Mystery Box

A box without a return address appeared on our front porch. It contained a book for school ("For meeeee!" sings David), a Justice League DVD ("How day know I love Super Mahn?" asks David), a set of pink and girly hair things ("Foh meeee!" shrieks Lauren happily), and a couple of swimmy bathtub toys. The clown fish was immediately snatched up by Lauren, who has been holding him and making "fish lips" every since, while David fell on the whale and immediately started taking him apart.

No notes or clues were left, so we're not sure who it came from, but it has markings from Indianapolis. I have my suspicions.

Would the generous donor prefer to step forward, or remain anonymous?

I Found It!

I officially found something I'd lost and have been looking for now for over 18 years!

(G-d, if that doesn't frighten you, nothing will!)

It's a video. I stumbled upon this video when I was something like 16 years old. I figured out that there was seriously something wrong with the world when I could look at numbers and have absolutely no comprehension of either their shape OR meaning. These were sporadic episodes of complete number-amnesia, brought on by periods of high-intensity stress at this new thing called "work." Imagine the panic you might feel if you were manning a cash register with an insanely long line of impatient people, and when you looked at the display to give people their totals, it made absolutely no sense at all. It's like looking at your digital watch and seeing Mandarin Chinese or ancient Sanskrit written there. Interesting figures, but informationally devoid.

This weird experience sent me looking for various answers; among them, a trip to the Colorado Association of Learning Disabilities, where I discovered not only the innumerable permutations of dyslexia ("I can't be dyslexic, I can read just fine,") but also my strong LD/ADD family background. (Dad was simply the "bad reader," and we just knew it was "hard for him." He rarely, if EVER, read smoothly. He might read the occasional thing out loud, but it was always accompanied by lots of stops and starts and sounding out of words, and more than one round of spelling words out with the intention of asking for mom to translate. Still, I didn't think much about it. It's simply "how things were.") LD's are extremely hereditary.

While looking for references at the CALD, I ran into a video. I checked it out, the whole family watched it, and I was thrilled with it. FINALLY, someone explained for me what I hadn't been able to put into words. It was a video aimed at non-dyslexics, which gives a clue as to how someone with an LD actually functions and sees the world.

Well, I promptly forgot the title of the video, and the Association promptly became defunct. (This was, after all, in the pre-internet days of the late '80s, so it's not like they had a website I could look up!) The video was lost.

I subscribe to several listservs these days, and on one of them, someone was complaining about the symptoms their Kindergarten-aged daughter was having, and was it dyslexia? Someone lauded the idea of catching the "disease" early, so that the little girl could get "her brain re-wired more easily." Re-wired?!? To say that I was displeased with this comment is an understatement! Slightly rabid was more like it. "Disease?" Like what, leprosy? It's not the kid's brain that needs fixing, tinkering and altering, it's how they're presenting information to the kid! Sheesh! What happens when we decide that every variation in nature is a pathology and needs to be exterminated? This kid isn't going to be "cured" from the way she thinks...at best she'll learn how to cover the symptoms that distress her parents and teachers and attempt to sublimate feeling completely inadequate. At worst, she'll try faking it for awhile, then completely give up on all of it and drop out early, opting for any exit which doesn't require daily reminding of just how "broken" she supposedly is.

Teachers often make this mistake. Dyslexics are highly visual people; they tend to think in pictures and shapes. Abstract concepts tend to throw them. I remember high school being a bit of a schizophrenic experience, since some math and science classes I would literally fail, and others (like geometry and physics) I made honor roll with. Teachers could NOT understand how I could be making A's in math one semester, and be making F's the next. So I'd have teachers pull me aside in the hallway and say, "What's the matter with you? Mr. Smith says you're failing his math class. You can do better than that!" At the time, I had no idea "what the matter with me" was. Had I been able to, I would have looked the guy in the eye and said, "I'm a dyslexic who thinks in visual-spatial terms, and Mr. Smith's explanations are all deeply grounded in the abstract. Within five minutes of each class, I'm utterly lost. He might as well be speaking Arabic. I try to take notes, but inadvertently reverse my numbers, so when I try to go home and work it out myself, it makes even less sense than the Arabic gobbledegook that frustrated me six hours earlier. When I feel like I might cry, I close the books and go do something more pleasant. I come back to school the next day with no assignments done, no further understanding, and not much chance of getting it right in the future. I think that about covers it."

Anyway, I thought of that video again and wondered if I could find it online. And BEHOLD!! Through a lot of trial and error and wild guesses, I ended up emailing the spouse of the guy who produced the darned thing! It's called "How Difficult Can It Be?" by Richard Lavoie...if you deal with anyone at ALL with an LD, I highly recommend seeing it! Even our local library carries a copy, so it's worth checking into via that route.

As long as I was looking at the guy's stuff, I found several more things. Among them was a book titled, "It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend," the premise being that LD kids have a harder time of it socially than they might otherwise have. Most of it focuses on those with way, way more serious symptoms than the ones that I have...the complete inability to read facial gestures, for instance. It does have its salient moments, though. One of the most hilarious was its discussion on organization. This has never been one of my...er...strong points. And yes, the world is full of tips and hints and systems and books and heaven knows what. "This is a tall order for those with learning and attentional difficulties. Unfortunately, the organizational techniques contained in most books on the topic are generally unsuccessful for those with learning disorders. Due to my own ADHD-related organizational difficulties, I have spent significant time, energy, and resources attempting to integrate these "anti-clutter" strategies into my lifestyle--with minimal success. The techniques that are so effective for most people (e.g., date books, electronic calendars) simply do not work with many people with attentional deficits. We lose the datebooks and forget to buy batteries for the electronic devices!

Amen!

These techniques fail because ADD people view the world in a unique way. We tend to be very visual and need to see something in order to remember and organize it. Therefore, elaborate filing, categorizing, and storing systems are doomed to fail. If it is out of sight, it is literally out of mind. That is why people with ADD tend to be "pilers"; we place all of our important and necessary documents and materials in piles that can be easily and readily accessed. For years, my office at school featured a conference table with innumerable piles of papers, periodicals, memos, and documents."

Doug laughed manically. I don't know if he was thinking of my reading pile on the end table; the bills, mail, and phonics piles on the kitchen table; the cooking, coupons and directions pile on the counter under the radio; the soon-to-be-recycled paper piles on the living room desk; the LLL paper pile on the floor of the dining room; the notes on Adobe software DVDs and new releases on the floor of the bedroom; or perhaps it was the (no kidding) foot-high stack of graphic design-related material on my desk.

This house suffers from a bad case of CHAOS. (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome.)

Ragged

So.

Left the house (late!) at 12:15, drove down to the Science Center in order to participate in their Homeschool Days (see schedule here). On the way, David suddenly shouts, "Mom! I fink I need frow up!" Ack, ack, ack!! So I go rocketing off an exit ramp which happens to have a wide shoulder, and pull over and slam on the brakes, and hit the button to open the van door. David unbuckles his seat belt and sort of slithers out the door. I head around the van to his side and watch him as he takes big, deep breaths of the cool outside air. The melting snow has creating a little sparkly puddle in front of us, and the air smells like mud and warm, brown grass. Nearly Spring. David looks at me hopefully and says, "Hey! Now I fink I don't need to!" He probably overheated and with my luck, has my propensity for motion sickness. Still, I handed him a plastic bag from the backseat and he was under strict orders for the rest of the trip.

We got there, collected our tickets, and I took him to the meeting place, where there were probably around 25 kids waiting. After dropping him off, I took Lauren over to the Discovery Room, where we played with race cars, tried out some instruments, rolled balls down ramps, looked at bugs through microscopes, petted a four-inch Brazilian Hissing Cockroach (I'm SO glad those things don't live under my fridge, let me tell you!), ground dried corn into maize, poked at a life-sized, plastic skeleton, and looked at dead and dried butterflies.

This still left us with 45 minutes to kill, so we managed to wander a little bit. We even found a penny press that would squash a penny and put an image on a butterfly on it, which Lauren thought was grand, so we ran one through the machine. We also spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the life-sized, robotic T-Rex on the lower level, which caused Lauren no end of angst. Was it real? What had it done to that Triceratops? It was moving. It was real, wasn't it? How does it eat blood? Why is it that color? And so forth. I finally dragged her into the gift shop to make her look at something else for the remaining 15 minutes.

We went back to pick up David, who was in the middle of helping to build a six-foot arch made of vinyl-covered blocks. I asked him how it'd gone and he replied, "I don't want to tell you."
"What? Why not?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Oh. Well, they have lots more of these classes, and if I don't know if you like it or not, I don't know if I should sign you for more."
"Oh, definitely!"
"It was worth it? You had a good time?"
Vigorous nodding.
OK. Fine.

I waited a while.
"You know, I saw that arch you guys were building. It got knocked down, I bet those guys got in LOTS of trouble for that!"
"Oh NO," he says. "We builded it and knocked it down lots, and once I did it and nobody else did, and some of those blocks fell on the teacher's head, and that made me laugh! And I tried to make a circle with toothpicks and marshmallows, but then I got tired of that, and...." he prattled on happily. Good.

I took him to the gift shop, intending to show him the dinosaur school set I'd found (a ruler and pencils with dinosaurs on them), but then it happened. He spotted the Triceratops.

He already has the larger one, that's his beloved Triceratops, but this...this was a baby Triceratops! He freaked with joy, and cuddled the Triceratops to his shoulder. He loved him, he adored him, we HAD to take him home! Oh, look, there were TWO babies! Oh, could we take them both? I said no, he could only have one (which I thought was quite generous), and his eyes welled up with tears. But...but...he HAD to have two! No, I said, that baby dinosaur needed to stay here with his mommy. The one you have here is sad, because his mommy was sold without him, and he needs to be adopted. But the other one is quite happy here with his family. This was OK until we went to check out, and then he burst into tears again. But what if somebody ELSE came and bought the baby dinosaur? Then HE would be without his Mommy, too! "Oh no," I said, "I'm SURE he'll tell anybody who comes to buy him that he wants to be with his Mommy, just like he told me, and that person will buy BOTH of them. They won't get separated!" Well...he guessed that would be OK, even though it was hard to leave the other one. He opened the plastic bag and looked deeply into the glass eyes of his new friend. "I'm sorry your Mommy got sold," he said comfortingly, "But I'll take you home and take care of you."

Kosher Shrimp

I know I said they were swimming, but here's undeniable proof. (Well, I suppose you COULD deny it, but why?)

They've been perfectly happy in swim class so far, despite the difficulties in getting them into consecutive classes. I'm not sure if this is easier or harder than putting them together, but I thought they would be more likely to stand around poking each other and giggling if they were in the SAME class. Besides, they're together too much anyway, this gives them a (tiny) breather.

David announced the other day that soon he's going to "be a lobster." I found this to be an interesting statement, until I finally tumbled to the fact that he's referring to the levels of swimming lessons available. So then we had a nice chat about advancement, and how he'd be needing to take a test before moving on to the next level, and how he needed to work more on blowing bubbles and keeping his legs straight before he was going to be able to be a lobster. Apparently he found the pep talk quite inspiring, as he spent a great deal of the next lesson with waterline coming just up under his nose. I did get a small visit from the teacher after his class, telling me that he'd done very, very well. So I suppose he finds this motivating?

Lauren spends less time worrying about such silly things as class advancement, and instead she focuses her energies on making sure that Mom is watching her at all times. She does this mainly by employing lots of grins, winks, and thumbs-up signals. She also excels at memorizing music of all kinds, so I get treated to the "Swimmy Alligator Song" quite a bit...a lovely tale of a treeful of monkeys. (You have to envision this song complete with three-year-old enthusiasm and body language.)

Five little monkeys swinging in the tree,
Teasing Mr. Alligator, "Can't catch me, you can't catch me!"
Along comes Mr. Alligator, quiet as can be,
And SNAPS that monkey right out of that tree!

The joy, of course, is the person who has been "snapped" must jump into the pool. It's all quite exhilarating. Oh, and as a side note: Swimming lessons in February is not exactly the most brilliant of ideas. The pool is nice and warm, but one must be extra-careful to get hair dry and put hoods up on jackets before dashing through an ice-covered parking lot to find the car!

Swimming days are twice a week, and since they happen late in the afternoon, I rarely cook on these days, so we end up going out. One of the days coincides with the same day that "The Clown Lady" (in reality she's Princess the Clown, who really does do some spectacular work) makes an appearance at Fazoli's restaurant. The kids end up going to swimming lessons and then going to get their faces painted during dinner.

David approached this poor woman, and instead of requesting the typical Spiderman face, he asks her to paint him up like a Triceratops dinosaur. (Did I mention the boy's laser-like obsession?) I think, given the circumstances, she did quite well. I have another set of photos which I'll have to post...they're on my cell phone, so that means digging up the various cables to getting them downloaded. Urgh!

Speaking of which, someone wanted me to show them how to download music from iTunes and get those songs backed up onto an iPod. This is particularly hilarious since I don't even OWN an iPod. Still, I think we did relatively well...the biggest problem was getting the 10-15 songs downloaded over the dialup modem. Now if only I could figure out how to hook up one of the tiny iPod shuffles to the car radio, I'd be set!

Let's face it, I have to have my ears open and available at all times with the kids around! Lauren nearly burned the house down the other day...no joke. There was a newspaper on the flat-top stove, and Lauren got up early, came out, dragged a chair into the kitchen, and figured she'd turn one of the knobs on the stove "just to see what would happen." Well, she turned it on low, but pretty soon the newspaper started smoldering. Doug was sleeping on the couch due to a combination of getting all-night technical support calls and a hurt back which didn't want the bed, and he sort of felt like something was wrong, but couldn't put his finger on it. He got up and started to stumble into the bedroom when Lauren intercepted him and said, "Daddy, dere steam inna kitchen." He said at that point his brain clicked on with the sudden realization of you smell smoke!! He shut everything down, but the stove had blackened a good deal of the newspaper. Luckily there was no fire yet. Neither of the kids would talk to Dad about what happened, but when I came out I managed to get the story out of Lauren. Reluctantly, but she told me. So we had a nice conversation about what fire does and how it burns up and "eats" our most favorite things, like our stuffed animals and our blankies and our dollies, and how it can even eat up the whole house and sometimes, it can even eat up your family. This impressed her enough that went around for two days saying, "Mommy, I NEVER going to turn the stove on again! Never, ever, ever!"

I devoutly hope not!!

Waaaay Behind

OK, I officially don't know how it happened, but I got insanely behind on the posting. Let me see what I can do to catch people up....


Mom came out to visit for nearly two weeks for Passover. Her timing was also pretty good as she got to catch the kids' first swimming lessons down at the local rec center. They each have lessons for 45 mins, twice a week, and are having a total blast. David tells me each and every time that he enjoys swimming lessons way more than karate lessons. (Then again, he chose to take karate lessons JUST because his buddy down the street was taking them. He chose swimming lessons because they sparked his own individual interest. I hope he notices this.) It's going to be an interesting circus to keep up for any length of time...in a bid to keep the kids alternately interested, I'm busy doing educational stuff with one while the other swims. This isn't always as easy as it may seem. It DOES make me be creative, though. For instance, did you know that there's a "number line" at all swimming pools? You just have to look at the depth indicators at the side of the pool to see the number line pattern. :-)


I'm just now getting back to what we call "normal" around here. The house is piled deep in new toys, of course. Lauren has new dollhouse furniture (bunk beds for the "kids;" she's all over the Calico Critters dollhouse stuff. She's already got the Townhome, kitchen, bathroom and now kid's room, plus two families...one family of mice, one of dalmations. They're quite itegrated, though...apparently one of the mice married the dalmation, so there's this impossible mish-mash to keep track of where we have Mommy Mouse and Daddy Dog, and Grandma Dog and Grandpa Mouse and of course four kids, two of each kind. The eldest is the dalmation in the red dress, whose name is apparently Sweetheart. And of course they occassionally run away from home with the aid of one of the My Little Ponies. They're also quite fond of making heart-shaped cookies, which are curiously like the beads that Lauren once had on a bracelet that she broke. Oh my.)


There's also a "Littlest Pet Shop" game sitting here, and an amazing popup book about dinosaurs. It's sort of like a popup book of little popup books, and it's quite the work of art! Perhaps best of all, it has (gasp!) TRICERATOPS in it!! (You cannot imagine the triceratops lust that goes on in this house! It's truly insane. We rented a Discovery-type video at the library wherein a Protoceratops was wounded and, eventually, killed. David sat clutching his blankie, tears streaming down his face, but he wouldn't allow me to turn the video off or fast-foward or anything. Luckily the video later featured a herd of Triceratops dinosaurs fending off a T-Rex attack. They even saved their baby Triceratops, so the movie was redeemed at the end.)



In trying to find a photo of the popup book, I've now run into a couple of other interesting items...a Triceratops throw pillow (right), a Triceratops road sign (left)...heck, I even found him a pair of Triceratops shoes that he lusts after. Isn't the internet a grand thing?

By far the most interesting thing gotten by anyone was a real, live digital camera. Have you ever wondered what photos a five year-old boy would take with a digital camera? I'll undoubtedly be uploading a great many of them in the next several days and weeks.

For the moment, though (*yawn!*), I'm off to bed!!