Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 76

It’s Been A Rough Summer

This is how I feel right now: “Get me off this thing NOW!”

It’s time to admit it out loud: This has been a rough summer.

This is the first summer since Julianna came along that I haven’t had regular “respite” care.  Our county provides services to people with special needs and to their families, and until last year, the biggest things they’d given us were the iPad and “home based support,” i.e. respite care. I always felt a little weird about taking that service, because it isn’t like Julianna’s disability is so severe that you can’t find a babysitter another way. I felt like I was cheating by taking it.

And yet those 22 hours a month, it turns out, were a real sanity saver. Most parents of a six-year-old can expect her to be able to help out around the house. To dress herself. To be able to perform simple tasks without having to stand over her and issue step by step instructions. You sure don’t expect her to be a toddler-level mess maker. One day recently Julianna dumped the UNO deck, the Cars & Trucks counting deck, the Disney snap deck, all the Memory cards, and the entire Eric Carle alphabet game on the basement floor.  It took me an hour of bullying, focused solely on her–well, I practiced my flute, so the time wasn’t totally wasted–to get her to clean up that mess. I thought the pain of that experience would teach her not to repeat it.

I was wrong.

Nicholas, meanwhile, has reverted to his poor-choices routine. He draws these lines in the sand over nothing, and he defends them like they’re the only thing standing between us and the total annihilation of the human species. He will eat dinner, but only after everyone else has finished, if you cajole and threaten and load his fork for him. He does it because it causes inconvenience, and because when dinner is over and it’s time to go to choir practice, for instance, and we will no longer let him eat, he can consider himself deeply victimized. He actually chose to skip dinner altogether one night. It was that important to him.

It’s an attention bid, but there’s only so much attention to go around. I’ve been including him in cooking times, and several mornings this week we’ve cuddled. I help him get dressed sometimes, because I know he likes that. But he’s determined to demand more than the share that is possible to give him.

And then there’s Michael, who started toilet training with a bang at 17 months, and after a few weeks learned we were only going to make him sit there for five minutes, and he was capable of holding it until we put a diaper back on him. It’s one thing to have a child start asserting himself that way; it’s another to go two months without even one successful bathroom visit. We took three weeks completely off in the hopes of resetting, but he returned to the process even more stubbornly determined not to succeed.

Now, the current philosophy in a situation like this is “wait until he’s ‘ready’,” but that philosophy is a luxury  made possible by disposable diapers. Michael does not use disposable diapers. You cannot wait until age 3 or 4 (which I find patently ridiculous in any case) when you’re using cloth diapers.

So Friday I spent the entire morning sitting with Michael on the toilet: 10 minutes on, 5 minutes off, waiting out his ability to hold it. And it worked. In the last three days we’ve had half a dozen successes; he’s learning that we’re serious about this. But those two and half to three hours I spent sitting in front of a toilet were hours I really needed to get the floors mopped and papers filed, to say nothing of the column and the bulletin insert due this week.

To top it all off, the kids have spent the entire summer fighting with each other All.The.Time. I see my own temper reflected in Alex’s short fuse, and I realize how much I need to corral and redirect myself, because he is absorbing my habits.

In short: O.Ver.Whelm.Ing.

I post things like this with a wince, because it’s inviting judgment. People are inevitably going to tell me what I’m doing wrong, or how I need to do less, but what? I have virtually no deadlines this summer; I barely spent any time writing last week, because I was focusing so much on family matters. In fact, that’s been the story of the entire summer: every two weeks or so, I get one productive writing day by paying a sitter; otherwise I’m snatching ten minutes in between family commitments.

I have much to be grateful for, but it doesn’t change the fact that this summer is really hard. And I sit here in the dark on my NEO so I can pound the thoughts out before 5:45a.m. Jazzercise without getting sidetracked by the internet, but it’s a little too honest. A little too raw. And I wonder if all parents feel this way, whether they have two typically-developing kids four years apart in day care or ten smooshed together at home. And if so, is this stress just the price we pay for the gift of having them at all? Or is it, like everything else, an invitation to fall upon grace and be broken open to make room to grow?

(Well, duh.)

Carnivals and Kid Moments of the Week: a 7QT post

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After much deliberation, we decided to go to the county fair this week. We couldn’t justify armbands at $16 apiece for six people, not after spending $10 a head for Christian’s, my and Alex’s admission, so we bought one book of tickets and rationed the rides to three apiece. It felt very miserly, indeed, but to obtain unlimited rides for our family would have cost us over $100 for the evening. For two hours’ entertainment. Not even remotely justifiable. It’s frustrating; they’re pricing families right out of the event.

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In case you’re wondering, I actually don’t know where her glasses are at present. :/

We had the kids choose a ride, and they went one at a time to stretch out the enjoyment. When Nicholas went into the inflatable obstacle course, Julianna plopped her bottom on the gravel and began wailing. We were prepared to ignore the drama, but the carnival employee caught my eye and surreptitiously waved her in for free. I don’t like Julianna being exempt from the rules, but on the other hand, I thought maybe this girl had some connection with Down syndrome that made her want to reach out. So I let her go.

And then she snuck into the “Scrambler” ride that Christian and Alex were going on. I pulled her back out around the fences, and the operator–again–caught my eye and told me to send her in. (Throws hands in the air.) This carnival company was overtly Christian, so maybe they had some sort of philosophy about people with special needs.

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As an aside, on the topic of carnivals, this:

Because doesn’t everyone want a giant plush corn cob to treasure for ever and ever and ever, Amen?

I will never understand carnival prizes.

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This morning I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to get my Jazzercise out of the way early. I was surprised to see how dark it was. One of the other women began the class by moaning, “Oh, I hate it when it’s dark in the morning! It’s a sign that school’s getting ready to start!”

I said, “I was thinking the same thing, except I like it, and Hallelujah!”

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Because you see, my children have decided the purpose of their existence is fighting with each other while making epic  messes in the basement. I can’t decide how much I should be arbitrating. Because I would spend all day at it. Literally.

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However, I do have a couple cute moments. Like this Nicholas-ism. “How old are you, Daddy?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Wow. I can’t even count that high!”

And the fact that Michael is making his first forays into helping around the house. He is dying to be a big boy and clear the table. Every time he brings me a dish he has the biggest smile on his face. He’s so proud of himself.

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Let me close by talking about Alex and Michael a bit. They are so very adorable together. (This is being written with Alex reading every word as it goes down. It’s crimping my style, people, I’m telling you. ) It’s a beautiful thing to see how much he loves his baby brother, and how much his baby, or rather, toddler brother loves him in return. Compared to the rest of the bad blood in the house it warms my heart. But their relationship isn’t perfect, either.

You see, Alex is quite particular about his food. Remember this post? He’s still very slow and methodical. When he has fruit snacks, he lays them out on the table from least to most favorite, and wanders around the room, looking at the computer screen while savoring the one in his mouth; then he returns to the table for the next. The only problem?

Michael Mayhem, of course. The child who climbs everything and eats anything. The end result being, of course, that Alex often doesn’t get to eat his favorites, because they’re gone by the time he gets there!

(I keep telling him you can’t leave things lying around in this house and expect them to still be there when you come back. But you know some lessons kids seem incapable of learning. Like, yanno, “You take care of you! I’ll take care of (fill-in-sibling’s-name).

Fiction: A Little Absurdity For Your Hump Day

Photo credit: Mandy Dawson (http://inmandyland.com)

This afternoon an alligator came down my street

driving a pink scooter.

I was cleaning my gutters,

elbow-deep in half-rotted muck,

and I could swear

she winked at me as she passed.

Time, she seemed to say,

is a-wastin’.

So I left the ladder hanging

and found my scaly skin

and took off

into the cool

wild blue.

*

Well, last week people encouraged me for trying a genre new to me. This absurd image came to mind at bedtime last night, and I thought, hm, let’s just go for it.

Thoughts on Maintaining Weight Loss

[image error]

When I saw this picture taken in Colorado, I went, “Whoa! I really do look skinny!”

It’s been about three months since I officially kicked into “maintenance” mode instead of “weight loss” mode. Frankly, I find this stage tougher than the weight loss stage. When you’re losing, there’s the motivation of seeing the number falling to keep you in check at the table. Once you’re “there,” you have to get comfortable with a certain amount of up and down.

Plus, it’s a tricky balance to find the right number of calories. LoseIt.com bumped me up from around 1600 a day to over 1800 a day overnight. I knew better than to use them all, so I adjusted my budget by 100, but I started gaining again. Not until I removed virtually all the extra calories did I settle in.

I’ve watched the progression of weight loss and subsequent weight gain among those close to me too many times. Having invested in a new wardrobe now, that has to be my motivation–my own miserliness. That and simply being healthy, of course. My conviction about holistic living–integrating faith and respect for the way we’re created into every daily choice, from family planning to purchasing choices–presupposes good eating choices.

I started this process last fall in the knowledge that I’m just over a year away from age 40, at which point weight is likely to get a lot harder to manage. There have been many times in the past nine months when I have huffed and puffed my way through diaper changes and forcing unwilling children up the stairs, leaning them back to wash their hair, running up and down the stairs to get the baby up from nap…it seems like I’m constantly running around. Why on earth didn’t that translate into more calorie burn? I wondered.

But on the flip side, there were those days when I overdid it and still lost weight.

I realized, eventually, that my body is indeed burning more calories than it’s given credit for; my metabolism is more active than someone without four young kids would be. Otherwise I would have had to work a lot harder at losing weight. Because honestly, it really wasn’t that hard. My age and caring for multiple young kids in a three-level house worked in my favor. Every day now I think about my metabolism when I’m wrestling munchkins and running up and down stairs. (It helps my attitude, let me tell you!)

But I’m also very aware of the coming days. As my metabolism starts to slow from that around-age-forty transition, I’m also going to be doing less running after kids, because they’ll be getting older, more self-sufficient. I’m going to lose that crutch just when it would be most useful.

Fortunately, everything happens incrementally. I guess it’ll be good for me in another way: I’ll be forced to continue adjusting my habits and expectations all the way into my twilight years. Mental and spiritual flexibility is a good thing.

It’s Organization Week

weta (Photo credit: Jasmic)

At 3:30 this morning I woke up when Christian got up briefly. No big deal…he interrupted a terrible, vivid dream in which my mother was cooking dinner in my childhood home while I stood in the living room with my children, both adults keenly aware that five miles to the north was a pack of orcs headed our way with intent to murder and destroy. I was contemplating my first battle, knowing I had no training, and both I and my children were likely soon to be dead.

You can imagine I wasn’t too upset about my night’s sleep being interrupted.

However.

My brain immediately went into gear: what am I going to blog about today? Shut up! You can figure that out while you’re driving to Jazzercise. A few minutes later Michael woke up wailing for water. Then my husband’s breathing got under my skin. Then Michael again. The precious remainder of my night was disappearing fast. Monday is my 5a.m. wakeup call to make sure my body’s fully awake in time for 5:45 Jazzercise. I could tell I wasn’t going to sleep anymore in my bed, so I went downstairs and mummified myself on the couch in throw blanket and pillows, as I have learned to do. And Michael shrieked again.  Wake up, Christian. I sent all my brain waves in his direction, but then Michael settled down. Only to fuss again, but with less conviction. And again, but by now I could tell he was going back to sleep. I exhaled my tension and started the rosary that helps my mind settle back into sleep.

And my alarm went off.

Summer is passing fast (some parts of me want to add, but not fast enough), and with the concepts presented in Organized Simplicity rattling around in my brain, I have a purpose for the rest of it. My orcs, the ones I have to battle, are excess toys, books, and junk. So this week I’m blogging fast and furious so I can dedicate my oodles and oodles of spare some time to decluttering and simplifying.  Tomorrow’s topic: thoughts on maintaining weight loss.

Sunday Snippets

It’s time for another gathering of Catholic bloggers at RAnn’s This, That & The Other Thing.

This week my posting followed a progression from frustration with one child’s strong-willed behavior to a nice respite found in a field trip day to a reflection on IQ versus emotional intelligence–which, you guessed it, is a Down syndrome post. The progression of frustration and not frustration this week culminated in my Friday post, which is all about getting organized by way of defining priorities a little more clearly. And that, of course, will be a long-term project, not the work of one blog post…. None of these are overtly “Catholic” posts, but life lived in faith, down at the nitty-gritty level, is always formed by faith and leading me along the journey. Especially when it’s uncomfortable. (I talked about that on Morning Air with Sean Herriott at 6:30 in the morning on Wednesday. Nice deep way to start the day, n’est-ce pas? )

Organized Simplicity (and 7QT)

Yesterday morning I hired a sitter so I could go someplace offsite and dig into writing without being interrupted by children bashing each other , wailing over toys being taken, or making epic messes. Example A: Nicholas is beating on the box to Alex’s toy using a stick. This annoys Alex, who decides the best way to stop Nicholas is to beat on the stick using the box. I know. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either. And in the process, he lands a blow on Nicholas’ temple which is still swollen two days later. Example B: I come home from a generally successful writing morning to discover that Julianna has dumped out all the Anomia cards, all the Memory cards, all the Crazy 8 cards, all the Snap cards, and part of the Uno cards. And that was only Julianna’s part of the mess. Example C: When I come upstairs after making her clean it up, I discover that Michael has been playing at the table with the water pitcher, a cereal bowl and two glasses, all of which had liquids left in them.

Christian was gone from Saturday through Tuesday, and during that time I basically did no writing at all. I simply accepted that my life was about being a mom and keeping all of us sane. And it was successful, which was very revealing. During this weekend I also began reading a book: Organized Simplicity. Since chaos and disorderliness seems to be my life, and since these things stress me ridiculously, and since I spent the whole last half of the school year wailing to my husband that we were doing too much and we couldn’t keep this pace up, it seemed like the answer to a prayer.

Of course, I haven’t made it very far into the book, but the initial task is to come up with a family mission statement to direct everything else you do. Her discerning process involves a questionnaire. Here is part of mine:

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Collectively we are at our best when we are…organized and not overscheduled, when we don’t have commitments piled on top of messes needing to be cleaned. That’s when we can enjoy each other’s company. We are at our worst when we are…fighting to juggle all the commitments: baths and cleaning and writing and lessons and practices.

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If we had a completely free day as a family, how would we spend it?

We would do something outdoors–bike ride, playground, pool, etc.–and have both family breakfast and family dinner. Otherwise we’d probably do about what we do now, just at a more relaxed pace. Go get ice cream. Go see a movie. Something fun.

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Name three things we think we could do better as a family.

1–home organization, i.e. cleanliness

2–starting early, so we don’t end up doing things in a rush all at the last minute

3–”unplugged” time as a family

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What would we like people to say about our family as a whole in thirty years? I’d like them to say, “What a great family. Look how much they love each other. I want to be like them.”

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If we could name one principle from which we want our family to operate, what would it be? Seeking God in each other and in all life’s situations.

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What are the top priorities we want our family to value? Stewardship of our material things, of the earth, of our gifts and of our talents.

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What is the main purpose of our home? To provide a safe haven and a place of rest and unconditional love for all our family members.

All this adds up to my first attempt at a, well, at least a personal mission statement, since I’m not involving the whole family:

To use our activities, our home, and our possessions in such a way that we can live in tranquility amid busyness, not let love be overwhelmed by the stress of chaos, and be an inviting example of what a Godly family can be.

Check out the book here.

IQ and EQ

I’ve never had my IQ measured. Have you? I’m not going to ask people to share results, but I’m curious as to how many of us have been tested. How about a quick poll?

Take Our Poll

Everybody knows what IQ is: a measure of how smart you are. We use it to measure both ends of the spectrum: genius starts at 130 or 140; mental retardation starts at 70 and goes down from there.

Julianna’s IQ is 60, as measured last year. It can change a bit in the first few years of elementary school, so she’ll be tested again, but for now that’s the number we use.

But have you ever heard of Emotional Quotient? It’s a self-reported test, so it’s not scientific, but if you’re interested, you can take a survey here to see how you measure.

People with Down syndrome are often really emotionally intelligent. When I’m asked to talk about Julianna, one thing that always comes up is her ability to connect with people. She’s all heart, both good and bad–when it’s bad, the world is ending, even if it’s just a scraped knee. But oh, how she loves. And loves complete strangers as well as loved ones and friends.

We went to visit my grandmother on the 4th of July, when she was recovering in the nursing home. I remember visiting my great-grandfather in a nursing home when I was about her age. I found it positively terrifying. As we walked in the door, Alex and Nicholas clearly felt the same intimidation. Their body language sucked inward; Nicholas drew very near my side and didn’t venture away as we passed the ring of elderly in their wheelchairs, sitting in the foyer. One man smiled widely and tried to engage us in conversation. The boys shrank.

Julianna, however, made a beeline for him. “Oh, hi gway gee-paw, hi!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. (Great grandpa.) “I be see!” (I be six.) Of course, he had no earthly idea what she had said, but his face lit up. A brief encounter that brightened his day and gave her joy.

More willing than her brothers to brave the cannula on her great grandma.

She seems to find the person in any room who most needs a hug, and if you’re crying she comes right over to comfort you. “Doh cwy, Mahk-oh,” she’ll say to Michael, who is less than enthusiastic about her as a comforter; his favorite people in the world are, in order: Mommy, Alex, and Daddy.

It’s hard to measure emotional intelligence by any objective standard, but even considering that, we as a society place little value on this trait. And that’s a shame, because it’s at least as important as the more traditional form of intelligence. Maybe more so. Intelligence is great, but empathy, compassion, kindness–these are the things that make life worth living.

As a society, we pay lip service to the importance of people with intellectual disabilities, but I’m not sure we really mean it. What we value is the high IQ. Everybody wants to meet, shake the hand of, and honor people of high intelligence. People whose contributions can be measured in dollar signs or publicity or glory. The overflowing person-to-person love shown by people with low IQs and high EQs makes us uncomfortable. They don’t always understand and observe the conventions and boundaries the rest of us cling to.

For me as a parent of a child whose love knows no bounds (except dogs. She’s terrified of dogs), I face a daily conflict. I want her to learn that the rules apply to her, too. Yet in some ways I think the boundaries are a little silly, and worse, they force her to dampen that which makes her most valuable to the world.

I suppose my point is that we really ought to rethink the things we prize. High IQ is good. Achievement is good. But neither of those is more important than empathy, kindness, or compassion. We have things we can and should learn from people we label as “retarded,” “simple-minded,” “handicapped” and all other manner of dismissive, derogatory labels. Because a lot of times, they’re way better than we are at the things that matter most.

And then there are the good days…

*

*

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Teaching a cousin to knee dive

(who knew you could have so much fun at an Ob-Gyn’s office? Big brother was out in the waiting room playing Jet Pack Joy Ride on the iPad with a cluster of nine other kids gathered to watch. I have a picture, but I promised all the moms I only took it for me, so you’ll have to imagine it)

Visiting another great grandma, who has…

A player piano!

Singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to each other.

Nicholas wailed, “But I don’t WANT to leave great Grandma’s house!” File that one under the “awwwwww, what a delightful child” category while muscling him into the back of the van, anyway, teeth brushed, dressed for bed. Arrive home two hours later to this:

My Strong-Willed Boy

Friday was not a good day. I’ve had several months to accustom myself to the idea of my beautiful children turning into sibling monsters who seem bent on pushing each other’s buttons, but Friday they took it to a whole new level. Well, one of them did, anyway.

I’m not sure how it began, exactly…I got involved when Alex hit Nicholas, in response to Nicholas kicking him repeatedly in the back. I demanded they both apologize to each other–something Alex was willing to do, but Nicholas was not.

Apologies are a hard skill to learn, which is exactly why they’re so critical. We all screw up repeatedly, and you can’t just move forward, pretending it didn’t happen. Reconciliation requires apology. Love requires apology.

Anyway, the details would take several thousand words. Let’s just say it escalated, and none of the discipline techniques I employed made the slightest impression. My last ditch effort was canceling the planned outing to the park. I thought the fact that everyone would be mad at him because he caused them to lose their outing would sway him, but it didn’t. He was fine with everyone else being miserable on his account. What he was not fine with was when I decided it wasn’t fair to punish everyone else, and told him we were going to the park after all, and he would sit on the bench beside me while everyone else got to play.

That led to an immediate apology. With requisite hug. Let me tell you, it was a very revealing insight into his character.

We had two more world war N’s before bedtime, but that, really, is the subject on my mind: my third-born’s character.

Somehow, I thought he would follow the same general path as his big brother: around the age of four, he would smooth out into a more or less compliant child who had learned who’s in charge in the house, and could begin to be entrusted with small pieces of the household load. In some ways that’s true, and this is the hardest thing about him: the duality of his nature. He can be so sweet, so delightful–universally so in public, and with non-parental authority figures. At home the delightful side of him comprises somewhere around fifty percent.

But then there’s this other side. The strong-willed, not empathetic side. And frankly, it scares me a little.

I’ve done enough reading, and listening to other moms,  to know that having a strong-willed kid is not all bad. If you can train their minds and hearts in the right direction, they are likely to cause less parental heartbreak in the teen years. Because once they know what they believe, nobody, not no how, not no way, can get them to do something they think is wrong. They are naturally resistant to peer pressure.

But getting there…that’s the scary part. If I could focus on Nicholas the way I focused on Alex when he was going through a similar stage, I would feel more confident of a positive outcome. But we’re toilet training again now. (Unsuccessfully, I might add.) Toilet training a walking tornado who might or might not need speech therapy. While a developmentally disabled big sister is still trying to learn to talk, and struggling to comply with instructions like “pick up that shirt and those pants and put them in the dirty clothes,” to say nothing of …math, for instance.

I still believe the end result of a middlingly-large family is worth the struggle, but the fact is, right now this all feels overwhelming. How can I lead him down the right path–to holiness, to empathy, to respect for the dignity of himself and everyone around him–when he pulls so hard in the opposite direction, and I have so many other lines tugging on me?

I’ve always prayed for wisdom in parenting, but never so fervently as I have begun to do in the last week or two.

Still, I can’t leave you on that note. Nicholas has delivered some real howlers this weekend that I just have to enshrine for all eternity.

“When is Grandma gonna DIE?” he demanded loudly while we were visiting my grandmother, who is recently returned to her apartment after we thought she was near death. Thankfully, Grandma’s hearing is almost gone!

“Now I have a sprained ear!” he wailed after I tried to clean out his ear.

“The little Lego doctor truck…Dr. Feel Bad,” he clarified as he tried to tell me who was racing in his room.