Month: January 2021

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

/ lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

This was going to be a long blog post about the inauguration and politics in general, but that leaves me feeling tired. Suffice it to say that I’ve breathed a sigh of relief, but I also acknowledge that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and I’m focused wholly on the future and how to improve things instead of bemoaning the immediate past. The past informs the direction that we need to take as a country (a wholesale rejection of white supremacy, measures to rectify massive wealth inequality, having an actual PLAN for the pandemic instead of just pretending it doesn’t exist so we don’t spook the markets, etc.), but I’m through arguing about the past four years. They were politically terrible. Let’s move forward.

Instead, because I don’t feel like getting my blood pressure up today, I’m talking about life overall, or life in our house, at least.

Because it goes on. Like I said last time, insurrections, elections, inaugurations, Bernie with his mittens, it all happens and it all affects you, but at the same time, life goes on. You read a headline, you feel angry or sad or hopeful (which is new), then you have to run to the post office or call the kids’ therapists or something or another. Maybe you discuss it, you sign a petition, you run to a protest, you donate, but life is going on with or without you.

Life goes on. 

The twins had their preschool evaluations on the fifteenth, and it went well, I think. They met with the entire preschool team, with the physical therapist running the evaluation while the others–the teachers, the SLPs, the OTs–took notes and observed. Kyle, Sam (who was there because we didn’t have childcare for him), and I sat in a corner of the room that was separate enough for the twins to not zero in on us instead of what they were supposed to be doing.

They started out pretty shy. Carrie warmed up to the situation first, when she saw that they had a dollhouse, because she is quintessentially what toy marketing execs want a little girl to be. She loved that the dollhouse had a little toy cat with a little toy toilet and a little toy bed, and she spent a great deal of time meticulously tucking the toy cat into bed or settling it on the toilet, not really talking about what she was doing, just doing it. She was SO quiet that the SLP had to come over and talk to us about her speech, and we talked about her on bad days–preferring one-to-two-word phrases over sentences, even though she CAN use sentences, and murmuring nonsense under her breath to tell you things. She’s very stubborn, so if you want her to talk to you, she just will not do so. 

She also, apparently, struggled with her fine motor strength–not her accuracy, but her strength, coping the OT’s movements with her crayon but not really applying a lot of pressure.

And, really, much of the evaluation was for her. Isaac’s struggles are pretty easy to spot and pretty easy to describe. He spent the first ten minutes of the evaluation standing stark still like a statue and smiling shyly behind his mask. Though he eventually warmed up, he’s mostly nonverbal still (which is more of a “behind” thing than a permanent thing–he’s about where Carrie was between 12 and 18 months, and I think he’s mostly stagnated because the pandemic has prevented us from having in person speech therapy for a year now. Like, we work with him, but we don’t necessarily know what to do to encourage him to, for example, speak independently instead of parroting us) and has exactly zero sense of danger, which combines poorly with his extraordinary fine motor skills. 

(which sounds kind of cool, but you don’t expect your two-year-old to figure out how to unlock a window, create a tower of stuffed animals to reach the lock, unlock and open the window about two inches, figure out how to open the screen, open the screen, and then start tossing his toys down from the second story window. That’s a surprise. So yeah, the windows in the twins’ room are duct taped shut now)

But the evaluation was both to get an idea of where Isaac is and to see if Carrie actually qualifies for the preschool’s special ed program. She’s right on the border where she MIGHT need the extra help, but she might also catch up with her peers by just being with them. It’s hard to say. And it’s not a huge deal either way–when I talked with the head preschool teacher over Zoom, she explained that Carrie will have a spot in the program no matter what, it’s just a question of whether she’s there for free as a special ed student or whether we pay the $140/month tuition.

And even that isn’t a big deal. When Sam was in preschool at the twins’ age, we were paying probably… mmm, I want to say about $200/week because it was a full time private daycare. Which I LOVED, but I can even point to ancient blog entries I wrote here about how I realized that having twins meant no more daycare for anyone. So back then, I was wondering “omg how are we going to even afford preschool for them, that’s $400/week, that’s $1600/month, how can we do that, that’s a second mortgage?”

The idea of both of them going and us only paying $140/month? $35/week? It’s kind of miraculous. And if it’s free, I’m just going to do a dance.

We’ll find out sometime this week how things went, and then we have a meeting on February 2 to set up their IEPs (or IEP if Carrie doesn’t need one). And that’s WILD to me. I’ve talked so much about IEPs with so many people (my sister always had one, my mother-in-law is a special ed teacher, one of my besties is an SLP, etc., and that’s not even counting the huge village of parents of children with IEPs who are like “yes, I will help you with this, I will tell you how I best advocated for my kid”) that actually diving into one is like

Let alone diving into TWO.

We’re very fortunate. Our town is apparently one of the best in the area for special education from top to bottom (which isn’t surprising; everyone here is some degree of wealthyish and it looks like fucking Happy Valley from “Mickey and the Beanstalk” and then there’s me with my overgrown ugly lawn covered in dead leaves like “oh yeah, I totally belong here!”), so while I know I’ll have to fight for a lot of things, I don’t feel like I’ll have to fight as hard as I would have somewhere else.

(like apparently, my hometown, which is just a few miles down the street from me, has one of the WORST special ed programs in the area. They used to be good, according to all of our therapists and contacts, but nowadays, things are just garbage from top to bottom)

It’s a lot. But I feel ready.

And life goes on.

And it might end up being THREE IEPs, anyway. Sam’s been having in-home therapy for a couple of months now to deal with, oh, a whole bunch of things. His anxiety had reached a point where he wasn’t sleeping in his own bed at all, he has days where he barely eats, he’s an absolute ping pong ball if he doesn’t have something with a screen drawing his attention… it’s a lot. Kyle and I had a sit down talk with the therapists over Zoom on Monday, and they suggested having Sam evaluated for both autism and ADHD. 

The autism bit has me a bit skeptical. They were noticing a lot of the outward signs, and I agree that Sam has a lot of sensory issues, BUT if he is autistic, he’s also the most adamantly extraverted autistic kid I’ve ever met. And that’s not to say that autism can’t look like that–it’s a sundae bar, after all, and you can have all sorts of weird varieties of stuff going on–but it’s just. I hate to say this because it’s so not clinical, but he doesn’t ping my autism radar the way Isaac did from ~day one. Isn’t that a dumb thing to think? Like “mom hasn’t ever gotten autistic vibes from him, not even a little” is not a good diagnostic criteria, and should not be used as a diagnostic criteria.

I took one of the screening tests for him, the one they use in clinical settings, and maybe I’m too close to him to see (but unless I’m missing something, I feel like a lot of these tests are just asking parents how their kid is anyway and then observing in a play setting?), but he scored way too low on the autism test to even warrant further testing. And again, maybe I’m just too close to the situation, but like. I can’t imagine I’m missing THAT MUCH, you know?

Now, on the ADHD test, on the other hand, he scored off the charts. Everything from his lightning fast mind to his constant movement (not stimming, just MOVING) to his general breakdowns if he gets a question wrong was right on there. But professionals who see him in brief settings keep saying “no, he doesn’t have ADHD, but he’s probably autistic.”

I don’t know how to respond to that! I go, I do the assessments that are available, and maybe I have confirmation bias or maybe I’m too close to the situation or maybe I’m just crazy, but I end up getting super low scores for autism and super high scores for ADHD and I just ???? am I missing something? I see this child all day every day. He’s my son. We talk all the time. We snuggle up at bedtime and go over his day. He tells me matter-of-factly how he feels about so many things. I know when I can and can’t push him on things, when we can work through something or when we need to disengage from it. I’ve SEEN him from the moment he was born, and I’m just so confused here. Are they seeing something I’m not? Are we all just misinterpreting the same information?

Anyway. We’re trying to get in touch with someone to schedule an evaluation for the next soon, because if he does have autism or ADHD (or sensory processing disorder, which I also suspect), I want to know ahead of time so that I can plan IEP meetings for when he gets back to school in the fall. If nothing else, I want to be able to talk to the school in general to say that while he’s soaring in math and science, and while he can read perfectly well, he struggles with handwriting, with creating sentences, and with reading comprehension. 

SO.

Life goes on.

It goes on for me, too. I started my inauguration day with a visit to an orthopedic specialist to talk about my back. Here it is:

Note how spines are not supposed to look like that. I apparently have slight scoliosis (less than a 25 degree curve, which means I’m not really a candidate for surgery, more for just PT and figuring out how to live life overall with a wonky spine), some twisting going on (though it’s unclear if that was just posture-related or is an actual Problem), and bone degeneration that’s a bit more than usually expected at my age (not quite 40). I’m supposed to be getting on a calendar for an MRI sometime in the next near future so that we can see what nerve involvement is there, and if there is nerve involvement (which there is, I can feel it), I’m a candidate to get an injection of anesthetic and steroids into my sciatic nerve in order to keep it from, you know, murdering me. 

It’s both vindicating and frustrating. On the one hand, I’m able to point to it and say, “LOOK, see, the fact that I’ve thrown my back out at least once a year since I was 20 has a REASON behind it. I’m not being overdramatic, I do have some issues that could stand to be addressed in numerous ways!”

But on the other hand, I feel frustrated that I’m just learning about this now, that I didn’t think to get it examined before, when I was throwing my back out with such regularity, not necessarily because I was lifting something wrong or doing something weird but because my back is just prone to spasms. I could’ve spent years working on this and not been here, feeling miserable and useless.

Oh well. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

And life goes on. The pandemic is slowing, slowing, slowing. It doesn’t feel like a very fast slowing (because how would slowing be fast??), but it’s happening. If President Biden is able to really get his vaccination plan off the ground, maybe summer will be normalish, maybe we’ll go on a very short vacation to like Hershey Park and Sesame Place, maybe this isn’t a forever sort of thing. Maybe we’ll get on a plane again someday, maybe we’ll travel across the country and the world again. It feels possible, which is a huge step above where it felt even a month ago, and I’m grateful for that.

Until then, though, life goes on.

Life goes on.

/ lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

How has it only been 2021 for a week?

Because the wild thing was that before Wednesday, I was feeling really optimistic about this year; and I still am, mind you, but with the caveat that the first chunk is going to be a B I T C H, and the rest might follow suit, unless some serious changes start happening seriously soon. 

I mean, things were really going well! Sam was having a very smooth first week back to school–we’d done all his times tables up to 9, we’d finished out a unit on description and attributes and were moving on to the senses, both ABA and Sam’s therapy had started back up and were going well, and even my therapy started with a really good session that left me feeling excited and motivated for whatever comes next!

And then Wednesday.

I don’t talk a lot about my politics, at least partly because I don’t know how to politically define myself. Words don’t mean the same thing now as they used to; a lot of the terrorists on Wednesday were thrilled to call anyone who disagreed with them a Communist, which is not at all what the word means. I can’t define my stance on economic issues with a single word; I can’t define my stance on social issues with a single word. 

Whenever I take the (imperfect) political compass test, I end up solidly in the green square, but as anyone else in the green square can tell you, that tells you the barest of minimums of what I believe and think; so much liberal and leftist political theory is so nuanced that I feel like I need a serious polisci degree to actually be able to answer the question.

But here’s what I believe, without definitions.

I believe that, if we are to have a government that we pay money into (and we should), that government’s job should be to look after the people, all of the people, so that nobody goes hungry, goes without a home, goes without healthcare. If the government can do something to prevent any of those things, I believe the government should do something to prevent those things; otherwise, what’s the point?

I don’t believe the United States is the greatest country to ever have countried. I couldn’t tell you what country is the greatest country to ever have countried, because it’s a rare country nowadays that doesn’t have blood on their hands in one way or another, skeletons in their closet, that sort of thing. Putting countries on pedestals is such a dangerous thing, because it’s not realistic. It can make you think that a country is infallible; it can blind you to the things other countries do right because they aren’t your personal favorite. 

I believe that we have work to do, and will always have work to do; that’s the nature of humanity. We work to care for each other now, just as we did tens of thousands of years ago while painting pictures on the walls of caves. Society as a whole is at its strongest when we care for our weakest members; conversely, refusing to care for our weakest members is a pretty good sign that we’re heading into “fall of Roman Empire” territory, and that we should probably be on the lookout for marauding Goths.

I believe that all humans deserve to be treated with kindness, dignity, and respect, no matter what they believe, the color of their skin, their ability or disability, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, the number in their bank account (or lack thereof), their nation of origin, their immigration status. At the same time, I understand the tolerance paradox: in order to promote true tolerance, the intolerant must not be tolerated. 

(I also want to throw things when someone is like “hburr dhurr so much for the tolerant left” because none of us ever said we were tolerant of Nazis; that’s on you being a dumbass)

When I talk about politics, I don’t exaggerate to make a point. I grew out of that about 20 years ago. When I look at a group and say, “Wow, they seem like Nazis,” it’s not just me saying, “I disagree with them, and I must exaggerate to make myself look more right.” I don’t care about looking right or trying to paint my opponents worse than they are. When I say that someone looks a lot like a Nazi, I mean that someone looks a lot like a Nazi.

(which is such a pet peeve of mine; just because you called Obama a Nazi because you disagreed with him doesn’t mean that I’m doing the same thing when I say, “this person who wants to murder everyone not like them, who embraces fascist ideology, and has a literal swastika tattooed on their bicep is probably a Nazi”)

I don’t know why I’m enumerating all of that, except maybe to say that I’ve seen this coming since 2016. I remember when the election results made it clear what was going to happen; I was listening to Disturbed’s cover of “The Sound of Silence,” and I knew that if things didn’t go completely fascist, very quickly, they were at least going to try. And they are still trying, and I hate being right. 

But the weirdest thing is how life goes on, you know? I was glued to the news all day and late into the night Wednesday, but Isaac still had ABA on Thursday, Sam still had therapy on Friday. I cleaned a lot of the playroom, breaking down Christmas boxes and putting away books. We had pizza delivered Friday night. I scheduled the twins’ preschool evaluation for this coming Friday.

Very weird.

You always expect that, during these Major Historical Events, everything just stops until things are resolved. Like whoa, hey, it’s Revolutionary War time, nothing is going on EXCEPT for battles with guns and ships and nobody is just living normal lives, but here we are. And shit, it’s the same all over the world. I remember reading one article recently where someone talked about how their camera roll had pictures of them out at a disco with their friends right after pictures of a building that was bombed just down the street from their house. The only thing that’s keeping life from moving forward more quickly is that there’s still a pandemic on, and even then, the vaccines should be widely available soon, so life will keep moving forward.

Are you supposed to keep working during a coup or can you take the day off?

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next ten days. I’m afraid of them. People will tell me that I’m overreacting, the same people who said I was overreacting in 2016, and I want to believe them. I’m not losing sleep over this, thankfully, because I’ve got good coping skills (we’re practicing “radical acceptance” and also “sleep meds” right now); I’m not even being fully disengaged from my daily life because of it, because what can I really do? 

If I’m losing sleep, will it stop more QAnon cultist terrorists from rushing government buildings like my almost three-year-olds when they want to get through the gate to the playroom?

If I’m constantly refreshing the news, will it stop the occupant of the White House from deciding that if he’s going down, we’re all going down with him, and starting a nuclear war?

If I’m NOT constantly refreshing the news, will it prevent a peaceful transition of power on January 20? Will it stop the FBI from arresting everyone involved in this disaster at all levels? 

What can I do? I donate, I protest, I speak up when I need to do so, I stay informed, I vote, I breathe. I want stability, for my kids, for their future–no child should grow up in a land torn apart by war–so I pray to whatever may be listening that things get better. I read a book and escape to another world for a little while. I have some ice cream after dinner and think that I should probably take up walking and running. I count down the hours until my appointment for my sciatica. I live.

Isn’t it weird? And yet, there it is.