.  Look:  the standard score is 100.  But then somehow the full scale score is 40, which somehow <0.1%.  But shouldn’t 40/100 be 40%?  And the full scale score if 40 from three component scores of 49, 55 and 40 <- that doesn’t make any sense either.

I was like, whatever, who cares what the data says, let’s move on.  Jeremy on the other hand, the lover of statistics, the guy who got a PhD in statistical analysis of polymers, who taught me statistical mechanics, got really interested in the data and got the psychologist to actually pull out the bell curve for the questionnaire and once we saw the bell curve, we understood.  100 is the mean score (not like 100% on an exam), with statistical deviation of 15.  So with a score of 40 on the test, we are really more than 3 standard deviations from the mean.   Three!  More than three, it’s really 4, right?  100-15-15-15-15 = 40.  Edda’s one in a million.  Or 99.994%.  Is that one in a million?  I can’t math tonight. At that point in the meeting, I was actually kind of laughing to myself at Jeremy – he can’t resist digging into the statistical analysis of the the data even though it doesn’t matter in the end.

Anyways.  I cried.  And I made at least 2 other women in the room cry.  It was a tough day.

I drove Vince to school this morning in my pajamas.  I did throw a robe on over the PJs.  It’s been that kind of week.  I almost got away with it until I got home and my next-door neighbor spied me en route between car and front door and laughed at me.

It has been a long day.   I’m still trying to learn how to be a mother.  Forgive me my faults, my dear children.  I’m trying my best.

What even made the day longer was that I needed to drive to Alexandria, back to my mother ship, the patent office. I don’t think I’ve been back to the office in over a year, but I needed to go today because an attorney requested an in-person interview and I also needed to restock my office supplies.   I lugged a cart full of paper and toner from the office supply room to the car (and through snow/salt/sand covering very bumpy bricked sidewalks) which was parked about a quarter-mile away.  Someday I do aspire to do my work mostly paperless, but it’s just so very satisfying to make notations on a real sheet of paper with a real pen.

I know this is old – but we just got it loaded onto youtube.  It’s Edda’s Thanksgiving play.  When I watch it, I’m both happy and sad.  I like it when I tilt more towards happy (which is mostly how I feel about these things), but it’s also always a little sad.  For a long time I wanted that last lingering bit of sad to go away (because I just wanted to get over it and get on with it, whatever “it” was), but now I think that it’s OK that it’s in there all the time – like a little stone I carry around in my pocket.  Sometimes, like a stone in your pocket, you can forget that it’s there because you are so used to carrying it around.  But it weighs something and whenever you reach for a tissue or lip balm or some cash, you remember, oh yeah, that.  Yeah, it’s still there.

Of all the household repairs, I like plumbing the best.  I think it’s genetically programmed into me. My parents both are adept as designing piping systems in nuclear power plants so I think it is natural that I like to fit pipes together and move fluid from one place to another.  If I had a lot of time, I would do all the plumbing work in the house.  I’ve replaced wax rings on toilets in this house and I’ve repaired a number of faucets.  Plumbing involves so many interesting materials: there is the PVC piping and the chemical welding, there is copper piping and the solder with the blowtorch and then there is (if one is brave enough) the gas piping. This weekend, I replaced an incorrectly installed drain from our laundry tub.  We didn’t notice that it was installed backwards until Saturday morning when it started leaking.

*******

I bought Vince a five pound bag of gummi bears.  When I started working with Vince to improve his Chinese grade, I started to introduce to him all the habits I have from years of being a good (a.k.a. anal) student.  I taught him about calendars and how to write down when everything is due and how to not leave everything until the last minute.  I taught him about flash cards and how to use them effectively.  There are study habits which involve using a timer and a set reward and there are certain rituals that I invoke to delineate “study time” from non-study time.  Jeremy watched me teach all this to Vince and asked if anyone taught all these quirky habits to me.  No one taught these habits to me, I’ve always thought that everyone knew how to study.  It never occurred to me that anyone needed to be taught how to study.

Anyways, Vince is working a little everyday on his Chinese.  Most days, the studying goes fine.  Some days (maybe once or twice a week) he’s really mad about studying and rolls his eyes at me. His final is tomorrow.  He told me this afternoon he feels really well prepared.  The gummis are his daily reward for reviewing his lessons, he gets only one at the end of each daily study session.  I told him when he gets through the whole bag, he’ll be fluent.  OK, maybe not quite.  Maybe 2 bags?  3?