Saturday, October 31, 2009

She has too sweet a demeaner for me to call her a smart a**

We are finished with school today, and after schooling comes chores. My daughter asked what she could do to help clean. I gave a a job and walked back to my room. As I passed her room, I called up to her with, 'Honey, you really need to tackle your room.'

She called back, 'but doesn't it already looked tackled?'

I was grateful by then to be several rooms away and out of earshot!

Friday, October 9, 2009

sick, sick sick

I can't believe how much time the topic of illness has occupied my thoughts this season. Swine flu and Strep are going around. Everyone is so worried about swine flu, but strep actually concerns me more, only because I have had it.

I would like to say I am not worried at all. But the truth is, a friend's daughter got it and had a fever of 105 the hospital had a hard time getting down. That is scary and I don't want my kids to get that.

That said, I feel that I am more in danger of thinking myself or my kids sick at this point than actually contracting anything. I have to admit getting a little irked about KidsROCK activities coming under such scrutiny for fear of germ spreading when we have families with multiple kids in soccer, AWANA, 4H, charter school activities and other classes. Those activities bring kids in contact with a wider variety of kids, including public school kids who are themselves exposed to kids who MUST attend school when a little sick because of two income families. Soccer is meeting a new group of kids three times a week, running around in the cold, minor injuries and then slapping hands with everyone!

I mean, come on!! Then Club PALS comes around and we have an hour conversation waffling back and forth over a clear running nose. Come on! So far, we have had sick kids in the group, but none with the same thing, including our one family with swine flu. But KidsROCK is treated like a petrie dish of germs. I don't get it.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

HE DID IT!!!!! Never has the g sound been so sweet

My boy has had speech problems from the beginning. He used 'sa' and 'da' for an impressively large vocabulary. I took him to speech therapy starting at age three 90 miles away to the University.

It was such a frustrating experience. Aside from just being a mom worried about her kid who couldn't effectively communicate all that was inside him (and showing little to no improvement as he grew), the people at the therapy center gave me so few of the answers I was desperately seeking. They failed to recognize his vocabulary; how would they know that when he said, 'sa' that time it meant car and this time it meant bear? I wasn't allowed to be present to translate. And all they would tell me was that he had a serious problem and would be in therapy until Junior High school!! Well, with my three year old, that felt like an eternity we could not afford. Not to mention a couple hundred a month in cost, gas and food!

So I pulled him out and began working with him at home. Not without tears, teasing, and 'helpful' suggestions from others that he suffered from all sorts of problems from hearing impairment to autism. And we continually fielded the concern of family and friends because we were no longer seeking professional help. I did seek help from the local schools, but never got any, so we continued to work on our own. Slowly, but surely, he grew to be able to speak intelligibly.

The last and seemingly permanent hold outs were the K sound and the hard G sound. I basically resigned myself to the idea that he had a physical problem we would not be able to overcome.

About nine weeks ago I bought a homeschool speech therapy book and implemented it into out day. Even at ten, there were tears--more sad and hopeless now. He had to fight gagging as we did the exercises together.

But today...today, October 4, 2009, my ten year old said, 'G...g...girl.' What can I say? What can I say? I praise the Lord!! I wracked my brain, shouting in my head, 'WHO can I call???' "WHO knows?' My big sis!

So, she got to hear 'g...g...girl.'

I am telling you now I deserve a medal of valor for finishing the last of the school assignments, greeting Daddy and watching his reaction to 'g...g...girl,' waiting for him to change clothes before I went to my bed and sobbed. I just cried it all out. No words came to my head--how delightful! And I reached for my Bible. I am not big on the whole idea of opening the Book and reading a magic message, but I did let it fall open, and found Psalm 34.

Life goes on. There is still work to do. He is still needing to be more patient with his sister. The house needs cleaning, they haven't memorized their poems for school yet. I need to do the grocery shopping. But this is big. This is our big. And I praise Him Who loves us and gives us all good things.

Just Keep It In The Family

So, I am putting on my makeup, getting ready to go to one of those rowdy, hundred-kid birthday parties and I hear Brian talking to the kids about literal and figurative definitions. I am not sure what they are defining, but there is a dangerous amount of cackling.

As I finish and head up the hall to join them I hear it: dork. Oh, great! I used to use the word all the time, so Diane went to look it up (never acknowledging that the very act of doing so made her a dork) and found it meant whale penis. So, now I know the source of all that cackling. I put on my shoes and begin the lecture.

"OK, kids, so we know that there are some things we can talk about with friends and other things that really need to stay just between you and Daddy, right??"

Brian puts his ankle across his knee, and spreads his arms the length of the love seat and innocently asks, "like what?" We talk, with lots of laughing.

Next I called my girl to help get her ready for the party and told her to sit on her tail. She, of course, must let me know she has no tail. As I am brushing tangles from her hair, I tell the story of my little sister's child hood belief that all boys had tails--and we are back to the penis talk.

I told the story of when my grandpa visited us and fixed our sprinklers. At the dinner table that night he announced in response to the complement of his hard work that he 'worked his tail off.' My sister's already saucer-sized eyes reached their limit to match her gaping mouth. My kids loved the story and we decided to call Aunt Katie and ask her if boys have tails. Bless her for playing along.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

OH, my!

We were at the supermarket, checking out and Madi and Brian were fooling around. I said, "take a pill," to Madi. She didn't understand, so Brian explained it was take a chill pill from the eighties. And he said it was something we used to say when we were growing up.

And Madi, asked, 'together?; And Brian said, no. We are in Susanville, so I knew that was a possibility. So I wasn't upset by the question. But then she said, 'because you're brother and sister.' Right at that moment I had my hand out, accepting change from the cashier. Our eyes met, just as Madi said the words with less question in her voice than I would have liked.

I froze for a moment, and then exaggeratedly said, 'WE'RE NOT!'