Green Light; Red Light!!

Yesterday I played a game of Red Light, Green Light with a pickup. Apparently I lost. I was less than 2 minutes from my house. I think there's some research that says 90% of all car accidents happen less than 2 miles from your house. We've proved that theory.

I had taken Romania to school and was planning to hit the jogging path to walk with Egypt. The path is only 1/2 mile but it started to rain and I was getting cold. So after just one time, we headed home. I had a green light heading through an intersection. I could see this smaller pickup coming at me from the right and could do nothing about it. He slammed into the back right side of the van. I hit the brakes but spun completely around and blew both back tires. It was awful. The noise was so loud. I was rattled and crying but was able to get out of the car to check on Egypt who is sitting cock-eyed still strapped in her seat. Luckily she was sitting on the driver's side and her door opened and I got her out. Some very nice people from a hair salon came out to help me get Egypt and my things and go sit inside their business.

It's been hectic trying to figure out where to send the van to be fixed, talking with insurance people, buying a new car seat for Egypt, visiting the ER and a chiropractor and getting the boys to and from school. I just picked up Vicodin and muscle relaxers and am heading to bed.

I brought Egypt with me to the chiropractor this afternoon just to be sure everything was in the right place. She was very tired from going two days without any naps and was kind of crabby on the drive into town. I told her that God would not be happy with the way she was talking and if it continued she would be punished. She kept saying she didn't want to go to the doctor and said, "Jesus said he wants you to take me to Fred Meyer." (a local grocery store) I had to fight back the laughter to keep from driving off the road. How do kids come up with such hilarious ideas? I said we couldn't go to Fred Meyer but I could take her to "Star Chicken" (what she calls Carl's Jr.) if she obeyed at the doctor. Lucky for me she obeyed because I was hungry!

Freezer Burn

Last week I spent five hours with my mom cooking 10 meals. I've cooked freezer meals before, but I convinced my mom to come help me cook by enticing her with 5 meals of her own. Tonight I pulled out my first one. Little disappointed. It was Lemon Chicken. I had made this before, but don't remember it tasting so bland. I also made it fresh the night we ate it, so maybe that was the difference. (Super-hero dad didn't even notice, whew!) I was cleaning out the freezer (in search of ice cream) and starting to pull stuff out to throw away. I can't believe some of the stuff I found! It's really quite disgusting how long you can keep food. Every time I would look at something, I would convince myself that I would be in need of that someday. I'm embarrassed to admit (but what are you going to do about it, right?) that I pulled out 6 year old homemade spaghetti sauce. Yes, that's right. For some reason, I've been looking at the same spaghetti sauce in a plastic box thinking I would use it for the past six years. Can you top that??

The Messy Scientist

The first two pictures were taken in Holland's room. I've emptied his room three times now. I've limited his 'stuff' to Legos and Rokenbok. Not really working that well. My room is half-filled with his stuff because I've run out of room in the garage. This is what happens when he has too much: he gets overwhelmed and everything becomes a project. He uses every available object in his room. He likes to create "scenes" on the Rokenbok table: Lego guys battling it out with Star Wars ships; some guy swinging down a zipline he's rigged from his bed to a stool; little green army guys riding around in Rokenbok vehicles looking for someone to battle.



The second set of pictures is an experiment he did in the kitchen. Apparently I had decided to do unimportant things like laundry and cleaning and came back (hours and hours later) to find this set up in the kitchen. I don't know if you can see what he did, but he rigged a series of objects to carry water; through the paper towel tube, and eventually fill up a bowl. It was a great idea, but the water didn't make it past the paper tube. This is why my house is in complete disarray all the time. I cannot keep up with the experimenting. It doesn't do much good to remind him not to do it. He forgets. The only way to stop him from doing this is to glue him to my hip.

Lunar Eclipse

Well, we saw it. But the batteries in my camera were dead. So no lasting memory pictures. But the boys were so excited to watch it. They both ran back in the house to grab pencil and paper and draw what they saw! Romania even took his to school to show his teacher. I love it when kids get excited about learning! The night sky was so clear that I was even able to point out some constellations.

10 Things.....

That will send me to the nut house:

1. Going to use a strainer in the kitchen only to find it's been mangled by the resident scientist.

2. Canning jars of peaches and not being able to find the gripper. Again, compliments of the scientist.

3. Reaching for gum in my purse, only to find that it's been stolen.

4. Having computer paper used for art projects.

5. Finding frozen colored ice pops in the freezer that have been made with ink from a pen.

6. Vacuuming 20 minutes ago and still being able to find bits of crackers, popcorn or pretzel trails on the floor.

7. Finding old sandwiches, dried up food and banana peels under a bed.

8. Stepping on Legos that I just asked to be taken upstairs. They must have walked down on their own.

9. Answering the same question 5 times, asked 5 different ways, and still giving the same answer in less than 10 minutes.

10. Washing clothes and finding legos, rocks, food wrappers and hard candy in the dryer after the cycle.

The Immunization Crisis

For the past week and a half, I've been on the phone almost daily trying to track down medical records for the boys. We're on our third pediatrician and somehow records never got transferred when we changed peds. Neither facility can locate the records. One place went private and sent all their records back up to a teaching hospital and the other facility changed computer systems. The receptionist tried to tell me since we weren't in the system, they didn't have our charts. Luckily, our former doctor walked by and I joked that "you lost my boys!" She was able to explain to the receptionist that they would have to locate the records by hand (what a concept! Something has to be done without a computer!) I still have not heard from either facility.

The whole reason behind this is Holland's school waited until 2 weeks ago to tell me they didn't have his immunizations and he would have to leave school on February
20th if they didn't have them. What they do have is incomplete. In some cases they don't have record of 4 sequences of shots. I know that I didn't miss any, but no way to prove it. Last night I was watching a movie and got this weird feeling that I had seen a yellow folded card that I could picture his immunizations charted on. I went through several drawers, craft boxes, and receipt boxes. I did find the record that came from San Diego where Holland was born (with his given birth name. Wouldn't that be fun to explain??) And then as I was standing in the school room looking at a stack of drawers, there it was. The record I must have used when Holland went to preschool!! I was so thankful because it meant he didn't have to miss school or go through about 6 more shots.

Water, Water Everywhere

Everything's so much more fun with water, right? So why not on Valentine's Day? Not that we were planning anything spectacular, but you never want to have to deal with an overflowing toilet.

I had just finished getting the kids dinner. Egypt had been finished for a few minutes and called to me saying she needed help with her clothes. This is always a clue to some greater mischief. She said she needed to change her clothes because they were wet. We're very close to being finished with potty training and any time she gets a little wet, ALL the clothes come off and she finds clean ones in her drawers. I put her back on the toilet to see if she would go again. No luck. So, got her dressed and went back downstairs. The boys were playing a game on the computer, so I sat down for a breather. Not even 5 minutes later, I hear a strange dripping noise upstairs, like someone forgot to turn off the faucet. I had Romania go investigate. Needless to say, "you're not going to believe this!" is not what you want to hear. I ran upstairs and water is gushing out of the bathroom floor onto the hall carpet. I get in the bathroom and the toilet (I'm thanking higher powers that it was clean water) is running over. I turn off the valve at the bottom and start yelling to the boys to get towels. I had no idea how I was going to clean this up. How do you pick up an inch of water on a floor? I race back downstairs and see that the water is dripping through the ceiling from a vent. Fabulous! Now we're going to have moldy drywall. I grab a plastic bowl and throw everything off the table it's dripping onto, shove the bowl under the drip and grab a broom and dustpan. Back upstairs the boys are stomping on the very wet towels. So basically I swept up the water and kept throwing it into the tub. It worked pretty well.

I even had time to page super-hero dad and tell him about our little fiasco. But his pager has been on the fritz and he didn't get the message. When he opened the door, the boys run at him and start explaining about the big water mess. We figured out (process of elimination since she was the only one up there) that Egypt kept flushing the toilet. Practicing for when she actually uses it.

Tonight super-hero dad and I ignored the humongous mess in the kitchen and watched a movie. How romantic! Too bad I didn't think to get a picture. Now that I have some where to write about all our mishaps, I'm constantly evaluating if the situation would make a good blog post and if so, how fast can I grab the camera. Sorry. I grabbed a bowl instead.

Going to School

Today I helped out in Romania's class for a couple hours. Of course I'm not sure how much help I actually was. Egypt was with me. She did okay the first hour coloring at a table and reading. I mainly helped with crowd control and getting the kids quieted between transitions. Then the teacher gave me some blacklines to copy for an upcoming penguin unit and also lamenating some charts. Everything takes longer with a 3 year-old, but I was able to do some of the copying and all of the lamenating. Romania's teacher is so laid back, so it was no problem having Egypt with me. I just know I would have been more help without her there. Tomorrow they are having a little Valentine party and Romania will get to hand out his handmade cards (I replaced all the "I love Joy" ones).

In the time I was there, the did a warm up word search, calendar time, a math game using a clock, read a story and did some inferring and had 20 minutes of quiet reading. That took two hours! He's there 6 1/2 hours! I feel like all the work I was doing at home is just getting wasted because he has to wait for the other kids to catch up. When I did school with the boys, on average it took 2 1/2 hours (if everything went smoothly) and we got reading, writing, handwriting, history, math, Bible verse, Bible story, science and maybe an art project completed. I know he's having a good time and making friends, and really I couldn't homeschool right now because of all of Holland's doctor appointments. But part of me is thinking about all the time spent on transitions and getting quiet and getting your paper and pencil ready and stop talking again and listen to the directions for the 3rd time. I feel the need to have some one-on-one time with him on the weekend so he doesn't lose all he's learned at home.

Reading in Bed

When I was little, I remember my mom putting foam curlers in my hair and going to bed with them. It felt really weird to sleep in them, but it's such a fun memory of waking up with curly hair. I bought some foam curlers to use on Egypt. While her hair was still wet after a bath, she sat in bed reading and I put curlers in. These are some of the pictures I took. I wasn't sure if she'd sleep in them, but most had fallen out by morning because her hair is still pretty thin. She got pretty goofy and kept looking in the mirror to see them.

Who Is Joy?

For the past two evenings, I've been helping Romania make Valentine cards for class on Thursday. The teacher requested they be hand made and to make one for each student. We came up with a good idea and he loved using all my scrapbooking tools. He got to use a hole punch, put eyelets in and spray ink on the card. I was going back and forth helping Holland with a mystery game he's playing on the computer, so I was pretty distracted. When I came back I found this. Apparently he flipped the cutout words I made with my Cricut and it said "I love Joy" instead of "I love you".
Fortunately I only had to make 5 new cards.

The Electrical Experiment

Whenever the phone rings and it's Holland's school calling (love caller I.D.) and the conversation begins with, "We've had an interesting day..." I know something's askew. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, it has to do with electricity. He really is a smart kid trapped in a non-executive-functioning body. He has so much natural curiosity, so much passion and so much impulsiveness that the combination is deadly. Luckily (actually it wasn't luck, but divine intervention) he was spared from injury at school.

I haven't been able to get the whole picture of what happened, but I've pieced together that he was frustrated that he wasn't being allowed to build something. He was persistent and asked several different adults in the class. Each one responded with no, not now. He was in the reading area of the room and he had found himself a paper clip, unbent it and stuck it in an electrical outlet. Sparks went flying. Somehow he managed to touch part of the outlet that resulted in big sparks, but didn't feel a shock. His teacher told me he cried for several minutes and then just sat at his desk staring off into space. This is the same kid who at about 1 year of age, touched our glass fireplace with all ten fingertips. He had blisters on each finger and guess what? He did it two more times before he learned something. You're probably wondering why I didn't teach him not to touch hot things or stick things into an outlet. BELIEVE me, I did. This is the executive functioning and cause and effect skills he lacks.

We had another conversation about making good choices and I don't believe he will be sticking any more paper clips in outlets. He will, I'm sure, continue to invent, create, build and construct various masterpieces that will require a keen eye, constant supervision and total disregard for housework.

911 is too many numbers to dial in an emergency. I'm gonna need to put that in speed dial.

Doctor, Doctor, Therapist, Therapist

There should probably be one more therapist in there. Holland had an appointment with an Occupational Therapist today. I was thinking it was more for strengthening his back and some small motor issues I've noticed, but the OT pointed out many things I hadn't noticed. (Which is why I'm not an OT). I brought his IEP, writing samples and a list of the meds he is on. I had seen a change in his handwriting over the past year or so. When I was schooling at home, he had really nice handwriting. Very careful to copy the words, spacing was right on. He had all the mechanics. But by the end of his 2nd grade year and the beginning of 3rd grade, I saw a drop in legibility, spacing, and letter formation. After a short observation, the OT thinks that his writing problems could be linked to his medication. I knew that tremors were a possible side effect of one, but assumed it would be noticeable in daily activity. She had me watch him write and sure enough, there was a shakiness to his writing. This is probably not something that can be remedied with therapy, but not to worry, he has plenty of other things to be concerned with!

He has trouble copying body movements. She had him stand facing her and he was to copy her movements. He had great difficulty with some of them and after watching him I wondered how he lasted so long in karate. He could not touch his right arm to a lifted right knee and then switch. He would lift one knee and then touch the standing leg with the wrong hand. He also had trouble raising his arms fully extended above his head. She asked me if he had ever broken his arm. Nope. But he's double jointed in his elbows and after she pointed it out, I wondered why I never noticed it! We're going to meet with the OT once a week and looks like we'll also see a Phsyical Therapist to help with movement related to his Spina Bifida and tethered cord. I also filled out a lengthy sensory questionnaire. It will be interesting to see how all his sensory issues relate to his current struggles and frustrations. We're slowly getting more of the picture here. If this were a 500 piece puzzle, I'd say we've successfully completed 6 pieces so far.

Feel the Burn

I actually made it to the deep water exercise class today. I almost didn't even bother. Holland woke me up at 5 to open his door and go to the bathroom. Of course after that, I couldn't go back to sleep and he just played in his room. So I layed there thinking about how I couldn't go back to sleep and how I'd have to get up in 90minutes. Then there's the craziness of trying to get three kids ready to catch the bus and drive the other one to school.

I made the childcare reservation this morning, so I forced myself to go.

I was the youngest one in the class. Didn't help my ego at all. I think the average age was about 60. But most of them looked like they were there to visit and I was paying for childcare, so I was gettin' my 5 bucks worth! I definately felt it. Especially since I had just done two days of workouts at home. But, no one could see my sweat! Big plus for that.

I already will have to interrupt the swimming schedule on Wednesday. Holland is going to see an Occupational Therapist. He'll be evaluated for fine motor skills (trouble with handwriting, writing in one direction, putting things in order). I can't believe we're going to see yet another doctor. My insurance company actually set up a care management person for us. Maybe we've been red-flagged.

Day #2

I'm documenting that I finally got a chance to exercise. And even two days in a row!! woo-hoo! I bought a DVD the other day. Someone had recommended "The Firm" workout series. They have a bunch of different videos that target various areas. I got "Burn and Shape". Sounds good. Let's burn. Let's shape.

Let's also get something straight. I'm not 20, I'm not thin and I sweat. I look nothing like those girls on the DVD. I saw plenty of close-ups and unless they somehow retouched a video shoot, not one of those girls sweat during the entire 45 minutes. That's disgusting. I hurt in areas I forgot could hurt. Yesterday I made super-hero dad take the boys out after Romania's basketball game. I put Egypt to bed for a nap and moved the furniture around. Now I know why I like working out in a pool. You can sweat and no one notices.

Today I did a DVD that uses a giant rubber ball. I think it's called a Yoga ball, but it wasn't yoga. I'm surprised at how good a workout it was. I felt stretched, and a little taller. I have to be strategic about these workouts. If all the kids are around, I will never get to exercise. They bounce the ball all over the house and they'd probably be laughing at me because I go left when the instructor goes right.

Tomorrow I'm planning a trip to the club. Finally. A day with no doctor appointments, pending teacher conferences or a visit to the vet. Egypt is gonna go play in the child care room and I'm gonna go jump in 15 feet of water. I'm gonna sweat and no one will know.