Transplanting a Seattleite

I will catch up on blogging.

Slept in, cleaned my sheets. I had a visit with M. I brought some stuff from the attic room — which STILL is not empty — down to the basement. But a lot of what is left is purely R.’s and he wants to sort through and get rid of things (which I am in favor of) so it’s taking a bit. I did get a bunch of exercise going up and down, tho. I also listed a few things (a keyboard tray, a keyboard and mouse, a desk lamp). I don’t think any of it will move, but you never know.

R. and I had a late lunch at Benjarong and strategized how to handle A.’s schedule. I’ve concluded that trying to maintain a consistent getting-up-time is not leading to her being willing to go to bed at a reasonable hour (and when I do, she wakes me up at 2:30 in the morning). Even if we split things up, she would be getting increasingly sleep deprived, and she is already popping more symptoms. Sleep deprivation is a known risk for seizure and mania, in addition to increased symptoms with personality disorder, and all of those are well represented in our extended family.

So in the interests of all of us having a better life, I’m going to take over mornings so R. can sleep in, and he can respond to requests for meds to help with burping / reflux / etc. in the middle of the night. She has already asked for gas-X to have in her room so she doesn’t have to ask someone else for it, which seems really fine since it’s hard to imagine getting into trouble with that medication. R. can supervise the pepcid. By taking over the morning routine, I am going to work on speeding up the various elements of it (especially the hair, but other parts as well), with a view to getting the whole routine to 45 minutes so she can get up at 9, instead of sometime between 8 and 8:30.

She’s got a lot of days in her schedule this term where her first class is lunch at 12:30 or 1:30 if she has lunch at home. That’ll be interesting. If it is literally one class, it’s worth it to just sit there and wait for her to be done. And R. wants to make an appointment at the Apple Store for a longer day to have his phone battery replaced. But we’ll figure that stuff out on a day by day basis. Fingers crossed we can all have a better sleep pattern going forward.

This whole go to bed really late and keep me up thing is dragging me down very literally, so this morning, I told my daughter that I thought she was trying to avoid thinking by staying up really late so she was too exhausted to lie awake in bed with her thoughts.

Turns out I was right.

She had a lot of the normal anxieties of girls / women / at this age, and didn’t realize it would help to talk about them. We talked about them. It seems to have helped a little. We’ll see.

R. had a meeting with the landscape folks on zoom. He also got most of the shelving away from the walls, prepping for the basement insulation project.

M. is really distressed, about politics, and how poisonous the news is, and also her mother’s health. But while she couldn’t walk right away, we had a snack and a chat and she felt better and we got our walk. I went over to CVS later to replace her broken heating pad with a new one. Having now bought on short notice two heating pads at CVS, I’m really tempted to order one on Amazon and just keep it in the box for when another on breaks and we need it on short notice.

Piano lesson went well today. T. is here for a few days. That’s kind of fun.

Regular readers know that when I say “a bit more” or “a few words” or similar, brace yourself or possibly skip reading.

I’m reading through the cards section of Fair Play, and the CPE structure kind of drives me bananas. It is concealing too much. The goal, of course, is to be able to turn the mental / planning / reminder load off of the person who is running the household / handling most of the kid duties. That’s a great goal, and there is a lot about the CPE structure to love about that. However, there are really serious problems, too. Like, there’s a card for Special Needs / Mental Health (kids) that is separate from Teacher Communication. First off, I don’t understand how that could work. A lot of times, the author explicitly says that people holding one card will have to work closely with the person holding a related card (kids parties and kid transportation, for example), or she’ll say that if you have this then you have to deal with the transportation component of it as well. That’s confusing. But there is NO SUCH COMMENT on Special Needs / Mental Health and Teacher Communication. Further, there’s NO COMMENT about redealing Special Needs / Mental Health. And there’s NO CONNECTION made to the Discipline card. I don’t understand how these are separable tasks AND if you have multiple parent-figures / caregivers, you have to involve as many as you possibly can in IEP processes or the IEP won’t work. Literally. I put a ton of pressure on R. to go to these meetings even tho he didn’t see any purpose in his presence, because there wasn’t a lot for him to say. But it was incredibly important to everyone for him to be there to hear what the team had to say, and when there was something for him to say, it was important for him to be there, notice and say it.

This is a great book, and a needed book, and the author, as a mediator, is very, very good at creating structured opportunities to help families get to a better working relationship. But boy oh boy the specifics of the cards are utter bullshit.

There’s other minor stuff, too, like, dishes. My sister has carved up the dishwasher project to have one piece for each kid, altho she is the manager of the structure. We worked pretty hard to move kids along the process of understanding how to load the dishwasher, because it’s a critical life skill. I’m still working on making sure the last person to bed starts the dishwasher, but honestly, we’re nearing a point where that will be a programmable part of a smart dishwasher (if closed and if it is after a certain time of night then start running, type of thing). Having this be a card between the parents and not involving the kids in the process seems weird. And there’s a lot of stuff like this.

ETA:

The card “Informal Education” is a whole bunch of stuff that PE and related should be teaching, and the extent of riding a bike is learning to balance — nothing about adhering to traffic rules, local rules about sharing sidewalks and bike paths with pedestrians. But that’s not what I’m here to complain about! I’m here to complain about “(Hint: If your kid is the only one in class still wearing Velcro sneakers, you might want to remedy that by teaching him to tie his shoes.)”

Nothing referring back to the Special Needs card, either. Entirely un-inspected assumptions.

ETAYA:

In the section about why not to break up a task / ask for spousal help in Execution, there’s a story about parent heading out the door to pick up could-choke-on-things-offspring from mom’s who asks other parent to pick up the “Marvel Legos”. Other parent hears “marbles” can’t find any leaves legos on floor. This is given as a reason not to break up a task.

!!!!!

How is there a parent in this scenario — this is the _younger_ of _two children_ — who doesn’t realize that when the kid-who-could-choke-on-things returns home, there must be nothing (not marbles, not marvel legos) on the floor!

Same section, story about hears the drycleaning please drop it off. Person tries to drop it on a day when the drycleaner is not open. Person _would have made this mistake themselves_ if they had been responsible for conception and planning (ask me how I know. Just ask me. I’m not even talking about R. here. I know too many people who’v made this mistake). And yet somehow, it’s “solvable” by having one person do CP and E. No it’s not! It’s “solvable” by someone habitually doing the drycleaning dropoff OR by having the drycleaning dropoff time put on google calendar where it fucking well belongs.

There is so much stuff in this book that basically amounts to, CPE will fix this! And if you need help with E, ask your village, not your spouse! Some of these are things that would be way better fixed by teaching people to use gentler language with each other, and how to be consistently emotionally validating (even in a mechanical manner). Some of these things are a matter of one person in the partnership hasn’t been doing a lot of stuff and basically needs to learn how. CPE is _a_ solution, and it’s not clear it’s even a _great_ solution.

Then there’s crazy shit about resolving disagreements in the Minimum Standard of Care. In the event you can’t agree on an MSC, the players are supposed to ask “Would a reasonable person (in this case, your partner, spouse, babysitting, caregivers, parents and in-laws) under similar circumstances CPE this card in this way.” _Really_?!?! That guy a couple paragraphs up left legos on the floor with an under 3 year old coming home. _He is a dangerously incompetent visitor in his own house._ _He would not know to ask this question much less what the answer is._ Fine, he’ll learn by doing, and fine, maybe his spouse isn’t the right person to teach him, but how does any of this help?

Reading through the Need Execution Help again, and just cannot get over the request help from someone in your village other than your partner by providing full context and an explicit request. So, like, if you have a medical emergency and have to go to the hospital, and you haven’t done your Daily Grind tasks, you have to arrange outside help from someone other than the parent of your children, and fully explain how to do everything, rather than ask the other adult in the house to deal with it while you drive yourself to urgent care / the hospital?

Really?

“My husband taking full CPE ownership of the ‘auto’ card was worth ten cards to me because …” Oh boy. This husband had dropped the ball on car care?!? The Superwoman vibe in this book is _wild_.

“When my husband took over “extracurricular (sports)” for Zach and Ben, I gained back eight hours a week.”

The husband had dropped the ball on _sports_ _for_ _sons_. And this book is intended to reduce men resenting women for nagging and ordering them around? The men in this book are … something else again. Car, lawn, sports for boys are well within trad male responsibility.

A. is at Fusion for her first day; we are very excited and hopeful.

Meanwhile, I finally emailed the counseling office at ABRHS again to try to finalize the withdrawal process.

I had sent the counseling office this email on March 20:

“We’ve been working through both identifying some neurological problems she has been having and also finding a different school for her which we think will be less triggering for the problems she has been having.

Today, we enrolled her at Fusion Academy Burlington. We do not yet have a start date for her, but I expect we’ll be figuring that out over the next few days.

We’re not really sure what the process is at this point, but we understand at some point we’ll be withdrawing her from ABRHS but we do not want to withdraw her from special ed.

I’m not really sure what my next couple of days are like. They are currently open, but if we hear back from the neurologist about the results of the EEG, that could change; also, if we have an appointment happen with the new school that could change.

Please let me know how I can help this process go smoothly for everyone.”

The next day I got this response:

“Thank you for reaching out! I am cc'ing here our counseling support staff, xxx and xx, who can assist you with the withdrawal process so it goes smoothly for you all and especially for A. I am sorry to hear she is experiencing neurological problems and hope that things get better!”

And that was the last I heard from them.

In the event, I didn’t have an official start date for A. until Tuesday (of this week) and there was no school at ABRHS on Wednesday (and we were in transit on Tuesday anyway), so I punted until today on poking the school about the withdrawal process. I emailed all three of the people in the counseling office, sat and thought for a moment, noticed I had an extension for the counseling office, and called it. I got xxx, and said, how do I do this, and she was, have your student go fill out the form. I’m like, she hasn’t been there since March. And then xxx says, well, the usual process is to have the student go fill out the form. I just let the pause stretch because, I mean, what, time machine requirement now? On brand as a requirement. I ask if I should come in, and that doesn’t get a better response — something like, you should have told us sooner, and I’m like, _I sent the department email on March 20_, and have not yet heard back and you should have that in your email on March 21.”

Anyway.

Registrar — who had been _awesome_ about rapidly turning around the transcript for the initial application to Fusion early on in this process — called me back, and was generally easy to deal with, and then called me back again to say, drop off the stuff at the front desk, fill out the form there, I sent the official transcript to Fusion and removed A. from PowerSchool. Which, you know, is really all I was looking for here.

As I noted to the Registrar on the first of those two phone calls, I’m not at all sad about pulling my daughter out of a school that pulls shit like this. How overwhelmed are they, over there, one has to ask, but one does not have to stick around for the answer.

ETA:

So, I went into the school and the form was sitting there but it was super unclear what all I was supposed to do at this point. Apparently, withdrawal from school forms really are signed primarily by the student? I’m just like, aaaanndd even when they have an IEP? I mean, the whole thing feels like some weird bad joke of a process. There _is_ a line for the parent to say, “I know my kid is doing this.” But what a ridiculous thing.

Anyway.

I was sent to the library with the form to drop off the Chromebook, stylus and charger. The librarian nearly left the charger at circulation, but I was like, you’ll want that too, right? She was trying to find the stylus without telling me, but I figured it out and handed her that box. She was happy about that. We took them back to someone in another back room at the library, and _that_ person was much younger, and quite clearly used to this process not going well which honestly cheered me enormously. And obviously, people were happy to get the stuff back which, predictably, does not always happen.

Then it was off to counseling with the textbooks and the form, and then I checked out of the visitor log at the front desk and left. I _did get it all done in a single trip_, which was my primary goal in this whole fucking outing. I had not been back to the school since that meeting in the vice principal’s office and intended to minimize my time there because I just do not have the self-control to not say what I’m thinking when I’m there, and that’s basically What the Heck is Wrong Here I Do Not Remember You All Being This Incompetent Before.

I’ve got so many questions about why.

I’ve been making pizza-sandwiches lately. Basically, take a piece or two of bread, put some tomato paste on it, sprinkle some basil, oregano, black pepper, layer it with pepperoni, mushrooms, (in my case fake — cashew mozz) cheese. Put it in the countertop oven until it’s cooked, eat it with sprinkled red pepper flakes.

I’d had been looking at the dates thinking, hmmmm. Today, I sliced one up and added it as a layer. Holy crap that’s good. That’s going on every pizza ever from now on that I possibly can.

Also!

https://www.feministsurvivalproject.com/episodes/episode-08-the-monitor

The Nagoskis have stuff on frustration! Yay!

Also, definitely hits different knowing that surviving 2020 only gets you to 2021 and we probably all remember more about 2021 than we are exactly comfortable with.

ETA:

OK, did a 3 mile walk with R. and talked about some stuff including this. I’m increasingly focusing on A.’s perseverance / autism rage loop / high-stakes affect when “working” as the problem that may persist when she is in classes again. I’ve talked to A. about frustration and what it feels like, and she says she often has a list of, say, 3 things, to try to do something, and when she has tried all 3, she is already depleted and has no energy to think of more things to try. My immediate reaction was, oh, yeah, no, don’t do a list of three things. Do one thing, and then the next task is to figure out what to do after that, based on whatever you learned from the one thing. If you have a list of three, you might learn something from the results of round one that will make the others irrelevant. This was interesting, but I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with my explanation.

The Nagoskis have this:

“We've got three different targets for solutions, right? So option number one is going to be changing the kind of effort you're investing. Solution number two is going to be just making a decision to change your brain's assessment of how hard it's going to be. And then our third option is going to be changing the goal.”

They are working with a model of approach / avoidance (discrepancy decreasing or increasing), and frustration is the affect that arises when the criterion velocity is too low. I have some very real issues with this model, but we’re going to play along at least for a paragraph or two.

The “kind of effort” turned into a discussion of what I have as the Basic Needs Theory. It’s less developed than my theory but basically same same. Get enough sleep, eat better food, etc.

The “how hard it’s going to be” is basically a redo the schedule to be more realistic.

The “change the goal” is super weird, and I’m not 100% certain I even understood much less agree with that make Andrew experience joy thing.

“ The new goal has to be soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.”

No explanation on this. In my world, the absolutely crucial element of any goal is that it be attainable. Which is not on this list. Which I find extremely worrisome, because an unattainable goal is going to bring us right back to frustration. It’s easy to think, but how do you _know_ it is attainable? Well, it has to be something that you know to be fully within your control. So, “drive to the mall” is kind of a sucky goal, but “try to drive to the mall” is a great goal. You try, and if it turns out someone else already took the car, well, you tried! You met the goal, even if you didn’t make it to the mall. Let’s say the car is there, and you drive partway there, car breaks down, resolving the car breakdown takes the rest of the day / money. You still tried! You didn’t make it to the mall, but you tried! If you get stuck in traffic, and by the time you get there you would have to turn around and go right back home for some other part of the day’s plan, oh well! You turn around right away, because you tried!

Yoda’s there is no try is absolute bullshit. Try is a great goal, and a great way to reduce frustration.

Another change-the-goal is “do a bad job quickly”. Then you can decide whether the bad job is good enough (now you have extra time!) or you can decide whether it’s worth spending any remaining time allocated to the task to improving the the work.

“Do a bad job quickly” for “go to the mall” might be, well, I wanted to look for a pair of shoes or a sweater, and I can do that online and maybe you find good enough shoes and/or sweater online, place the order and the amount of time spent on the task is a tiny fraction of the time it might take to drive to the mall. Or maybe you go look in your closet and discover a pair of shoes or a sweater you forgot you owned that is kinda cool and because it had been forgotten for a while, it feels like new. Fastest solution ever!

I’m not sure if this is going to help with A.’s frustration, especially when it comes to words or concepts that she does not understand and wants to understand. I use these techniques. Like, why does Germany / German have so many terms in different languages (Alemanni derived, German, Deutsch). We talked about migration, and terms from outside vs. inside a group, and concluded that Deutsch, like so many terms used by a group of people to refer to themselves, just means “of the people” (I predicted that, actually, and was pleased that that turned out to be the case.) Alemanni was a reference to a confederation, so probably it means something close to what it sounds like (all the tribes). We still don’t know what’s up with the German/Germany one, tho. So I tried to answer, told her it would be harder than expected (reset expectations), and punted on a complete answer after getting answers to parts of it (reset success criteria / abandoned part of it). And she’s mostly been okay with me using these techniques. But it’s less clear how successful I will be at teaching techniques like this to her.

I had a delightful phone call with J. So nice to catch up! It’ll be good to see her and the kids in about a week.

I had a visit with M. It is raining today. Like, all day, more or less.

I have been experimenting with Siri, Reminders and Notes. I’m trying to figure out what is an easy way for A. to keep track of her Questions that is NOT in her head. It seems like Siri cannot readily edit Notes (I mean, people claim to have some Shortcuts to make this work, but why). Using Siri to create Reminders strikes A. as more difficult than just typing something into Notes. We will see how this goes. So far, we are still keeping stuff either in a Note on my phone, or on the paper on the table.

We were going to download VDI’s “Driving Essentials” on the PS5, but then they realized they could do it on the XBox which A. has more familiarity with. Because we rarely use any of this amazing stuff we own, there were some updates and reboots and resetting passwords but eventually we got the thing started. A. didn’t really understand the game representation of side mirrors and rear view mirror, so I took her out to the car and had her sit in the driver’s seat and look at the mirrors.

She’s having dinner now, but we’ll see how this goes. The simulator has not great ratings online, however, the maker has all kinds of trad media plaudits so *shrug*. It wasn’t that expensive, and it seemed worth a shot.

ETA:

Biggest problem was figuring out how to get out of park. So far, anyway; we’re still in the tutorial.

We have a tour scheduled for Monday morning! Woot!

We are not feeling super optimistic about scheduling courses, because of spring break at Fusion Academy. Boo. And also, come on, this went so fast there really did have to be some kind of a speed bump eventually.

I got a call from Neuro Logic. The EEG was completely normal. Because A. had the involuntary hand movement during the EEG, we can completely halt all further EEGs; there’s no point in continuing. Yay, no MRI! Boo, hiss, the absolutely annoyingly imprecise nature of dealing with physical symptoms of psychological stress. Oh well. At least we were already pursuing a change in school placement; feels extremely justified now. We’ll check back in with Neuro Logic in a couple months and let them know how things are going.

I have now officially notified A’s school that we are pulling her out in favor of Fusion.

It’s super unclear what the timeline is right now. I mean, we have the tour Monday. And after spring break at Fusion is over, I guess we’ll have some number of classes that is hopefully greater than 0 at Fusion. But in the meantime, not sure what we are doing. So today, we packaged up everything that belongs to the Old School, and figured out what backpack A. would use for the new school (the same backpack, but we got out a vacuum and got rid of all the weird grit that builds up in bags over time).

In Construction World (remember, there’s like a Whole Other Arc Going On!), I got an email from the electricity provider! So I made an appointment at the bank with the notary. R. had already left to go to the Subaru dealership. While shopping for a car for T., R. experienced a CrossTrek and decided that he really wanted it. I’ve canceled the Sirius subscription on the i3, and we’re gonna trade that one in for the CrossTrek. Very exciting; I’m hoping we can ultimately get rid of the Honda Odyssey. The improved range and Adventure characteristics of the CrossTrek should fully replace the van. However, we want to have the increased passenger capacity for a road trip in April and possibly for another road trip in August (I’m pushing hard to make adjustments to the August trip, and trade in the van for the car for T., but R. has a couple months to think about that).

See how I snuck in the whole car nonsense in the middle of construction world.

Anyway. We’re finally going to get the full service at the house we are building! Very exciting! The email did not initially go to the lawyer, so I sent it along, and then called him. He confirmed my basic reading of it (this is stupid and unnecessary, and also, I can see why they want something clearly spelling out their rights because fuck what a lot of nonsense you have to go through to walk everyone through what you clearly have) and that I could safely sign it (in front of a notary). We overnighted it; fingers crossed.

I nagged the architect about a bill that he needed to authorize; he’s going to visit the site and get back to us.

I talked to the builder, and the builder is in a good mood, and, as happens to me at intervals, somewhat jokingly offered me a job as an MEP coordinator (NO!). I asked him about the status of well #3, which was hung up at conservation commission, and he’s going to get back to me.

I think I actually get to have a quiet day tomorrow? Goddess I hope so. Monday’s gonna be a bear. A. and I have the tour. I have the meeting with the BMS provider, the PV / battery / generator provider, the HVAC guy, the electrician, the architect and probably other people (maybe an engineer) about the design of the backup system. Basically, we’re going to find out what the BMS can and cannot do and then figure out the logic and designate some poor sap to actually design the system. About fucking time. It’s such a pity I don’t get to use all this shit I learned in the future. R.’s going to a GEM reunion luncheon. I’m NOT going, because I was never part of GEM. And then Tuesday, it’s back to MEPFP, and hopefully finally put the backup system to rest (but probably not).

Also today! I was on the phone with my sister, and googled some stuff and turned up a possible job for her, so that’s something. There’s this massive risk that if you put a problem in front of me, I will just pull out the Harley Quinn Cartoon Hammer of Problem Solving, and Fix That For You. You’ve been warned.

I walked with M. A. was having difficulty identifying comfortable clothing for the walk, and bringing sunglasses, so R. walked her the other way to us and then she continued back with us. When we got back to the house, I pulled out a pair of pants from her drawer, said, these are awesome pants. I love them. I know you think they are static-cling risk because of the way they feel, but I swear, they never, ever, ever cling. You should try them. She’s been wearing them pretty much since.

Again. The Harley Quinn Cartoon Hammer of Problem Solving. I also ordered her a 64 pack of Miss Vicky’s Sea Salt potato chips, because we cannot seem to find a store that carries them near us.

A. got up on her own for piano. The piano is loud, obviously, but even so, I usually have to go get her up. Not today! She got up in the middle of R.’s lesson, came down, ate, put her plate over by the dishwasher. I am stunned. She was up until midnight. I had warned the instructor that she might or might not be participating today and why. He was extremely understanding.

I decided to take a look at what the People Online have to say about parents, schools, students and therapy. Yes, I know, probably should have done this before!

Some discussion is teachers looking for guidance on whether it is overstepping to suggest to parents that therapy for the kiddo might help. They were discouraged in general, often on the grounds that this would result in therapy being the financial responsibility of the district. Let me just say, the amounts of money I shelled out for various therapies suggested by that flaming asshole OT that CASE inflicted on T. I have a policy, where if I am in conflict with someone intransigent, I will do everything (okay, nothing that is contra important values, obviously) they suggest will “fix” the problem. If things improve, yay! They were right! I had a good outcome! If things do not improve, or, as is more typical, got worse, I now look like the reasonable one (I tried the things I was told would help If I Just, and we’ve already exhausted their initial list of But If You Just). Over the years, this policy has become tattered and threadbare. It now stinks really bad. I’m probably never going to do this again. And also, I’m going to start attending to the timeline much more closely.

To be clear: it’s not that I will never listen to anyone again. I _do_ listen to people! They are often super helpful! My life is not All Conflict! Altho, a disproportionate amount of my blog is, in part because I need to have something to refresh my intentionally suppressed negative memories, and in part because Drama Makes for Engaging Content (<— that is mostly, but only mostly, a joke).

Some of the discussion online is about having specific behavior or attitude goals for the therapist and the kid to work on, and then leaving them to it and not being overly intrusive. There are also remarks about Don’t Expect to Be in Every Session with Therapist and Kiddo. All of _this_ is hilarious, not in a way that makes them _look_ bad (I mean, it kinda does, but that’s not WHY it’s funny; that’s just sad). It’s hilarious because I got the therapist for T. because he insisted that’s what he wanted. I didn’t have a goal. I just ask how things went and express generic hopes that it was helpful and/or enjoyable, and that if he ever wants to talk to me about it more, he absolutely can, but there is literally no pressure. The second therapist happened because I was getting a lot of pressure from the school psychologist to get A. a therapist and, “A. says she doesn’t understand why she needs or should have one” didn’t seem to be compelling as an answer to anyone (I was fine with it). When the pressure did not let up, I engaged in malicious compliance and got a Team A. therapist and consistently ignored all efforts to have any communication between the therapist and the school. A. wouldn’t go to the therapist without me, and the therapist does family therapy and was fine with this, so that’s what we do (oh, look, I have a therapist too! Whee!). I had no “goal” for therapy, and this also seems to be fine (I picked a relational therapist and I’m paying her directly). The rapid swap from the use of the word “punch” and the phrase “handbook violation” in an email from the vice principal (since retracted as noted in earlier post) to pressure to sign the form allowing communication is why I’m doing this research.

I’ll be back; I have to do before noon duolingo.

A.’s piano lesson really went great and she’s in a good mood. I said, hey, we’re going to learn a new Adult Skill: cleaning a toilet. She was not enthused, but I said, this is the Watch One stage. She helped clean the sink and the counter and we roped T. into helping declutter the counter. This was awesome!

T.’s off to see a play at the jr hi. We’ve scheduled a test drive for the first of a list of candidate vehicles to buy him for graduation. He identified the dealership and that they had the right car available. After the play, he’ll go over with his dad but in separate cars, and they’ll do the test drive and then T. is off to work, conveniently in the same town as the dealership. Progress on multiple fronts!

Meanwhile, A. is reaching out to a friendly-acquaintance, potential friend at school to schedule some online gaming. Mental Health Day is the gift that keeps on giving, along with a plan that gives us hope.

Back to the therapy communication research!

We have teachers wondering if they can recommend therapy and everyone piling onto them saying no, don’t put your district on the hook financially (*sigh*). We have advice to parents to set goals for the kid’s therapy. (*double sigh*) At least that’s being used to manage parental expectations / set boundaries. What else do we have?

We have an assumption that there isn’t a 504 or IEP already involved, and assumptions that the kid doesn’t already have a diagnosis. LOL. My kids have both had diagnoses since they were wee. They’ve been receiving services since pre-K (T.) and early intervention (A.). We’ve had to escalate to get appropriate services for T. AND we’ve requested return to district for T., when an appropriate in district program was created. Ironically, the district did not tell us that program was created, _even tho the teacher designing the program designed it with T. as the target audience_. I mean, what. (How do we know that? The teacher told us that’s what she did. I know it can be difficult to believe if you’ve recently had an interaction with me that R. would describe as I Disapprove of Reality So I Will Remake It the Way I Want It to Be, but I actually do care about relationships and I have some weirdly good ones with people.)

Anyway. None of this helps me? The school knows the sensory issues. _The school sent me email about evolving symptoms that are almost certainly seizure activity ramping up._ They did that when A. was in pre-K, too; they’d send email about her staring off into space and not responding and I was like, whatever, until they said, her face went white, and after I got over the initial, uh, she’s pretty pale, my brain caught up and said, wait, no, that’s a petit mal. We haven’t been able to get the sensory issues adequately mitigated in this school environment. Partly, that’s a Them Problem. A pass to switch classes early or late would help with the passing time crowding overwhelm; an escort would also help, and could help with the Too Much Stuff to Manage problem that means she doesn’t want to bring her over-the-ear headphones because it’s Just One More Big Thing to Manage. Until A. found the migraine glasses, we were seeing a _lot_ of seizure activity; the glasses absolutely fixed that.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that I probably should have involved a neurologist last year. But we’ve never managed to get any action out of the neurologist we had, because we never actually caught anything on EEG (didn’t do a take home, just a sleep deprived, and honestly, that was the problem). We’ve done well enough managing triggers that I lulled myself and everyone else into a sense that the problem was gone, much like there are people around me who lose track of the food allergies and picky eater issues, because I’ve gotten so good at navigating restaurants. Fundamentally, we don’t really _want_ any of us to be on long-term medication (we resent having to take antihistamines, honestly). We are definitely part of that problem.

OTOH, I’ve _never_ thought it made sense to medicate so you can do something that makes you non-functional without the medication. Avoid the trigger! I’ve been on cruises and took a quarter tab of dramamine every 4-5 hours to do so. Yes, I am a hypocrite. Yes, I had to wake up in the middle of the night to take one. _And it was a cruise._ It wasn’t going to school for years. I basically got on a boat with my extended family and the boat entertained everyone else and I lay around in a haze for several days. The dramamine helps with allergies, and I could still have one drink, so it was actually a fantastic experience. The only downside was my sister kept wanting me to go do shit with them, and my entire plan had been to NOT do anything.

The specific reason I’ve been reluctant to get a behaviorist oriented therapist and/or have the therapist communicate with the school is because I believed that the goal for the school is to fit A. into their environment and have her perform at a high and increasing level. We all know that the school is a bad fit for what A. needs in life to thrive. I’ve expressed concern that this is not an appropriate placement (I did that at the junior high, too, but that was only 2 years, and those were the coming-out-of-the-pandemic years and everything was weird anyway. Plus, junior high.), and I did that when T. was transitioning from pre-K to K (and K was an unrelenting disaster that the district pulled the plug on before I had all my experts fully onboard with the plan).

On FF last night, E. really objected to me using the word “bad” to describe this environment triggering increasing seizure symptom situation. E. likes nuance, which is normally fine and also wildly insensitive in this particular context. I’m not sure precisely what she was getting at, _and I don’t care_. The second sense of “bad” in Oxford languages online (what you get when you google “define bad”) is “not such as to be hoped for or desired; unpleasant or unwelcome”. I just don’t understand how this word could possibly be other than the right word for this situation. E. tried a bunch of ways to express her values, and I suspect the core idea involved concerns about ableism. I think it’s obvious that if you are being pressured into doing something you don’t want to do, that is harming you, and that is causing you to have a lot of unpleasant seizure type symptoms, that’s “bad”. It’s not “bad” that you happen to be the kind of person who has this type of reaction to an environment that is unsuitable for you. E. is probably thinking about this in the context of people in E.’s life who are struggling to find appropriate niches, and whose appropriate niches become less and less supportive as the people in them age and eventually pass away. E. may also be thinking about how for some people, embracing the dissonance, the “not fitting in” is part of them “thriving”. I would _much rather_ be the boring person in the middle, than the person who everyone looks at and goes, this is definitely the one that doesn’t quite belong. I don’t want for me, or anyone else, especially my daughter, to always be the one that doesn’t fit in, no matter how hard they try to find their people. At some point, there is a surfeit of being special, an excess so great that even the numbing properties of great wealth and awesome vacations and amazing friends are not enough to overcome. There are not enough carbs in the world. At some point, ya gotta pull the plug and say, if I don’t fit in anywhere, let’s make a place where I do.

R. and I have been framing “homebound” incorrectly. We look at all the outside-the-home things that people don’t get to experience. But they _do_ get to fit in, within their home. I don’t want to be limited to my home (yet), nor do I want that for my daughter. I now want, badly enough, clearly enough, that I’m not going to tolerate any more, the places where I cannot fit, the places where my daughter cannot. I’m afraid I’m going to have to, once more, Replace Reality with a Better Way of Doing Things.

We are going to make our environment Fit For Us.

Probably I am exaggerating.

So, Tuesday, I got up for the MEPFP meeting. Wednesday, I got up for the dentist. Thursday (today), I got up for an 8 am meeting with the vice principal at ABRHS regarding something that happened Wednesday afternoon in the current events club. I obviously was not at the current events club. I got A.’s description. I got a teacher’s description (very vague). I got a phone call from the vice principal on the way to the therapist. I talked to A. about it before the therapist. I talked to it with A. at the therapist. We all trooped in to talk to the vice principal about it this morning.

I then tried to listen to the If Books Could Kill about _Lean In_, and concluded that I truly do hate everyone and I just want nuclear winter already because honestly, that’s what we deserve collectively. If we are in a world in which young, Democrat voting folks think that supporting a group of terrorists that want to segregate everyone by gender over the age of 9 AND attack Sheryl Sandberg for being a capitalist AND then be appalled at an SPLC survey that suggests that men are unhappy about feminism and/or think that men should be valued “more” whatever that might mean, well, I’m out. I’m done. We deserve what happens to us, no matter how horrible.

And then I got the summary from the vice principal about the meeting. And that email included the word “punch” (that had not previously entered the conversation at any point) and the phrase “handbook violation”.

OK. Look, I know I wanted my kid in school because that’s where the kids are, but I can admit when I am wrong. And I am obviously being wrong about a lot of things right now. I talked to A., and she doesn’t know what she wants (fair). I sent an email to the therapist asking for support on the keep A. home on Friday as a mental health day (okay to say no, but boy, a letter in support would be awesome). I replied to the vice principal saying A. won’t be in the club any more, and will be staying home Friday, and please let me know if there is a plan to suspend her on Monday so we don’t send her in to school pointlessly. I also asked for details on the “punch” thing, since that was a whole new thing and I don’t want to talk about anything until they completely spill all of what they have on that. Whatever “that” is. I mean, it’s fictional, but details matter.

We did some research, because I realized I didn’t really know what the options at this point are (obviously, homeschooling is always an option). Turns out MGL says school until 16, and honestly, that’s not that far into the future. So one option is to attend until 16, bail, send a letter of withdrawal and then sit for the GED or HISET. At that point, we can take a couple years (or not) and she can attend college (or not). Obviously, I find this personally deeply appealing because of the travel opportunities that open up.

In the meantime, I remember seeing something go by about a program to deal with chronic absenteeism. We work really hard to make sure the kids go to school and are in school all day pretty consistently, but I’m thinking I’ll just revisit that decision at an absolute minimum. Since the December debacle with the history teacher, we got a notification _at the appropriate time_ about missing assignments in history, and A. and I got her caught up and have been keeping her caught up. But I’m now thinking maybe that was a poor choice.

I’m thinking an absolute nose dive in attendance and homework completion is the correct call at this point. In conjunction with that certificate she got about her amazing MCAS scores, it’ll make our point for us when we pull her next September.

I’m really, really, really sorry I worked so hard to keep my kids in school. That’s easily the stupidest, most damaging, worst decision of my entire post-JW life.

If you are agonizing over your kids’ education, or are homeschooling and wondering if that’s the right choice, or whatever you are thinking about your choices: whatever you did, I fully support that you made the best decision you could at the time. And if you regret it, I absolutely sympathize with you. And also, I am pretty sure that in the grander scheme of things, it is way less important than it feels, and the quicker we get that idea into us, the better we’ll all feel.

I walked with M.

I watched last night’s and tonight’s Alex Wagner, mostly by fast forwarding through a lot of the commentary on the trials. I also watched the new episode of NCIS. It was okay; I did not fast forward through it.

I got A. through her history homework and a shower. We also talked through how the Crusades were justified at the time. I’m not convinced she really gets it, because she — like a lot of people who exist entirely outside a group — is trying to reconcile how the group behaves vs. what it says it believes in. Lots of autism in the, wait, but you believe in X so why are you doing something so wildly Not X. I tracked down a more-complete-translated-text of Pope Urban’s speech and broke it down in pieces: he went to a bunch of people who were already killing each other, and said, hey, y’all go together and beat up on the Muslims instead of each other, and in exchange, all your sins will be forgiven and you will get into Heaven. I _think_ she got it this time, but we’ll probably have to take a few more swings at it.

Oddly, I think this would confuse her less if I trash-talked religion more. Which is not precisely where I expected to be at this point in my parenting arc. I think she kind of expects people to actually live their values, which of course is not actually that normal.