Thank goodness I’m able to stay home with my daughter. Aside from the sheer joy of being with her, it keeps her away from the preschools and daycares.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of the teachers and kids from Mile Square Daycare. They have nowhere to play so they go to the public parks, where I get to watch them. Yesterday when we arrived at the park I heard a child crying loudly. I automatically took a look around and located a young boy, perhaps 4 or 5 years old, wandering around crying. I went back to watching my daughter, but its a small park and I could hear him continuing to cry. After what seemed to me to be a long time, I looked at my watch. At that point I’d guess we had been in the park for 5-10 minutes, and he’d been crying straight through that time. I have no idea how long this had been going on before we got there either. I watched for the next 20 minutes while he continued to wander the park, crying hysterically. During this time the teachers were standing together chatting. One went over to him and without saying a word pulled him into her lap. That sounds nice but she did it like it was a chore, and he pulled away. She let him. Another walked over, grabbed him,washed his face, and walked away again, all in silence. Finally a third teacher took him by the arm (still not talking) and lead him to the bench near the teachers. One of them said, in a surprised tone, “You still crying?” Like she hadn’t NOTICED.

At this point a fourth teacher went over to talk with him, but by this time nothing intelligible was coming out of his mouth. This lady tried for less than a minute and then walked away laughing with her teacher friends.

They continued to ignore him, and he continued to cry, for the next 10 minutes. Eventually he stopped crying on his own.

This is not the first time I’ve seen them act this way. One of the first times I took notice of this lovely group was when a girl was crying. She walked through the middle of the teacher group and no one so much as looked at her. She then sat down right beside one of the teachers, clearly looking for comfort, and was ignored entirely until she finally gave up and walked away on her own.

It’s Cry It Out for preschoolers. The interesting thing is they don’t treat every child that way. Some come running over crying and a teacher asks them what happened, rubs where they got hurt, and sends them on their way. It’s the difficult kids who seem to be ignored. You know, the ones who take some time and effort to work with. The ones who most need the attention.

Then there’s the real problem child. I don’t know how old she is, I’d guess 3 or 4. She clearly has special needs of some sort. I’ve never seen her talk or heard her make a sound, she even cries silently, and she doesn’t ever play with the other kids.

Anyway, this all takes place in a water park, which is a fairly stupid place for Mile Square to bring these kids since they don’t want to children to get wet (no bathing suits or towels or changes of clothes). There is other playground equipment there too, but the water is the main attraction.

The girl with special needs loves the water. Periodically the teachers tell her to leave the water, or come over, pluck her up, and put her down away from it (always without talking). The only result is that she cries, then gets up and goes back into the water. This child leaves that park SOAKED every day, and she’s going to catch pneumonia, and it will be entirely because of the daycare’s negligence. She either needs to be supervised consistently, or she needs to be provided with a change of clothes so she doesn’t sit around wet all day. I suppose its possible that she has dry clothes in the facility, but if that is so, why do they drag her out of the water and make her cry? Why not just let her get wet and enjoy herself?

I was furious yesterday watching all this. These people should be ashamed, but I suspect that instead they feel their ’strategy’ of ignoring upset kids is working–after all, if no one gives a damn that you cry, eventually you stop crying so much, right? IMO it’s nothing but neglect.

I am so thankful that I don’t have to worry about my child being treated that way.

I’m turning the blog pink for October, though the theme is so beautiful I may just keep it.

The folks at breastcancer.org have a lot of great information on their site, including symptoms and instructions on how to perform a monthly self-exam. The people at the Susan G. Komen Foundation have a great sit as well at www.komen.org. Check them out!

I’m working on balancing my obsessive-compulsive control freakness with my humanist, child-led learningness. Yes, I know those aren’t real words, I’m attempting to be cute. So, anyway, I got thrown into quite a tizzy yesterday when my 4 year old announced that she was giving up on a new type of problem in Explode The Code.

I had intended to skip that page because I thought it was all about spelling, which she can’t really do yet. But she protested, loudly, that she wanted to do the page. So we looked at the first problem in the workbook. She didn’t understand what to do, and as usual her first step was to stop listening to me as I try help her figure that out.

As I looked at it, it became clear to me that the work really was something she could do.

So, what to do? Follow her impulse to give up as soon as things got hard? Or heartlessly impose my will on her and force her to try? Rephrasing, should I let her make her own choice about not trying and support the development of her will and make sure her schooling experience is not more stressful than she wants to handle, or should I teach her that she can do hard things if she tries and that she shouldn’t quit something she wants just because its harder than she thought it would be?

I suspect a better parent would have found a way to manage both.

I went with forcing her. She got the concept easily once the mini-tantrum was over, and did the rest of the page happily. My choice was intuitive, and I think it worked out well. I’ve been emphasizing with her that she can do things if she tries, that mistakes are only failures if you don’t correct them, and that she CAN do hard things. So perhaps that was why I made the choice I did. On another day, I’d have let her choose to quit. I think the big issue for me in that moment of decision was that she had specifically said she wanted to do the page. She made a choice, and I guess I wanted her to follow through on it by at least TRYING the work.

So all’s well that ended well, I guess.

When I was in college I had the incredible opportunity to take a seminar with Walter Mischel, a prominent psychologist. One thing he said about the process of evaluating what we read or were told has stuck with me ever since. He said the key question to ask ourselves was this: how do you know?

I wish someone had told me that a long time before. But we don’t seem to cover critical reasoning in school. I had a top notch education, and I didn’t hear this till college. Many people never do, and as a result most people just don’t seem to understand science at all.

I was flabbergasted recently when another mom, an intelligent and educated woman, asked me if I believe that vaccines cause autism. What does belief have to do with it? Facts are. They don’t give a damn about our belief. Try disbelieving in gravity sometime and see how that works for you.

The facts are that as of this writing there is no causal relationship established between vaccines and autism. I’m sorry if that steps on anyones toes, but that’s the reality. The relationship is correlational, which is as far from causal as Latin is from Urdu. Might we discover that there is a causal relationship? Perhaps–though I suspect that this isn’t the case, I am perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise by data. And by data I mean evidence, not opinion.

I have no agenda here either pro or anti vaccine. I could not care less what the cause of the rise in autism is, though I very much want it found and fixed. But it cheeses me off to hear people debating supposed facts and evidence, when they don’t have the slightest understanding of what those are.

Here’s a definition of “evidence” from wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn:
your basis for belief or disbelief; knowledge on which to base belief

In other words, evidence is what answers the question of how you know. What that means is that no one will ever convince me of something just by saying it a lot. I can scream 500 times at the top of my lungs that its raining, but that won’t make it so. It also means providing me with 50 different links to opinion pieces as “evidence” that vaccines cause autism (or that there were WMDs in Iraq, or whatever) won’t convince me. Because that isn’t evidence. It’s opinion.

I’m struggling with incorporating my holidays into dd’s world. On the one hand, I don’t want to push her into anything, on the other I want to bring her up pagan. Yes, these are mutually incompatible goals.

At the moment, I’m doing things simply. We can celebrate Autumn by collecting leaves and pine cones, buying a some decorative gourds and corn, and making a centerpiece. I’m going to try to take us apple picking as well. Maybe we’ll make leaf rubbings too. Unfortunately, while it may be only a few days until the equinox, the leaves are not really changing yet. But I think with some perseverance we’ll find a few.

Here’s a great article by Peg Aloi on Witchvox: http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usny&c=holidays&id=12061

In the past few years, and mainly in the past few months, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to think about being ill. A couple of years ago I was having periodic abdominal pains, often not very bad, occasionally severe. my doctor talked to me and diagnosed me with reflux. So I ignored the pain and toughed it out. Turns out it wasn’t reflux, it was gall bladder disease. Because I hadn’t known what was wrong, I hadn’t taken care of my gall bladder, and I ended up having it removed.

I don’t see that doctor any more.

Last spring I began having pain again, along with chronic diarrhea. I’ve been to two MDs, 3 gastroenterologists, had tons of bloodwork, 2 ultrasounds, and other labwork done, and had a colonoscopy. The first two gastros I saw diagnosed me with IBS as soon as they laid eyes on me. They wanted to do colonoscopies to confirm their diagnosis, and what they told me was that if they found nothing wrong in my colon, that meant I had IBS. In other words, they’d already decided. And their treatment for IBS? I should shut up and deal with it.

I don’t have any time to waste on morons, even if they have letters after their names. I know good diagnostic procedure when I see it, and that ain’t it. FIRST you get the data, THEN you make the diagnosis, not the other freaking way around.

I still don’t understand all of what’s wrong with me, but one big problem was lactose intolerance. Which, oddly enough, doesn’t show up in the colon. Imagine that.

I know another woman who has been having all kinds of health issues. The docs were clueless. She posted her problems on a website we are on, and the membership, none of whom are medical professionals, diagnosed her with everything from celiac disease to ms to lyme disease. Eventually she remembered that she’s been in a car accident several months before the trouble began, and began to insist on an MRI. The results were abnormal, and now, after months of feeling awful every day, she can begin to get some help. This woman has been going to see specialists and her regular doctor for months now, her insurance company has been paying for all this unnecessary testing, and all they had to do was an MRI.

Good patients do as they are told, accept everything the “expert” (a doctor or random strangers on a website, pick the authority figure of your choice) says, and does not push. A bad patient thinks about things, questions what she’s told, and pushes for what she wants. Bad patients live longer. Be a bad patient.

Last week was out first week of school for the year. I’m trying to get off on the right foot with record keeping. I’m doing that for my benefit, not for the state. I like to have a record of what I have done.

Last week I didn’t get much done at all. I’m still doing a balancing act between following my own mental schedule and following dd4’s interests. But she still likes our materials, so that’s one big hurdle crossed. This week has begun better. We did trees today, in accordance with the science through children’s lit book. It was fun, though dd decided that she’d paint everything BUT a tree. One mini-meltdown and some other pictures later she did a tree, and I declared myself satisfied. We also did our first science experiment–watching water change states. That one was purely following her interests, as we’d somehow gotten into a conversation about that yesterday and I had told her we’d see for ourselves today.

I’d also planned to read The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree today, but I can’t find it. I know its in the house SOMEwhere…

This past weekend we attended a birthday party for one of dd’s friends. His mother is an old friend of mine, and her family and her husband’s were all there. It seemed that every single adult came up to me, complimented me on my child, and then asked me where she was going to school. That got awkward, not to mention dull, but I know they were only trying to make conversation. I guess I’d better get used to it.

A moment of virtual silence. Because there is nothing, just nothing, that I can say.

When my daughter was younger I had a rule: never be in a hurry. When I was in a hurry, I’d get impatient with her playfulness and snap at her. As she’s gotten older, without really thinking about it I’ve moved away from that rule. When it’s time to do something I want her focussed on doing it NOW. And that’s all well and good, except that what it generally means is some variant of yelling and threats from me or my husband, and my daughter getting her feelings hurt.

I am at a loss.

Getting ready in our house typically goes like this:

I tell my daughter that in a few minutes we’ll be going to the park/store/whatever. She says she’s playing and doesn’t want to go. I give her another minute to finish her game and waste the intervening time on the computer. A few minutes or emails later, I tell her its time to go. NO, she says, she’s PLAY-ing. I tell her that if we don’t go now we won’t go *all morning*. That’s okay with her, she’s enjoying her game. But I know, if she doesn’t, that 15-30 minutes from now she’s going to finish her game and want to go out, and it’ll be too late to go because we have to have lunch on the dot of 12 and have her take her nap no later than 1pm so I can get her up and get to Pilates class at 3:30 without a half asleep and very grouchy preschooler in tow ruining things for everyone.

So I put my foot down. We ARE going to the park. Now she’s angry and motions as if to hit me and runs into her room. Do I punish her for hitting if she knew she wouldn’t connect? Do I want her thinking that shadow-boxing is okay? No, but I also really want to leave.

I give her a little time to calm down and then go into her room. She’s hiding behind the big chair. She’s angry at me for making her stop playing. I tell her I am sorry she’s mad but that we really have to get going if we are going to make it to the park this morning. I remind her how much fun she had just yesterday. I bribe her with thoughts of the sprinklers.

She comes out for a hug.

Now I have to get her ready. I ask her to take off her clothes. She climbs on the bed and jumps on me, demanding a ride. I refuse and tell her to take her clothes off so I can put her bathing suit on. She agrees but sees her stuffed animal and commences seeing if she can make it hit the ceiling. I ask her again to take off her clothes. I sound like a robot, because that’s how I feel, like a human tape recording. She tells me she’s PLAY-ing, and we’ve come full circle. I threaten to leave the room till she decides to cooperate, a threat she ignores till I actually get up. At that point she attaches herself to me like a little limpet, saying through tears that she wants another chance. By this point I am annoyed, but I sit back down and once more tell her to take off her clothes.

She wants me to do it.

Okay, I lean down to take off her shirt, and she waits for me to start to rise, then jumps onto my forearms so that I am suddenly bearing all her 40 pounds while my spine is shaped like a cross between a U and an L. It hurts, I yell, she’s sad.

Now its time for the pants. I ask her to take them off since now my back is hurting. She kisses my back and takes off her pants, taking the opportunity to fart at me. Then she tosses the dirty pants and underwear up into the air, laughing gleefully. I tell her to pick them up and put them in my hand. We go through a few rounds of this but eventually I get the dirty clothes and put them in the laundry. The I take her bathing suit and try to put her in it.

She decides this is the perfect moment for a game of catch-me-if-you-can. I tell her its not time to play, its time to put her bathing suit on. Doesn’t she want to go to the park? Well, then she needs to focus and cooperate. Reluctantly she abandons her game and stands before my chair, just out of reach. Come here, I tell her (remember my back getting hurt? I need to be sitting by then) and she takes a millimeter step forward. Eventually I take her by the shoulder and position her. Then I have to wrestle with the swim suit. I bought this thing, and I have no one but myself to blame. It has straps that cross in the back. Who knew that would be a problem? Not me. But they are. You have to get the child to stand relatively still long enough to step into the suit with the straps crossing behind their arms without sending your baby sprawling to the floor. This usually takes me a few tries.

That’s when I remember that she hasn’t used the potty in a few hours.

Okay, I say, so its time to use the potty. She protests. She doesn’t have to! She doesn’t need to! She doesn’t want to! Reminders that we go to the potty before leaving the house fall on deaf ears. She storms into the bathroom and slams the door closed. Then she calls me. I go over and she tells me that she doesn’t want me to look at her. No problem.

A bathroom sulk is good for several minutes, so at this point I waste more time online. I hear singing. Questioning whether she’s peed nets me whining, so I change tactics and ask if she’s done. No! She’s SING-ing.

Several minutes later she claims to be done. Next comes tooth brushing. You’d swear it was torture. She already did it (last night)! She doesn’t want to! Somewhere in there I loose it and start to yell at her to do as she’s told.

Eventually her teeth get brushed, and I eye her hairbrush wearily. How bad does her hair look? is it worth another battle? Nah, her hair will be wet soon anyway and then the other moms won’t be able to see that it hasn’t been brushed.

Only the shoes are left. I send her off to find her crocs, which leaves her staring blankly at the kitchen table. They aren’t there. Even in my house, shoes don’t go on the kitchen table. I suggest she look by the door, where I keep shoes. She goes to get them and puts them on the wrong feet. When I point out they are on the wrong feet, she says she wants me to do it. That’s quickly done. As I am gathering up my things, she finds her winter boots and puts them on her hands. She laughs happily and tells me she’s being silly. On a good day I laugh with her. On a bad day I sigh and roll my eyes. On a really bad day, I yell.

I’m focussed on getting out the door. She’s focussed on having fun. These goals are, at times, incompatible.

Half an hour straight of battles, and we head to the park. I’m already exhausted, plus I feel frustrated with her for being so difficult and guilty for being demanding, controlling, and losing my temper. And the day is yet young.

I have absolutely no idea if I’m being too indulgent or too strict, or if this is all totally normal. I have no idea about anything. I only know I am tired of yelling, and tired of being angry at one of the people I love most. As with most of parenting, I will only know whether I did it right when its too late to fix anything, which doesn’t go on my list of the most reassuring thoughts of all time.

If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. That’s all the sense I can make of this whole thing.

This hard-core conservative Senator, of whom I had never even heard before the scandal broke, has been in federal politics for over 25 years, and been a Senator for 17. And now he’s gone. Why? Because he pled guilty to disorderly conduct?

The town next to ours has just elected a convicted FELON to the board of education. My local city councilman was arrested for DUI and refused to resign or even apologize, and he had the support of his fellow councilmembers. Paris freaking Hilton waltzed out of a prison sentence for drunk driving on the basis of being rich and famous. Clinton had that whole Lewinsky affair. And here poor Craig foolishly pled guilty to a misdeamenor. Other things being equal, who would you rather have as your rep, a felon, a career politician who may never been convicted of corruption but who you know perfectly well *should be*, or a guy who cops to misdeamenor disorderly conduct? I know who’d have my vote. Of course, I’d never vote for Craig regardless because I disagree with his politics, but that’s beside the point.

Disorderly conduct isn’t really what this is about, and we all know it. If he’d endangered the lives of everyone around him by driving under the influence, that would have been okay. He’d apologize, enter a posh rehab for a month, and win reelection. If he’d solicited a female he’d be dreadfully embarrassed but probably still employed. The problem is that he’s accused of being gay.

Why is that even an accusation?

Nevermind that now, point is the guy is accused of being gay. And that one accusation, coupled with his guilty plea, is what sank him. His good Republican friends couldn’t turn on him fast enough–otherwise they might catch the gay cooties. Romney, the GOP, the Governor of Idaho, they all wanted him gone.

According to Ontheissues.org Craig voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage, NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation, NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes, and YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. And, of course, there’s his comment that he isn’t gay and never has been gay.

Why would a gay man take such pains to deny his gayness? Why would he turn on other men just like him, and then want them to have sex with him in a public bathroom, a place I barely want to wash my hands? Why would someone so smart and educated and powerful hate himself so much? Who taught him that being gay was that bad?

If Craig had been out about his sexuality, if he’d moved someplace with where voters consider sexual preference a private matter, he might never have gotten himself arrested, and he’d certainly still be a Senator. Craig may hate who he is and have hooked up with others who felt the same, but all that’s left him with is nothing.

If I accomplish little else, I hope to teach my daughter to accept herself for who she is. Because Larry Craig is the alternative.

For an interesting article on men like Craig, read this short article:
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics/story/257536.html