Picture Day

I have just now returned home from running a check to Lily's school. What a morning I have had. It is picture day for Lily and I somehow forgot to fill out the order form. I remembered to get her all dolled up. At the bus stop it suddenly hit me that I had forgotten to write the check and fill out the order form.

Before leaving for the bus, I was trying to get Lily's hair just right and she was squirming and crying. Mandy was trying to get a paper, which is due this morning, to print. I got so frustrated I couldn't get a braid in Lily's hair and I couldn't get Mandy's paper to print. Then Lily started crying that we were going to miss the bus. I got a straight part in her hair and put in a little clip. Lily is growing out her bangs and her hair needed a little help, especially on picture day. I noticed a lot of lint on the front of her navy blue dress and tried to find a lint brush or tape. Couldn't find either, where is all my tape anyways? Not in the tape drawer, but I noticed several new pictures taped all over the house. Lily likes to hang up signs. Boys bathroom, girls bathroom, no dogs allowed, restaurant, etc.

I got Lily to put on her shoes and backpacked, and we were out the door. She was of course upset that we were not the first ones at the bus stop this morning. We weren't last and we weren't late - but we were not first. Lily and I are working on using words and not whining, however that is not yet a skill Lily has mastered. We did get to the bus stop in time to wait about three minutes before the bus arrived. Usually we get there in time to wait at least 8 to 10 minutes. Lily likes to be first. While I am the mom and what time we leave the house is ultimately up to me, I tend to try and pick my battles with Lily.

I find that in a lot of my posts people's comments tend to be, you are such a great mom. Which is very sweet and I appreciate very much the kind words, I sometimes come away thinking that my blog is very self congratulatory. I hadn't intended that to be the case. It sometimes makes writing here difficult. In real life I don't get those comments. In real life I tend to get a lot of unsolicited advice about child rearing. Because in real life Lily is a hand full. I come here as a passive aggressive way of telling the world, mostly people that don't even know I have a blog, that I am to a good mom. I feel the need to explain myself, to say, I have a plan - I am trying hard - please shut up and leave me alone.

I think I have lost track of my story...

I came home from the bus stop and looked for Lily's picture order form and realized it was in her backpack. I thought to myself, it would have been easier to just bring Lily home from the bus stop and get the order form arranged and then drive her to school. But, Lily does not like to be driven to school, she rides the bus and she does not like change. So I decided to drive up to the school and fix it there.

First I noticed that Mandy was in the shower and that the light on my printer was blinking. I unplugged the printer and plugged it back in to discover that a half printed page had been stuck in the printer, what do you want to bet that Mandy's paper had not printed out? I tried to ask her while she was in the shower and she screamed back, I can't hear you can you wait a minute. 15 minutes later she tells me that the printer wont work.

So I fixed the printer, printed her paper, and then drove to the school. I didn't take a shower, had bed hair, and no makeup. wrinkled clothes etc. I hoped I wouldn't see anyone I know. What a morning. I got an order form from the front desk and filled it out, wrote the check. I was supposed to give it to the front desk and let them deliver it to the classroom. However, there was a long line of people who were late getting their kids to school this morning and so I walked down the hall and delivered the check to Lily's class myself, even though that is against the rules.

I got to the class and gave her assistant teacher the order from and check. Earlier I had seen her teacher with another parent in a conference near the office. As it turns out yesterday was my day to help in Lily's class, and the assistant teacher was home with a sick child so I stayed and helped for three and a half hours instead of my normal one hour. It was a lot of fun. So the assistant teacher thanked me for all my help and apologized for inconveniencing me, and I told her it was fun. I forgot to ask her if her son who has the swine flu is feeling better. I have not yet mastered the art of being a southern lady. Damn. I will make a point to ask her on Friday, which is my other day to volunteer at the school.

But, as we were speaking and I was giving her my check. About a dozen kids came out of their seats to give me hugs and tell me very important things. I felt so bad for disrupting the class. Especially since I was not supposed to be there. Not really, that was one of the high points of my life. I love being loved. Lily herself got out of her chair and came up to see me to. Last year the darling didn't even say hello to me when I was at the school and did not like for me to come to her class ever. This year I help in her class and she speaks to me, but never hugs me. I was thinking I was going to get a Miss Lily hug at school. I wrapped my around around her and she looks me in the eye and said, "You forgot to give me money for the raffle too." No Lily hug.

I gave her a dollar for the raffle and checked her face for crumbs. It is picture day after all. She gave me a sour expression and I told her she was beautiful. She smiled a little and returned to her seat. The other children were still trying to tell me important things. One saw me walking my dog. One lost a tooth. I said goodbye and sorry for disrupting the class and went on my merry way.

What a morning.

Receptive Language Delay: What Works for Me, 1st Grade

Every song I have heard on the radio this week has been a love song. Here I am missing my baby.

Maybe that will give me an incentive to keep up with my blog. A need for someone to talk to, someone to connect with.

In case you are on the edge of your seat wondering how the heck we all are...

Mandy got her license and her car. I am no longer a chauffeur. Not only do I have more free time, but her disposition has dramatically improved. She seeks me out and asks if she can help with chores and errands. I blinked my eyes and she became an adult. A thoughtful wonderful adult.

Lily is about six weeks into the first grade. She is doing well. Her receptive language delay is improving. Her behavior at school is fantastic. Her grades are average. She is still my little genius but she is has a bit of trouble demonstrating her genius on school work. It isn't for lack of trying she whole heatedly applies herself to school. We spend at least an hour usually two working on skills every night. She is steadily improving.

For all my receptive language delay friends, this is what is working for us currently. I have found that at six she physically improved, meaning her ability to process language is better than it was previously. Much of her delay now is caused by habit more than impairment. I work with her on improving her listening. I notice that she tends to tune people out especially when she is stressed or frustrated. She takes her cues from faces more than actual words and she talks over people so she doesn't have to listen.

What works for me... We play a game, I give her three funny things to do. Like - go to your room and punch your pillow, go to the garage and say the alphabet, go to the backyard and find an acorn. She has to listen to all three instructions and then do all three without any reminders. Then she gets to give me three instructions. She often forgets especially if one of the instructions takes time like saying the alphabet, but she is capable of remembering and I feel this game helps her to work that muscle. We get silly and have a lot of fun. There aren't any rewards or punishment we just make it fun, if she forgets I remind her or I pretend to forget to and we talk about it until she remembers.

Homework...Most of the other parents of first graders in my daughter's class spend about 15 minutes a night on homework and we spend at least an hour maybe two. However, we are doing more than they are. We go over things a lot. I make up work sheets that look like the ones she is doing. That way we can go over it together and then she is able to do her homework on her own. Sometimes she has trouble understanding instructions and so it takes me a little time and some ingenuity to explain things like fill in the blank. Lily prefers to pick her favorite word, than read the sentence several times with each of the choices and pick the one that works. She also likes to get done first, which is way more important to her than getting the write answer. I feel that by the end of the year she will be most improved, perhaps. She is on track. And we really enjoy the time we spend together doing homework, weird but true. I am grateful for the opportunity life has given me to be there for Lily.

That is my life in a nutshell. Add in a little volunteer work, a lot of paid work, a lot of dishes and that is it. Hasn't really seemed interesting enough to write about, but I miss you all.

Ramblings from the Hole in the Ground

The process of getting Mandy a driver's license has been a long one. She finally got her license on Monday, yeah. Up until then I was going mad. Driving her to school in the morning (20 minutes) driving home (20 minutes). Driving to her school to pick her up in the afternoon (20 minutes) driving home (20 minutes). Driving her to work (20 minutes in the other direction) driving home. Driving to her work to pick her up late at night (20 minutes) and driving home (20 minutes). I was so excited that she got her license, I thought at the very least I could give her my keys and while I wouldn't have my car at least I could get some work done.

But, Mandy isn't ready to drive on her own. She isn't ready to even drive with me in the car as practice going to and from school and work. Everyday she says tomorrow. So hopefully today she will do some actual driving. I have a lot of empathy, perhaps too much because I really don't like driving either. Funny thing is that all this driving Mandy around, and this has been going on for years, has increased my ease behind the wheel. Perhaps once she starts to do the chore her skills and confidence will improve too. It was really hard for me when we moved here after living in Japan for four years. I hadn't really driven more than a couple of times per month and there we drove on the other side of the road, and the Japanese are much better drivers, there wasn't any tailgating or people drifting into my lane while talking on the cell phone like here. Well you probably remember all my complaining when we got here, right.

In the mean time I have been working very hard trying to get a car for Mandy. The girl has been working since she was 12. Doing her paper route, summer jobs, and for the last two years she has been working at a grocery store as a cashier. She has saved enough to buy a car. I have been taking her car shopping everyday. Even though she would rather be taking a nap. I am dragging her into this buying a car and driving yourself around thing. I feel guilty, like she will get hurt in an accident and it will be all my fault because she never wanted to drive in the first place. But, not really, she is an adult and needs to start driving herself around. And she really needs to not get in any accidents ever!

The first car she fell in love with was a Silver VW Bug with a stick. She had to have that car, and she promised to learn to drive a stick. I could just see another two and a half years of trying to teach her to drive a stick, meanwhile me spending all day everyday driving her around. I took her to more car places. I would spend the entire day looking for cars for her and then taking her to show them to her. I know I am a terrible mother and should be making her do all this on her own. But, I am tired of the driving her around and the dragging her feet on getting a license and driving and I deal with frustration best by either yelling or working hard.

Yesterday I found another VW bug that was also silver, had less miles and was an automatic. So I took her to see the car. On the way there I told her this car did not have a cd player, she told me to just turn around and go home, there was no way she was buying a car without a cd player. She would just learn to drive a stick. yeah right. I almost pulled over and beat her on the side of the road. So we went to look at the Bug and the dealer said it wasn't there, that one of his guys uses it to run errands and wont be back with it until later. That they love the car and we will love it too. We left our name and number and by the way he never called us. Anyways, I said do you have any other cars in our price range as long as we are here and he said that he specializes in our price range and every car on the lot would be in our price range. I think I heard angels singing.

So I drug Amanda around the lot. And that is when she fell in love with a little red Mustang Coupe, automatic with leather interior. I thought we should take it for a test drive, she said no she wants to do that with her dad. She feels like we are leaving him out of the process and that he should be the one to test drive it with her, take it to the mechanic and negotiate the price. I was seriously trying not to strangle her, but ok dad can do the rest. I asked how late they are open and the guy told me 6 or 6:30pm. What is that? Don't people usually have an actual time they close? OK so we are in Mississippi, things are more leisurely and not ridged with like opening and closing times or having the cars you are trying to sell on the lot.

Jeff meanwhile was trying to pass a gun shooting test. He was out in the firing range and unreachable. I knew that he wouldn't be done until 6pm. I left him messages on his work phone, which I didn't know if he would check before coming home and his cell phone, which I imagined was turned off and he would miss his missed calls and text messages. So Mandy and I drove home.

Jeff called me before leaving work, he passed his gun shooting test. Which by the way gives me enormous knots in my stomach the thought that he has to be able to shoot and clean and load all kinds of big guns as part of his training to be deployed. Not to mention the anthrax and small pox vaccinations and later this month he has to go live in the woods for a week for survival training. This all upsets me. It is only a week or two until he goes off to survival training and then a week or so after that he leaves for the senior NCO academy for six weeks and then it is the big deployment for six months. I seriously cannot write the stuff on the calendar because it upsets me too much. Like if I don't write it down or actually know the dates it wont really happen. So he calls me and I ask him to meet us at the dealer on his way home from work. It is less than a 1/2 mile from his work.

Jeff feels that isn't a good idea and we should WAIT until Friday when he is off from work for him and Mandy to go and test drive one or both of these cars etc. I try to explain to Jeff, why I am determined to get this done. He thinks that he wouldn't be able to get the car inspected at 6 in the evening. He asks me if I know how late the mechanic is open. He doesn't want to have to go there and then go back again later. Just wants to get it all done at once. Mandy agrees with her dad. There is a lot of back and forth, like ok I will go - no you don't have to if you don't want to - no I'll go - whatever you think is best. And it ended up that he didn't go. But, he called me back to tell me that he appreciates how hard I have been working and he and Mandy will get a car on Friday, I don't have to worry about it anymore. Except, I am still missing out on a bunch of stuff I wanted to do today because I am spending the day driving Mandy around and then I have to go with Jeff to an award or induction ceremony tonight so I need to somehow manage to get my work done, dinner, homework, etc all by 6pm. We could have had a car last night.

Meanwhile, Lily is having a nervous breakdown. She was speaking to me while I was talking on the phone trying to convince Jeff to drive .5 miles after work and look at a damn car and Lily lost it. She spent the next two hours screaming at the top of her lungs. She has been reverting to her fit throwing self since school started. Change is hard on the girl. Plus, I think she needs a tad more sleep. I had promised a neighbor that Lily could come out and play but I had to call and cancel, her little boy was disappointed, I felt bad. I told Lily she had to stay in her room until she stopped crying. That took awhile. My nerves were shot. She finally cried herself to sleep and slept for about an hour and a half before I woke her up. Then she ate dinner, did homework, took a bath and went back to bed. All without crying. Boy was she mad at me. This morning she was very sweet too.

Basically yesterday as I sat at the dinner table looking around at my sweet family I was thinking about how all three of them needed to be smacked. And then as I stayed up until after midnight doing my job, while my dear family all slumbered peacefully. No doubt thinking of ways to spend the money I am was earning.

I feel like I have dug myself into a hole and can't find the way out. So how are you all doing? I apologize for not editing this post, I have to leave to drive Mandy to school now.