Beating down our sensory consternation

Today, or tonight rather, we take Daniel to his first concert.

At least the first one that isn't on a Sunday afternoon and filled with knee-high fans using sippy-cups.

We're going to see the Decemberists, all three of us.

I wrote a note to the school that he'll be out tomorrow. Sleeping off the excitement...hopefully.

We know the risks.

We bought the earplugs.

And the safety earmuffs.

There's no guarantee that we'll even make it through the opening act. But the prospect of hearing
"The Apology Song" or "The Mariner's Revenge" might just be enough incentive to stick it through to the end. That, or maybe just the lure of staying up all night.

I'm excited at the possibility that this wacky idea might work. I mean auditory sensitivity isn't Daniel's biggest issue, at least not one that impacts us on a daily basis, but when you couple it with a large crowd, wacky lights, and staying up past bedtime... well, that certainly seems like a recipe for disaster.

And this is the point that I'm making very awkwardly - we are still going through with it!

We are all older, bigger, more mature, and either more fool-hardy or more certain that there is a chance of success here.

I feel like we (all three of us) are building a ladder, or a scaffold as a friend of mine used to say, creating experiences, and memories for Daniel, that teach him that he can do it, that he doesn't have to let his anxiety, or his sensory issues hold him back. Each experience gets him a little closer to his peers. And look!

We managed The Blue Man Group!

We did Broadway!

He went Trick-or-Treating for well over an hour!

I have high hopes for us.

We are all growing up.

Oh,
and.... good work last Tuesday everybody!

not a bunny... but still furry

Daniel has taken the bus since he was in Pre-K.

Back then the teachers practically insisted on it, saying that it would make the transition from home to school easier.

Of course this was a special-ed Pre-K so the teachers were given a status very close to God, seeing as they were going to transform our misfit and "differently-abled" children into what would pass for normal by kindergarten.

So Daniel took the bus.

In Kindergarten he was still classified as special-ed so he got his own bus to and from school. A chariot of sorts with a driver and aide at his disposal. It was like a traveling "Daniel Show" complete with cheering section.

Last year he was de-classified so he took the regular school bus. There were some issues.

Some bigger kids picked on him.

Some tearful days getting off the bus.

But Daniel tells me, that the problems with last year's bus were nothing compared to the bus he takes from our new house.

Daniel spends a lot of time in his head beating himself up. Especially where school is involved. So I'm never really sure how much of the torment he is describing is real.

I guess it doesn't really matter does it? It is real to him.

And I've witnessed some of the neighbor kids interact with him. To say that they don't "get" Daniel would be a gross understatement. Plus some of the kids have reached the age where it is all about picking on the oddball.

We are nothing if not odd around here. All three of us.

So I'm going to be ferrying Daniel to and from school now.

I'm been kind of tough on Daniel lately. Expecting him to do more and complain less. Making him deal with some of his sensory issues instead of accommodating him. And yesterday he was pretty fragile.

It wasn't until bedtime that he explained to me (crying and sniffling and using an entire box of tissues  - Hooray! milestone! He is blowing his nose at 7 1/2!) that I understood why he was not able to deal with things.

The good news... he's only been on the bus a handful of times so far this year.

But I wonder, will his absence make him more of a target on those occasions when he has to ride the bus?

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!

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.

suicidal tendencies

Last night I decided not to take any Benedryl. I've been taking it pretty consistently since we started our house-buying journey.  But for some reason I didn't think I needed it last night.

I woke up at four.

It's 5:30 now and I just figured I might as well get up already - it's really boring lying in bed, not sleeping.

_______________________________________________________
Last week I got a call from the Principal of Daniel's school. It's never a good feeling when the school calls you.

He told me that Daniel had written a letter in class talking about killing himself. At which point all the blood drained from my body and I said, "Give me ten minutes and I'll come to the school so we can talk."

Can first graders have suicidal ideation?

Apparently, in my case, yes.

My first instinct was to find my boy, give him a big hug and take him out of school and never send him back.

But instead I sat down with the Principal and he showed me the letter (such beautiful handwriting!) and I explained (yet again) about the nature of Daniel's anxiety and how deeply he feels things.

Apparently the class had been acting up with one of the teachers and that teacher had told the class to write letters of apology. Daniel goes into super-high-anxiety mode when the class misbehaves anyway, and then this group punishment pushed him over the edge, so to speak.

Here's Daniel's letter that the Principal showed me:

Dear Mr. Granger, I know that I did not do anything wrong. I feel like I want to kill myself. If you know of a way to kill me quickly would you just kill me? Daniel

Holy shit.

I told the Principal that I believed that Daniel did feel that way at the time, but he was probably over it by know.

Then I gathered up my son, (who was not in the meeting) and we went home.

On the way home we talked about his day and the letter and his answers did little to assure me. When I asked him about the feelings he had written about in the letter, and how often he felt that way, he told me," most of the time".

Most of the time?

MOST OF THE TIME?!!!

My first-grade child is having feelings of suicidal ideation most of the time?!

How the hell does this happen?

And what does this mean for a first grader anyway?

I asked a few more questions to see if he understood what "killing myself" meant. And unfortunately it's clear that he has a firm grasp of suicide.

And what do I do when I tell him that I want to help him so that he doesn't feel that way anymore and he tells me, "Don't bother with psychologists mom, they don't work".

I need a valium. It's been a few days and I feel just as overwhelmed writing it down.

Oh and before any of this even happened my husband sent me this link, about a possible connection between Singulair and suicide.

Is there a connection?

I don't know.

I DON'T KNOW.

Suddenly, I have no idea about anything anymore.

suck it up

Here in New Jersey we had a two hour school delay.

Because the ground is covered in what looks to be 7 inches of semisolid water.

They call it "slush", but that name doesn't do it justice with its hints of summer and sno-cones.

They should change it to "sodden weather of despair".

kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Anyway, this is the worst weather for a kid with sensory issues. The slush "sodden weather of despair" is tactile and this encourages sliding and jumping and splashing, except that it is also cold and wet which then inspires screaming and yelling and wailing.

I hate days like this.

But today we couldn't come back to the house to change clothes. (you didn't think I was speaking in the hypothetical did you?) There just wasn't time.

So we waiting at the corner for the bus, in the pouring rain, screaming at each other because his pant leg was a little wet. But of course he wouldn't stand under the umbrella, so he just kept getting wetter.

I felt bad for him, I really did. I understand how yucky wet pants feel. But as I explained to him - most of the kids at school today will be wet. And they keep those classrooms so hot, I'm sure his clothes will dry in no time.

And he has a dry set a clothes at school if he really needs them.

We'll call today a lesson in "sucking it up".

Packing

So I finally started packing.

I figure it's probably safe now.

We are probably buying a house...

and we will probably move into it.

Both the realtor and the mortgage lender have called me asking if I wanted to move the closing date sooner since all the paperwork is completed.

I said no.

Partly because I still don't think that we'll ever live in a house, and I want to avoid the closing where they'll all gather around the table and laugh at me because there's no way we could ever afford a house in this town.

Ha HA HA!

My anxiety aside, what you see above is just one of many boxes of books I am packing up.

I thought it summed up our family nicely.
Some of my husband's books, some of my books, and lots of books to help us deal with Daniel.

Our life in a box.

Let's try this again

Today I got this card in the mail from my good friend...

Actually, I dream about Ikea, and refrigerators, and Eames chairs. Oh, and also right now, Henry VIII. (But that's temporary, I'll move on to another historical figure soon enough.)

And funny enough, I just got word this afternoon that we are out of attorney review and our mortgage is approved.

So, yeah... we are buying a house.

No really.

This time we are.

Or to put it another way - now is the time in our lives when the money flows like water through our fingers.

Kind of like a fountain.
a liquid money fountain
flowing down the drain of life.

(I didn't have any caffeine today, that's why I'm like this.)

I'm happy about it. (The house, not the lack of caffeine.)

But it's funny, you know, every person I talk to who already owns a house says, "No, don't do it. Renting is NICE. Owning a house SUCKS. Bad."
"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"

I wonder if they are trying to tell me something.

Nah.

It's gonna be fun, Right?

Right?

right???

The Days are Just Packed

with meetings at Daniel's school, and looking at houses and the usual Holiday ramp-up.

But the school has decided to move ahead with a 504 for Daniel, which is really excellent news. It means they are taking his anxiety issues seriously. It also means that yet again we have a very awesome teacher.

Of course if the school situation sucked then we could look at houses in a town other than Montclair - which means that we would have a lot more to choose from and we wouldn't be stuck with houses that have no parking, or no kitchen, or no plumbing.

But it's GOOD that the school he is in is working as well as it is for him. I'm GLAD that I'm stuck looking at insanely overpriced housing stock - because the alternative would be a sad little boy.

Speaking of houses, I saw the perfect house for us today. It's not fancy, not by a long shot, but walking in I could immediately picture us there with all of our stuff and the animals,and it has an enormous (by my standards) back yard with a stream running through it. It's the first time I've felt this way about a house since I started looking. Too bad that the taxes are too high and it's in a flood zone because of the stream and it just plain costs too much. My husband's response when he heard me talk about it was "Play the lottery then"

Because, you know, that lottery option has worked out so well for us in the past.  That and those three years I spent writing my address on 3x5 cards and mailing them into HGTV so I could win their damn "Dream Home" (I'm not bitter, its just that my hand still hurts from the writer's cramp)

So, uh, tomorrow I'm going to play the lottery (the "Modest Dreams" version it has better odds) and now I'm just going to enjoy the fact that we had a family sing-along this evening with "Stairway to Heaven" (I was going to embed a YouTube video and just got myself distracted for an hour and a half - all I can say is there are some pretty entertaining videos related to Stairway to Heaven)

I'd better go wrap some presents.

'night.

Everyone's normal at a Grim Reaper Convention

In the midst of all the waiting, waiting, waiting for the lawyers to do their jobs in regards to the new house... life just keeps happening.

I would have preferred to stay home Friday, and obsess about real estate, or maybe even just sleep, but my husband was sick and straddling that line of illness between human and zombie, so it fell on me to take Daniel to the school Halloween extravaganza.

Daniel never really wanted to go to events like this in the past, and when we did go it would inevitably be a short  visit, because he would quickly become overwhelmed and overstimulated.  So I had hopes that  we would leave early.

The school gym looked like a grim reaper convention with a few confused princesses providing dancing entertainment. Apparently, this is a seven-year-olds idea of the PERFECT party. We stayed for the entire party. I had to drag him out the door when the clean-up crew busted out the brooms.

Daniel figured out on his own how to deal with all of the things that usually send him running for the door.

When it got too loud for him, he grabbed my hand and we went into the hallway to chill-out for a little while.

When he started to get anxious that he couldn't find me fast enough, he asked me to "park" myself by one of the doors so that he would always know where I was.

He tried several times to go wandering through the school so he could find a truly quiet place devoid of other people, but every time I guided him back, and he easily went back to running around with his friends.

He was clearly overwhelmed, but every time I suggested that we leave, he held firm and rejoined the other kids.

I'm happy for him, I'm proud that he made it through without a full blown meltdown... but I really wanted to go home and crawl into my own bed. So I kept asking....

"Are you ready to go?"
"No."

"You look tired, shall we go?"
"No."

"It's really loud, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Do you need a break?"
"Uh huh."
"Ok, why don't we leave?"
"No. We can just sit in the hall."

So we sat, until he felt he could deal with the noise and confusion again.

I'm happy for him, and sad that my husband wasn't there to see it, because when you've got a kid who is "different", you rejoice whenever he fits-in with the crowd. And that night, among the scores of skeletons, ghouls and grim reapers, he looked positively normal.

Photo by mstresbabette