hang up the phone

My brakes work.

I can't tell you how happy I am to be able to say that.

And to the old lady in the Yukon crossing Orange Rd without looking both ways because you were on the PHONE...!

"Honey, if you're going to be like that then at least step on the gas. That way you'll only get almost hit in the back end instead of the driver's side door."

I had a post I was going to write today about the last day of summer vacation and second grade and all that, but I'm shaking uncontrollably, so....

maybe later.

I just got back from buying a living room set from Ikea that was even cheaper than their usual cheap furniture. I'll let you know later if it was a GOOD DEAL or a COLOSSAL MISTAKE.

But now I'm going to have living room furniture that matches, instead of the motley bunch chairs et al we have been living with.

* I was going to post a picture, but all I could find were photos of horrific accidents caused by people on cell phones. I'm going to spare you the images that I just burned into my brain.... next post will have a happy happy little picture... of... a bunny!

In the midst of it all

When Daniel went to the old apartment the other day with his dad, they were reminiscing about all the things that happened while we lived there.

I'm not sure exactly how that conversation went, but the end result was a poem from Daniel listing his memories.

They left the poem for me to find when I went back to the apartment by myself.

Isn't it weird how love and pride makes your heart skip a beat?

Sometimes Daniel asks me if I think about him while he's at school, and I ask him back if he felt the hug that my heart was sending to his. When I read his poem, it felt like that...like my heart was reaching out of my body to find him.

I can't transcribe the poem right now - he's in the next room. But maybe tonight I'll post it for you.

The insanity continues around here. The apartment is almost done, I clean out the last of the trash today, and we scrub it from top to bottom on Memorial Day.

And then my parents come.

This is not a good time for me.

But once they leave, I can curl up into a ball, and then slowly emerge as a person again. I'm trying very hard for everyone's sakes to not get too miserable this time.

We'll see how that goes.

When therapy "clicks"

Yesterday Daniel had art therapy.

I had called ahead to let the therapist know what was going on, so she was ready when we got there.

She used music and movement and drawing to pull Daniel out and get him to talk, but not in the way that psychologists do. She talked to him about how hard it was for her when her students don't listen and act up in her class, and she talked to him about how it made her feel.

When she asked Daniel if he knew what she was talking about, his eyes lit up and he joined in - telling her how it made him feel like fire when the kids misbehave and how he hits himself and tries to shush them but it doesn't work, it only adds oxygen to the fire.

They used drums to express how it made them feel, and the whole time Daniel talked and talked.

This is significant because he had not been willing to talk with his psychologist.

He spontaneously drew a diagram showing how he would like to feel (relaxed), how he feels most of the time (mildly to moderately anxious) and how he feels during conflicts at school (tense, "on fire" out of control)

He said he's only felt relaxed one or two times in his life.

I'm a fly on the wall during these sessions, listening but not interfering unless he calls me in. Several times yesterday I was near tears listening to him and his eloquent descriptions of how he feels. He holds so much in his brain, absorbing everything and then when it comes back out through his filter it is just amazing.

He got carried away comparing his feelings to those of a giant gaseous planet orbiting too close to it's star. (I think this is what he's talking about, but who knows) Updated to add: Here is the actual link to what he was talking about. Proud parent Howard looked it up so that you would have the "correct" information.

He couldn't simply end with the comparison, he had to fill her in on all of the pertinent minutiae, so that she could properly understand his reference.

Sometimes it's like he has to give you the contents of his brain so that he can have a conversation with you.

At the end, the therapist challenged him to be a little easier on himself for the next few days, and not feel responsible for the behavior of the other children in his class, and gave him a mantra to repeat to himself when he starts to get "wound up". He wouldn't promise her anything, because he can't commit unless he knows he can succeed, but he said he might try.

It was nothing short of beautiful.

And when he climbed into the car, he told me, "I love her."

"Me too" I said.

Me too.

Update

Things are a little better here.

Partly because of Valium.

And also because I've been bending over like a Cirque du Soleil act to keep Daniel as calm and anxiety-free as possible. (The contortionist act is made easier by Valium)

So I'm picking him up from school, taking him out of school early, and generally being as helpful and chipper as I can muster. That's not saying very much, really because I'm in that part of the packing cycle where I burst into tears randomly. But he seems to be a little better. At least he hasn't handed me any "I WANT TO DIE" notes in the last 36 hours.

So that's an improvement.

Oh! did I tell you? My basement stairs are one inch too narrow for my washer and dryer to fit.

Does that sentence even make sense?

I have to get a saw and carve up my beautiful finished basement stairway so that the movers will be able to get my washer and dryer into the basement.

I am not happy about that. Mostly because while I am confident about my demolition abilities, I have no f*@&ing clue how to hang sheet-rock and make it look pretty again.

Oh crap, here come the tears.

***********************

Ok, better now.

Well, I have to go back to the packing. The moving company is coming tomorrow to give me an estimate and I think they like to see stuff that is actually in boxes and not just thrown on the floor.

I shouldn't talk about it...but since I already am...

So... I think I should probably just keep my mouth shut about all the drama over here with our attempt to buy a house. But since I've opened the door to it already, I might as well talk about it one last time.

It's looking hopeful once again, but I just can't tell with this seller. It could still fall apart at the eleventh hour.

The good news is that all the feet-dragging that is going on is pushing the closing date back, which is nothing but good news for us.

And then of course there's a sizable amount of work the seller has said they will do to fix all the problems they caused with the renovation.

Oh, but we are all dreaming about this particular house now. Planting flowers in the spring, relaxing on the porch, maybe even shoveling the snow - providing we are moved in while it is still winter. Having larger bedrooms! And lots of windows! And more than one bathroom!

I guess I have to resign myself to the fact that I won't know if we will actually get this house until they hand is the keys at the closing - whenever that will be.

I suppose that gives me lots of time to procrastinate on packing.

photo by Mr. Greenjeans.

Does this go under "too cute" or "holy crap"?

Perhaps it was the Benedryl working it's magic, but last night before he fell asleep, Daniel asked this question:

"What's el-eye-ay-are? Is it liar? Like the thing you play like a guitar, or a fib?"

"It's a person who tells a fib. The other lyre is el-why-are-eee. How do you know about lyre, like guitar?"

"Oh, I read about it in Sonnets to Orpheus."

We should have named him Linus

Today was hard.

Daniel had a substitute teacher. And although he said there wasn't anything in particular that happened to upset him, just the disruption of not having his usual teacher put him on edge.

I should have picked up on it when he came off the bus without his usual bounce, but I was very distracted today, for reasons I' won't get into now.

Homework caused tears, but it often does. The difference today was that it also caused hyperventilating and outright weeping.

And then at bedtime he realized that we lost one of his many blankies.  THREE YEARS AGO!

Never mind that he hadn't noticed until tonight... the grief was as poignant as if he had lost it yesterday.

The weeping

the wailing

the rending of garments!

I'd like to say that I was patient, and consoling, and understanding of this most tragic of childhood events. But as usual it only occurred to me after the fact, that that might have been helpful.

I was just too damn annoyed with the kid to be selflessly nurturing.

He did finally fall asleep as I sang to him, after I promised that he could use his money to buy another blankie JUST LIKE the one that was lost.

Oh god, I really hope they still make those blankets.

It had to happen sometime

I keep writing and deleting tonight.

I want to talk about real estate, crazy science facts my son taught me today, what I'm watching on HGTV, really, anything, ANYTHING but the fact that my parents are visiting in just a few short days.

I haven't completely flipped out yet, because I'm absolutely, positively in denial.

I'm still hoping that I might wake up from this dream and find out that I have a perfectly wonderful, supportive, loving family waiting for me. Which is more complicated now than it used to be when I was a kid, because of course I AM part of a perfectly wonderful, supportive, loving family. The three of us in our little house is more than I ever dreamed was possible when I was a kid. I didn't know that families could be happy.

So it is always with some trepidation that I allow my first family to encroach on my happy family.

That, and it's just a huge drag getting everything ready for mr. & mrs. anal retentive.

On the positive side, once this ordeal is over, I will have a really, truly clean and somewhat de-cluttered house.

So excuse me this week, I have a lot of work to do. It's hard to clean when your first instinct is to crawl into bed and sleep until it's all over.

See you next week.

Protein Motor

Edited to add: Holy crap this type looks really small today. I'm going to make it bigger. Does it always look this tiny? Maybe my eyes are going...

__________________________________________________________

With some research help from my husband, I will now demonstrate a tiny fraction of what life is like with my son.

When I went to visit Daniel's school the other day, we all had to check out our kid's writing journal.

Now, a writing journal for a first grader is a pretty funny thing, since they don't know how to spell yet. So "reading" (and I use that term loosely), the journal feels a bit like being Champollion reading hieroglyphics.

But about midway through Daniel's journal I find a page that says in his handwriting:

Proteon motr

and has a crude drawing that looks similar to that image above. (Except that at the time I didn't know what the connection was, because who the hell knows what a "Proteon motr" is?)

Well, in the midst of my conversation with the teacher, she mentioned that journal page and how he had told her it was a "Protein motor". He explained a little bit about it to her and she asked him if this was a real thing. He said it was.

None of it rang a bell to me, but I did have the foresight to tell her that actually almost everything he talks about is REAL. And I mentioned that we have to explain to him sometimes that most people don't understand oh, string theory, or advanced engineering techniques or ...oh I don't know... physics.

When I relayed this conversation to my husband, he tells me that "Yes Viginia, there is such a thing as a "Protein motor". "

It is located within your cells.

And you know who else knows about this stuff?

The kids at Harvard who take classes in Cellular Biology.

I guess my husband showed this stuff to Daniel last spring, and it made an impression.

Here are some links, if you want to be smarter than all your friends too.

This one shows the awesome "Inner Life of a Cell" (the videos on the top row titled "Inner Life: View the Animation". Pick the version that works best for your bandwidth), with a boring narrator guy explaining what is happening.
(The part that Daniel was referring to is about half-way through, they show the words "Motor Protein" or "Protein Motor" or something, I've forgotten already)

Now if that one just sends you spiraling into a depression like it did me, because I couldn't understand a word of what he was talking about - try this one (scroll down below the picture and click on Watch the Video), which has the same animation but instead of those pesky words, there is a lovely new-agey soundtrack that makes you want to have a massage and take a nap, and doesn't make you feel bad because you are woefully ignorant about your cells' inner lives.

The third choice is this page which gives you a run-down of what happens in the video, without any animation. Just words.

I kind of wanted to burn a dvd for the teacher, so she would know that he isn't making this stuff up,  but Daniel doesn't want to and besides I don't want the teacher to know how insane we all are.

Yet.

Sunday school redux

So... what I was supposed to tell you the other day, and wimped out on, neglected to elaborate on, was what specifically Daniel told the Sunday school teacher.

Who is very nice, by the way. Doing a great job. Better than I could do - for sure. Did I mention how nice he is? Even though my husband thinks it would be great if I taught my son's Sunday school class. He's mean that way.

I'm stalling, because I have to see these folks every week. Oh well, I guess it's ok, after all, I'm really just hiding in fear of my parents, not my neighbors.

So... Sunday, my son blurts out in the class, "My mom told me how you got roped into being the Sunday school teacher and when you called your wife to tell her she said What?! and you said How hard could it be? They give you a book and you read from it? And my mom is really glad she isn't the teacher and then my dad and I laughed because that was really funny."

And that, my friends was when I melted in shame into the tiny tiny chair I was sitting in in the hall. I mean it's one thing for your kid to dish dirt at school, because the teachers are overwhelmed and hear stuff like this all the time. But Sunday school? It's all church and God (with a capital G) and you know, judgment and damnation and stuff.

Oh! and guess what? I dropped my awesome laptop on the floor, and it turns out that they don't really like to be dropped. And now I have a choice of either living with a quirky, not altogether functioning computer, or no computer at all, so it can be sent away to be fixed.

But I think I like quirky better. At least quirky still keeps my lap warm.