Monthly Archives: October 2013

Dublin bloggy meetup

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Meeting other bloggers is a funny thing. They may look like their profile photos or have unaccountably cut their hair since, but that’s really the only aspect of them that you’ll probably find to be in any way as you expected. Last time I met up with some other bloggers, I wasn’t familiar with their online voices, so what I noticed was more superficial . But on Saturday I met up with some of the Irish Parenting Bloggers  in Dublin, and was delighted and surprised by how similar or different people can be in person when you know them best (or only) through an online medium.

In writing, you can’t tell an extrovert from an introvert. You can’t tell a Dublin accent from Cork from Texas. You might have an idea who would command the floor if a group got together in person, but you might not be right about that at all.

When it comes to socializing, having an online persona doesn’t exactly level the playing field, but it definitely changes the game. A bloggers’ meetup is a bit like a gathering of rock stars in reverse: far from looking for the limelight, many writers, by nature, tend to shy away from attention and want to deflect instead. We prefer to interact on the page, on the screen, where we have time to consider our words and where we’re never too far from the delete key.

So the fact that a bunch of us dared to meet up at all, in daylight, with laptops left at home and phones put away, is a testament to the power of our connection online. And it turned out that we had a lot to say to each other about everything that was not blogging, as well as things that might be.

Here’s everyone. From left to right at the back we have Looking for Blue Sky,  Laura from My Internal World, Mind the Baby , Lauren of  The Dare Project,  Sadhbh from  Where Wishes Come From,  Caitriona from  Wholesome Ireland, yours truly, and Office Mum . The front row has BlueSky’s daughter Smiley, then Lisa of  Mama.ie with adorable baby, Lucy of  Learner Mama,  Muuka of One More Pair of Boots, and Glitter Mama Wishes.

Welcome

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Mild is not a word that’s ever applied to the weather in America. In Ireland, it implies an element of grateful surprise that it’s not any colder. The weather is mild right now, which is lovely. It’s not warm, but it’s warmer than we have any right to expect at this point in October. It can be mild and raining at the same time, of course, but if it’s mild and breezy and the clouds are scudding past, it’s really very pleasant.

The plane came in at 4.30 am and Ireland came up with its fairy lights, as Louis Macniece said, even though it’s not Christmas. They were little orange dots, like Lucozade. Exactly like Lucozade.

—–

That was Monday, and now it’s Friday. We’ve been pretty useful, but I still wonder how we got to the end of the weekdays without feeling like we’ve done more than dip our toe into being here at all. We’ve established that Mabel will happily exist on unlimited potato waffles while Dash would like to eat nothing but fresh-baked baguettes from the local shops. Along with milk and chocolate biscuits, these will form the basis of their diets for two weeks, and I’m sure they won’t die or develop rickets in that time. Probably.

I’ve also been reminded that while Dash in personality is very attached to schedule and routine and predictability, in physiology he adapts much more quickly to the five-hour time difference than his sister does. However, since Mabel has slept through, or almost through, every night – in contrast to past years when she’s been wide awake and wanting to play at 3am for nights on end – I suppose I’ll forgive her the screaming and kicking and hysterical “I’m not tired”-ing at 11.30 for the past two nights.

———

Never mind all this talking. How about a picture or two…

‘Scuse me

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In Ireland. Busy drinking tea and mainlining chocolate digestives. Back soon.

Irish Leeches and Irish Spoon Worms
I felt this embodied the true spirit of the National Natural History Museum,
unchanged from school trips through the ages.

Vision therapy: further update

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Dash has a vision therapy assessment this afternoon. I haven’t been talking about vision therapy much because I want to do a big reveal when it finishes up, but I’m tired of waiting, and frankly I’m excited about the way things are going.

At the start of the summer, Dash was seven and a bit and fresh out of first grade. He was reading a little above grade level, but it was a struggle and far more halting and laborious than it should have been. He was comfortably reading books like this:

More tellingly, he never spontaneously read a road sign or a store name. He resisted reading anything we asked him to, though he faithfully did his 20 minutes of homework reading every night, eventually, when all other options had been exhausted. He would blink and say the words had gone blurry after a sentence or so, but he’d persevere. It was painful to listen to.

He began vision therapy in June – two half-hour sessions a week, with a few minutes of “homework” to do every morning and evening in between. It’s hard to explain what the therapy consists of – reading and pointing and following arrows and picking out highlighted text and finding letters in order and learning how to focus and unfocus his eyes as if he were doing one of those magic-eye pictures that I can never do. Games and puzzles and things on a computer.

We had a preliminary assessment after six weeks or so, and to be honest at that point I was still ambivalent about how things were going. I couldn’t see any change, really, in his homework reading. I felt at that point that the worst outcome would be if his reading improved a little, but nothing really changed much, and if we’d never know whether he’d just caught up late as he was going to do all along or if the therapy helped.

Less than a week later, something changed. He started reading the next level up and stormed through a level-three Ninjago book in a few nights. Words didn’t go blurry any more. He was reading paragraphs.

Now he’s reading text that looks like this:

He’s on his third Magic Treehouse book. He’s still reading aloud, and only for his 20-minute mandated time, but if you’d told me when we started this that we’d have reached this point as soon as October, I’d have said all my hopes had come to fruition.

Today he was off school. We were talking about his reading and he said “…and when I’m finished all the Magic Treehouse books, I can read higher-level books and when I’m finished all of those I can start reading about real things.”

“You don’t have to wait till you’ve finished all the fiction in the library to read about facts, you know. We have a history book at home.”

So he did this:

He read two pages about World War II, asking me what things like N-a-z-i and C-z-e-c-h-o-s-l-…  and D-u-n-k-i-r-k spelled, and taking in every word even though his supporting background knowledge and geography are pretty hazy because it’s quite an advanced level book of world history.

His handwriting has improved to the point where he’s writing essays entitled “Why my writing is so neat.” He brought home a report card full of straight A’s last week. (This is his first letter-grade report card, so I can’t really compare it to previous ones, and I really don’t care and don’t want to put any pressure on him to stay a straight-A student, but that’s a different blogpost.) Last week at a birthday party he willingly read out the list of scavenger hunt items, even though they were in an unfamiliar cursive font.

At Wednesday’s session I got talking to another mother. Most of the kids I see at vision therapy are Dash’s age or a little older, but this woman’s son is in tenth grade, which makes him 15 or so. His deep voice sounds out of place beside my son’s piercing trill as they both do their separate exercises with their therapists, around the corner from where I sit and wait.

This mother said they’d spent thousands and tried everything trying to figure out what was going on with her son’s reading. He’d bring home A’s and B’s but his homework was taking seven hours a night. He’d had an IEP (individualized education plan; for children who need extra help while in mainstream schooling due to something like high-functioning autism or ADHD, maybe). Nothing had helped until they discovered vision therapy. She looked at me with hopeful weary eyes and told me we were blessed for finding this now, when Dash is seven, for saving ourselves all those years of struggle. I don’t doubt it.

Vision therapy isn’t over yet, and today’s assessment is to get a better idea of how he’s doing and how much more he needs. But I am happy to report that things are looking good. No pun intended.

——————

To read more about Dash’s journey with vision therapy, see here or type “vision therapy” into my Search field. If you wonder whether vision therapy would benefit your child, read this very informative page and take a look at the checklist linked at the bottom. We found a qualified developmental optometrist in our area using this search . Feel free to e-mail me if you’ve any specific questions, though obviously I’m far from an expert.

This entry was posted in reading , updates , vision , vision therapy and tagged Glasses , second grade on by .

Family car

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As the only child of tidy-minded parents, I always found that other people’s cars had an air of messy family-ness that ours lacked. I loved it. I loved the casualness and the randomness and the disorganization. It seemed to be the hallmark of a real family to me, and I loved being subsumed into the families of my more-siblinged friends, whether for a whole week in the summer or just an after-school playdate.

At my house, when we got home, whatever had come with us came out of the car and back into the house, to be thrown away or put away as appropriate. The glove compartment contained one pair of gloves, one pair of sunglasses (in their case), an orange chamois to de-mist the windows with, and the car’s owner’s manual. (Of course, this was before you needed twelve different adaptors for all the things you might conceivably charge in your car, and also before cars were littered with broken CD cases, defunct cassette tapes, and album inserts that didn’t match the contents. We didn’t even have a car with a radio until I was 14.)

Other families’ cars, though, had cyclinders of wet wipes on the back window and crumbs between the cushions, lost hair bobbins on the floor and abandoned liquorish allsorts under the seats. There was a fine line, of course, between the endearing and the disgusting – used tissues proliferating on the passenger seat, mysterious stickiness on the door handle, half-eaten packets of Tayto scattering as we rounded every corner were definitely out of the grey zone and into the gross.

More often than I could understand, there was a hairbrush in someone’s car. My hairbrush never travelled more than a foot from my dressing table, where I picked it up, brushed, and set it down again. My mother’s was the same. I always puzzled over the migratory hairbrushes.

————

Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve achieved nirvana, where nirvana is the perfectly messy family car. Art projects on the passenger seat? Check. Discarded toy parts and litter and tissues liberally spread around the floor? Check. Crumbs in every crevice? Check. Hairbrush on the back seat? More often than my former self would believe.

Tiny things

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One of the slats of Mabel’s headboard isn’t sanded smooth like the others. I’d never have noticed it, but one night at bedtime I saw her feeling each one. 

“What are you doing?” 
“I’m looking for the rough one.”
I felt with her and found the rough one, one from the end on the right.
It’s one of those tiny things that children take the time to find out and adults breeze right by. It will be one of the sense memories she retains of her early childhood, of her first bed, of her bedroom and this house.
I remember what the underside of my bed looked like, how it felt to turn my head slideways and slither swiftly under it for a game of hide and seek, where it’s rough and smooth and painted, and how it was surprisingly roomy underneath, before I got too big and it wasn’t any more. 
I remember the view from inside the hot press (linen cupboard), behind the mound of spare balls of wool for darning, on top of the good damask tablecloth and the other teacosy that was a present and the pillowcases nobody ever used. I hid there for a long time one afternoon, until my seeker had long given up and my mother was getting worried.
I remember the waist-high wall at the back of my best friend’s garden, the one we once climbed over to roam through the next garden over and the one after that, until we heard his mother calling in the distance and scrambled hurriedly back to be roundly scolded. The wall was made of rough dark-grey concrete domed over mortared-together granite rocks. The concrete was flaking away in places, where we could pick at it and find the underneath. 
Even when you can go back – and I still can, I’ll be there next week – sometimes you need a child to help you see the past properly.

Shut down

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I keep trying to write about the shutdown, and I keep stalling out. Politics and economics are not my things, and I don’t want to get something wrong, and it’s not directly affecting me; but still, it’s happening and I feel that it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it. So let me try one more time.

The American government has shut down. You can read better informed of why elsewhere, so I’m not going to try to do that here.

All staff members deemed “nonessential” have been sent home and told they are not allowed work. Here in the suburbs of Washington DC, this affects a huge number of people – I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say probably more than half the families I know have at least one person out of work over this. It’s been going on for two weeks now, and that’s 14 days too long.

We are lucky and not much has changed in our household. My husband is a contractor who works at a government facility. As such, he is expected to continue working (and will continue to be paid) but he can’t go into his office, because it’s closed. Nor can he access most of the big computers he usually remotely logs into to do his work, because they’ve been taken offline. He’s working from home when it’s quiet here, and from Starbucks when the kids come home from school.

This whole thing is insane. The government is holding the people hostage. The thing is, I’m not sure the government actually knows what sort of effect it’s having, so I don’t think it’s working. All the people in the top offices are probably considered “essential,” so it’s business as usual for them, only worse, I imagine. They’re not seeing the regular people, the moms and dads who are unaccustomedly picking their kids up from preschool and walking around the park and playing video games in the middle of the day and taking the opportunity to paint the hall and trying to quell that gnawing, nagging voice that keeps them awake at night asking “Will I get paid? Will the bank let us pay a reduced amount this month? What if I don’t get a check at all? When will this end?”

The knock-on effects are enormous – restaurants and cafes that rely on lunchtime trade from the huge NASA or FDA office campuses, daycares whose children are not attending because their parents are home from work; people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, and who might not recover even if the government reopens tomorrow. (It won’t.)

And then I read about the Antarctic .

This is stupid. It’s farcical. It’s not the way a country that sees itself as a world leader is supposed to behave towards its citizens, its working people, its families. Be in charge, dammit, Government. Bring the people back and let them do their jobs.

The White House
Come on, Mr Obama. I know you’re in there.

The party of the first part

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We, hereafter also known as “the host,” hereby acknowledge that we will take your child (“the guest”) for two hours (or three if you’re lucky) on a weekend afternoon. You may leave the premises and we will not call CPS and denounce you for abandonment (unless they are particularly badly behaved).

In return, you must provide, along with your child, a present, lovingly/hastily wrapped, decorated with a handmade rosette/curly ribbon/animal stamps/nothing, of a certain value that will be deemed appropriate by your parental peers but will never be mentioned and cannot be inquired about.

Your child may choose to (or you may choose that they) dress up in their “party best” for this occassion. We accept no responsibility for mud, grass, ice-cream, purple frosting, blood, snot, tears, pizza sauce, juice, or ketchup that may stain their clothes during the time they spend with us. Likewise, if you choose not to dress them up, or they choose to rebel against such dressing, we retain the right to assume that you didn’t feel we were worth making an effort for. Any such offence may, but will not always, be taken with no redress on your part. (Oops, that was a pun.)

We agree to keep your child fed and watered during the time that they attend our party. If your child is returned to you hopped up on sugar/red 40/soda bubbles, you will just have to put up with it. We hope you spent those two hours we gave you barricading your valuables and putting foam rubber on all the sharp surfaces in your house. Extra padding under the sofa springs is also advisable.

We will attempt to entertain your child in a manner that is not life-threatening or potentially mentally scarring. If these attempts backfire and your child decides to spend the duration of the party a) having a meltdown, b) playing alone with our child’s toys, or c) demanding to know when the cake will come, we reserve the right to deal with this as we deem appropriate. If things are really bad we’ll call you, but I’m sure you would rather this was our final option.

We have hopes that your child will behave somewhat reasonably, though these hopes are modified according to the age of the child in question and the number of children of that same age present. Please do not abandon us with your child if you think those hopes are completely out of the ballpark.

If your child demands to take home again the present they brought, or any other present, they will be denied. We hope this does not cause offense, because it’s non-negotiable.

The host may provide goodie-bags, but this is neither promised nor stipulated in the contract. Any children demanding a goodie bag will be unceremoniously kicked out, unless a parent is heard to be shushing them on the spot. We can provide no guarantees in re the contents of said goodie bag, except for the fact that they will probably include items of exactly choking-hazard size that your other children will immediately fight over, and some more Red 40 for good measure.

Please sign here. Have a lovely time.

Stick police

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Things that go through your head when your kids start playing with someone else’s kids at the playground:

Isn’t that nice, they’re all playing together.
My children are so well socialized, obviously.
They’re playing a nice game of tag.
Wait, where did that stick come from?
Oh, that’s okay, they all have sticks.
Wait now, that’s not a stick, that’s half a small tree.
Is the other parent here? He must be the man in the car. Where does he stand on the stick issue? Should I say something? Am I a helicopter parent if I wade in yelling “No sticks!” or am I a negligent parent if I don’t? Is he judging me?
Okay, they’re in teams. That’s nice.
No, wait, you can’t exclude the little one.
Uh oh. Here comes the little one to talk to her dad.

… 

Maybe I’ll just go have a word with them. Make sure they’re all playing nicely together.

“Hi! What’s your name?”
“Sarah, this is Mabel. Mabel’s four. Are you four? Is that your brother? He’s in second grade like Mabel’s brother? That’s nice. Now you can be friends. Be careful with the sticks. Maybe we should put the sticks down. Dash, how about playing tag with no sticks? Hmm? No, you don’t have to defend yourself. Well, yes, I can see that the other boys have sticks … Fine, just everyone play nicely, right?”

…

Well, that cleared everything right up.
Girls against boys?
No, but, the girls are four and the boys are seven or eight and that’s three against two… oh good, she wants to be on his team…but now it’s everyone against the little one again…
I should not be policing this.
But that father is sitting there in his car.
Judging me.

…

He wasn’t judging me. He looked out his car window and we had a nice conversation about how you should let the children just play, but that it’s always hard to know where another parent might draw a line that you don’t. And then I decided that playing dodgeball with sticks was probably a good moment to draw a line, and announced that it was time to go home.

Some days are better than others

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Some days I am on top of the laundry, and some days the laundry is on top of me.

Some days a blog post comes to me fully formed in the shower. Some days I have to hiccup it out like a cat barfing.

Some days I go for a run or do a whole exercise video and then saute kale for lunch. Some days I stop after five minutes and have a muffin instead.

Some days my children climb trees and run outside and I show them how to make leaf rubbings, and feed them meals that have components from each of the food groups. Some days they sit in front of the TV for too long and get a waffle and five frozen peas for dinner.*

Some days I am fired up with efficiency, and the kitchen is clean and the dentist appointments are scheduled and the new season’s clothes are sorted and I am superwoman.

Some days I’m not.

I think the key is not to give up after one – or many in a row – of the off days. Just keep swimming.

*Obviously, I’m talking about Mabel here. For Dash, eating from all the food groups means a peanut-butter sandwich and a juice box.