Too Many Curveballs.

I imagine you can see that I haven’t posted on here in a while. Unfortunately things have been intensely chaotic. Life decided to throw me several curve balls at once, and I’m just finally getting to a point where I’m juggling them all smoothly again.

I’ll write about them individually, but the short version is much easier to digest.

Last I wrote I had been talking about the idea of starting a second career and was contemplating how to transition my business to be able to handle me having less hands-on time for it. That was the end of January.

In early March we started looking for and found an awesome dog for my daughter – and it was a miracle worker. That dog has truly changed her life in a good way, at least in terms of how she relates to animals.

Later in March, my daughters father got in touch with my via Facebook after 9 years.

He makes it clear that he wants to try to be a dad (give the man a cookie eh?) and starts talking to me about all that. Of course, I’m not horribly thrilled by that prospect since he’s never proven himself to be worth much oxygen in the first place – but I decide to at least give him a trial-run with me on the phone and email to get to find out if he’s any more useful than in the past.

Unsurprisingly, and despite my warnings to him that I knew he would do this, he starts flirting with me in what I perceive to be an attempt to get to my daughter through sweet-talking me. Over my objections that I’m not interested in that at all, he continues on even to the extent of talking about wanting to marry me. Sure, I’d probably sleep with him mostly because I’ve been living a nunnish life lately, but not out of any attraction (trust me, there’s none) and simply out of convenience because we’ve lived together & had a child together.

To my great amusement and little surprise, his interest wanes after a couple of months and he rings up an old girlfriend who is so mentally unstable she will think the sun rises and sets with him. Again, not a surprise. To my knowledge I’m the only girlfriend he ever had who didn’t have mental issues, and that’s about as textbook a self-esteem issue as they come in why he picks disposable women like that. Anyway, of course, he doesn’t realize he does that. He also doesn’t seem to realize he fixates for short periods.

I had finally agreed to let him meet his daughter after talking to him for a couple of months, and he was fixating on her for a bit, then, of course, that started to wane also. Now he’s fixating on his new bipolar pill-popping juice-head girlfriend who just up and moved across the country to live near him (after only being back in touch with him for a couple of months). Pathetic. Anyway, he’s talking as if he thinks in a million years this is someone I would ever allow into my girls life. Get real.

In the end of it, it’s all good I suppose, he’s getting my daughter so irritated with him that I may not have to do or say anything in the long run. He can’t even spend a few hours with her and keep his mind on her without pulling out his iPhone to check to see if he’s got messages from his girlfriend — and that, my daughter sees and is reacting to. She knows he’s not focused on her, and he’ll probably end up losing her because of it.

So meanwhile, my great-grandmothers care facility for Alzheimers patients has upped the monthly care costs a few times, and I’m having to carry as much of that as I can. I never realized the amount involved in that kind of care. Seriously, it’s just ridiculous.

In addition, my grandmother is starting to have memory loss issues that are concerning me. We’re possibly going to have to go to court to gain legal control of financial and medical decisions over my great-grandmother. Meanwhile, I still need to get around do doing my own legal paperwork on my divorce, and I still haven’t figured out what career I’m switching to eventually because I keep getting sidetracked.

In the meantime, and while I figure that out, my kids are doing great in their homeschooling (at least one plus!) and my son is doing absolutely awesome with his speech comparatively. I’ll be starting on a new project building a piece of software soon, and will definitely need decompression breaks… so hopefully I can make myself write a bit more often.

A Beautiful School

Photo Credit.

I’ve  been strongly considering the idea of starting a second career. It’s a recent idea, and not totally fleshed out yet, but it’s been on my mind constantly. It’s exciting, horrifying, insane to think about at this stage of my life.

It would involve going back to college, which is a little worrisome since I’ve got 2 kids and am definitely not a kid anymore. Of course, going back to school is also exciting in its own way.

Beyond that, it’s just not normal for me to think in this direction. I’ve worked for myself my entire adult life. I think that people should do the things that best fulfill their dreams regardless of consequence, and for the last 10 years my dream has been entreprenurial.

Despite my success at running my own business, I realize I have hit a few milestones that are encouraging me to move on. I’ve learned that I have a huge love of public service, and enjoy teaching people things, assisting the growth of knowledge, and helping people along a path toward that also. In that capacity, I have done a couple of things that most people will never achieve in their lifetime, and I’ve done them before turning 30. One example is being part of less than 10 people in the entire world who helped create, implement, and teach new standards that are now used by hundreds of thousands of technology professionals for millions of clients across the globe (and that number will only continue to grow). The sense of achievement and pride I feel when I look at the people who are benefiting from our hard work is close to the feeling of having a child and watching them grow.

The same sense of accomplishment I feel watching my ‘baby’ take wings and fly is the also prompting me to consider a career as a different kind of scientist. I have been functioning as a computer scientist for 10 years, and I am feeling very strongly drawn back toward the natural sciences I loved as a youth. That old love is being coupled with my adult love of public service, and my natural talent toward problem solving. I’m highly considering becoming a forensic scientist as my second career.

The changes to my life would be enormous. Not only would I have to work for someone else, I’d have to go back to school, I’d have to rearrange how I handle my kids homeschooling (perhaps by supplementing with private tutors), I’d have to transition my business to be more self-sufficient and handled by contract staff, my personal technology projects would be relegated to a hobby again, and I’d have to learn to get dressed in the morning!

The adjustments to my life would be countless, but I’ve never been one to think that people should only follow one path in a lifetime. At this point, I’m not certain if I’d want to be more in the field as a crime scene investigator, or more in the laboratory as a scientist, but I find both appealing. The idea of taking my gifts as a problem solver, my highly analytical nature, and being able to speak for the dead and those who have been victims of crime appeals to my strong need to follow a public service path.

The path is there, it’s presented itself. I’m still thinking. It’s a battle between logical fears and my intuition.

A Very Big Pumpkin.

Photo Credit.

I’ve managed to get back to my personal blog in time for Halloween. It’s a really great time of year for us down here. We’re used to such hot temperatures, that low 70′s weather is just a dream. We even had the heater on for a bit this morning.

The kids are doing great! While my last post was full of upset from what had happened with the idiot therapists, I’m no longer bothered that it happened. They were pushing and pushing for me to medicate my son so he would be more ‘manageable’ – and I still haven’t. It’s been 5 months since that happened, and I’m proud to say that my son has taken HUGE strides in his improvement.

We having some small success with potty training, he’s tried out some new foods (hamburgers aka Crabby Patties! he really likes), he’s now spelling small words using wooden letters (which he never did before), and he’s writing small words (!!!!!) which is a WOW achievement since he has such a hard time holding anything to write with. Of course… there’s a downside to this new spelling ability: He’s learned to search Google for anything he wants – including stuff I don’t allow, like YouTube.

Don’t get me wrong, I like YouTube – for adults. For kids… it’s just not easy enough to filter the content. I’ve tried blocking the site, he unblocks it.Of course, the Google searching comes into play because I wipe his browser history and destroy any links he’s made to YouTube on his browser bar (every single time he goes to bed) but he just gets up, searches Google for what he wants, and then he’s back on it. I’m really reaching the point of just giving up on trying to moderate it.

My daughter is doing FABULOUS! I can’t emphasize that enough. She’s doing so good with homeschooling. To give a comparison, she ended her 2nd grade year with barely having pushed into subtraction and addition, and never having touched grammar or gotten into history etc… and after 3 years of ‘Spanish’ class she could finally recite the alphabet. Wee? Basically, the school was teaching her nothing at her level, and nothing at any level I was happy with.

Contrast that to now, about 5 months after school ended and she started homeschooling:

She has completely mastered adding and subtracting (with carryover). Totally mastered. As in she can do a multi-row math problem as long as I can write it on the paper. She’s also doing darn good at multiplication (which she wouldn’t have even begun until 4th grade at that school) – but we’re not quite done learning it yet. Then we’ll move on to division. She’s got an understanding of decimals, simple fractions, simple conversions between decimals and fractions (.25 = 1/4), and she’s got a basic foundation in geometry (parallel / perpendicular / horizontal lines, lines of symmetry, names of different shapes, etc…).

She’s now learned some of the most fundamental aspects of grammar (nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, etc..). She’s also learning proper letter writing and structure by sending out regular letters to family and friends.

For history, we decided to do a quick overview of a few major aspects of World History, then go back through and heavily go into detail on much more of how things connect in history and more about events. So far we’ve studied the Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Spartans, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Scotland, England, Columbus, American War for Independence, Civil War, and we’re wrapping up as we get closer by getting to the Mexico / Texas conflicts, and then we’ll get to Hitler and a few more things before we turn around and start back at the beginning for more detail.

Her Latin is improving, as is her Spanish, and while we’re still searching for the right extracurricular activities for her (Karate just didn’t work out once she started chopping her brother), I’m so completely sold on homeschooling that it’s definitely going to be something we keep. In fact, it actually caused me a bit of worry that she’s learning so fast.

I was really worried a few weeks ago because I started thinking… gosh, if she keeps going at this rate, or anything even close to it, she’ll have completed high school a couple of years early. That, of course, got me asking myself the question… do I -really- want my daughter to be a 15/16 year old at a college full of legal age people who assume she is also? I decided that if it’s still an issue at that time, there’s always online college for a couple of years until she’s 18. Or an old-fashioned iron chastity belt with a lock and key, and Mommy with a shotgun.

Overall, things are going pretty darn good. Great times ahead!

Photo Credit.

I have needed to take a break before writing this because the entire situation had me extremely stressed out. On the 20th I took my son to his double-therapy day. There was a long wait in getting started, so we hung out in the playroom with the toys for a while. Suddenly we had both his primary therapists, and some administrative person from the center in the room with us.

They sat down with us and talked about how they are concerned about my sons behavior and violent outbursts, and went on to talk about how his occupational therapist had been very upset by an incident last week. She recounted the incident in her words, as my mom had taken him to therapy that day, and you would think she was describing some demon she was horrified by.

In a nutshell, my son had a temper tantrum because he didn’t want to do an activity she was telling him to do, and threw himself down on the floor. When she reached to get him up, he came up a bit and intentionally scratched her. She came out of it with two small scratches on each arm.

Now, I’m quite aware that my son scratches during his big tantrums. In fact, I’ve discussed that with his therapists before – as well as having discussed with them how to avoid the tantrums reaching that point. Not to say that I’m perfect, I have had healing scratches on my arms perpetually, and small scratch scars all over them. However, in a one hour session, she’s not likely to have the same exposure to tantrums that I have at home. In any event, the speech therapist said they were more concerned about what he did to my mom after that (keep in mind that the OT seemed upset enough by the scratches and totally intimidated by that alone).

Basically, what happened next was that my mom went over to him and tried to pick him up off the floor. He head-butted her in the chest with the back of his head. Again, something avoidable. I have repeatedly told her not to pick him up from behind and lock her arms around him from behind. That’s how most people react to being restrained from behind – to buck backwards and try to knock off the person holding them. So, he bucked against her, and hit his head into her chest in an attempt to get her off him. Big surprise. It’s happened before. I’ve repeatedly told her to stop holding him like that, but that’s another frustrating experience to discuss another time.

In any event, what ended up being the result of the conversation is that they have decided that my son is a safety risk to their therapists. At least that’s what they were trying to say verbally. The underlying statement was that his OT was so distraught over the situation that she wanted to no longer have him there, and the other therapists were supporting her decision – whether or not they agreed with it. The speech therapist went so far as to say that she wasn’t bothered by his behavior, but noted that she has a lot more years under her belt.

The end result is the same: My son was officially kicked out.

So not only did we lose his OT and Speech therapy, but they said that we could come back after his behavior improves with either behavioral therapy and/or medication. They’ve always been supporters of medicating him, while I’ve remained an opponent to that as a solution.

I am now forced into a position to re-evaluate my feelings on medication. If he is going to totally lose his therapy because of his behavior, is it worth it to medicate him for a period of time to control his behavior enough that he can benefit from therapy? I have to admit that I always wonder about whether or not medication might actually help him in some ways, but I am worried about the question that comes to mind… Would he actually be getting better, or would the medication be making him ‘seem’ better?

I’m not in this to treat the external symptoms. I want him to grow up to be a totally self-sufficient non-medication reliant adult.

However, I’m now reminded that while I have infinite patience with him and can manage his behavior the best, that I’m also not his speech or OT therapist.

I would like to find him a behavioral therapist, but worry that we’ll go down this exact same road again with them refusing to provide therapy unless he’s medicated. Of course, even to see a behavioral therapist, we’d have to actually find a pediatrician willing to take an autistic child – which is proving extremely hard.

Alternatives? I could learn about speech therapy myself, and provide that at home. I have a catalog filled with occupational therapy toys and devices that I could fill the house with slowly. I had already planned on a getting a few books on how to do behavioral therapy at home with autistic kids (probably from the library first because each is rather pricey and then see which are worth buying).

It’s just a generally frustrating time for us here, and I’m hoping we find a good solution to it all.

At least now that she has some new motivation to do them she does!

I heard about a total gem of a website called Handipoints and it looked like it might be a great way to get my daughter doing chores.

Understand please that she’s awfully spoiled and getting her to do chores is like pulling teeth. I needed a new way to motivate her. She likes online games, and LOVES dressing up online characters, so I thought it sounded like a winner.

It’s a Free online application that lets me set up chores, what days of the week they can/should be done, and allocate reward points for each chore. Each chore gets two different kinds of points. One type of points goes toward rewards I give her, and the other type are used to play games in Handiland, ‘buy’ clothes for her online cat character, etc..

I also got to set up various rewards she could ‘buy’ when she had saved up Mom-reward points. You could pick from things you would actually go buy, or you could put in activities, or just create custom rewards that you want to give them. You decide how many points they need to save up to get those rewards.

I created a couple of dozen rewards, and my daughter immediately focused on the ‘Go Bowling’ reward that would cost her 120 points. After a couple of days of me having to push her to get going on it, she started to see the points rack up fast, and started doing them herself! It’s great. So, I signed us up on the 8th of this month, and yesterday (11 days later) she bought herself a trip to go bowling (which we did and had fun with!). Of course, if she had done all the chores every day, she probably would’ve had many many more points, but some is better than none!

For now, Handpoints is a success for us. We’ll see if the motivation lasts.

Photo Credit.

As I mentioned in my introduction to this project, I’m working on decluttering, and bringing you along on my journey. My first area of attack was to find a way to declutter the problematic rickety old bookshelves. My solution was to repurpose a clutter attracting (but otherwise unused) closet in the library and turn it into a book nook.
The old bookshelves were definitely aged and cheaply built to start with. Probably some deal we ran across at some point, but I know we’ve had them for 20+ years. They’re just pieces of pressed board for the sides and shelves, and all that stabilizes the entire thing is this one piece of paste board stapled across the back. I decided we needed a better solution all around.

One option was to put the bookshelves in the closet, and we had tried that in the past, but we can’t put more than 2 bookshelves in there. The closet is 5’4″x8′, and the bookshelves are 2′x6′ so we’re stuck only putting 2 in there and having alot of wasted space. That obviously isn’t a good solution.

In the end, I decided to make built-in bookshelves in the closet. While I got things ready and started moving furniture out of the way, my Mom went to Lowes and spent $43.00 on wood for the shelves. Unfortunately, she got the wood cut to 54″ instead of 5’4″ (64″). Ah well, at least she brought the wood pieces that were cut off back with her so I was able to piece the boards back together and stabilize the joints.

I took a break for a few days after finishing the first 2 shelves, and then got back to it over this last weekend and finished up 2 more. Then I went to Lowes again and picked up some edge molding, and a can of white paint (the walls in the closet are white), so that I could paint the hardware and supports under the shelves so they blend in with the wall.

Unfortunately, the rain got in the way of my plans. It’s been raining for several days now, and I’m not sure when it’s planning to let up. I don’t want to paint when it’s raining, the paint never dries right that way. I’m also considering adding additional shelves later, but for now I’m going to just finish off these 4 when the rain lets go.

I’m also planning to repurpose the old bookshelves in a more practical way. I want to take them apart and use the long sides (effectively 2′x6′ boards) to create wall shelves in my sons room to get some of the toys out of toy boxes and off the floor. I’m also thinking of using the shelves inside as display shelves that can be mounted along the walls in different places in the house (perhaps to put photos on?).

Other small bits of progress…

I went through all my daughters boxes of toys, art supplies, random game pieces, hair twisties, jewlery, etc… To give you an idea of how much junk she has… I’ll just say that it took me about 6 hours, and I didn’t even quite finish. But I also picked up a plastic shoe rack for $3.50 at Walmart, and now she has organized shoes. I also picked up some poster sized picture frames pretty cheap (under $8 each) and put a piece of her art in each.

I still want to have a yard sale (or put an ad in the paper) to get rid of some of the big toys in the backyard that they outgrew, but I’ve just not been motivated to do it yet. It’s on the list.

Either way, some definite progress. Hopefully by the time I finish those shelves I’ll have a new digital camera and can take a picture to put on here.

I found this great new company called Fun and Function recently. They had a catalog at the therapy office, and I went browsing the FunAndFunction.com website to see what they had. I found all sorts of great stuff!

You know all those lovely fun things they have in OT and other therapy playrooms? This is the place to find it!

They also have some really great tools to work on various other things, and one that grabbed my attention was the pen (shown above) that is used to develop fine motor skills. My son has never become comfortable holding a pen in the ‘traditional’ manner, and developing his writing and drawing ability is challenging because of the way he holds it. However, not only does this pen seem to put the hand in a position I’ve seen him use… it’s almost exactly the same position he uses when he has his hand on the computer mouse!

I’m definitely going to have to pick up one of those and see if it’s as perfect as my instinct tells me it is for his writing.

Of course… that’s assuming I can stop browsing all the rest of what they have on the site. They even have a little seated scooter called ‘The Plasma Car’ that uses no batteries and is powered by turning the steering wheel back and forth. It can even hold up to 200 pounds, and the price isn’t restrictive at just under $66 bucks. It reminds me of those toys we had as kids that were like a flat board with wheels attached that you could move in the same way… and I can’t remember what they were called, but hopefully it brings a mental picture to mind.

Photo Credit.

I’m attempting to declutter the house, and I’m going to briefly provide an account of the project (and progress!) to see if I can do it.

The biggest problem is that we have too much stuff and too little practical storage. I want to even out the numbers a bit more by creating more storage and reducing the amount of ‘stuff’ we hang on to.

We do have storage, but that’s part of the problem. The storage has taken the form of old cabinets, old bookcases, old dressers, old chests of drawers, etc… All of which are more ‘useful’ than having nothing, but none of which are ‘practical’ for what they are holding.

For example, we are using an old dresser and hutch shoved at the end of the hallway to store books in the hutch part, and in the drawers we have papers and some old costumes. Another example is a small table we use to keep our purses stacked on when we come in the house. The thing is, it’s not actually a table, but that’s what it’s used for. There are actually 3 shelves under the top of it that no one has looked in (I asked) in a couple of years. We finally decided to see what was in the shelves, and it was some cookbooks, cooking magazines, and various catalogs we’d received and saved for some reason. Obviously, we need to use that little cabinet more effectively.

Now, we’ve tried many solutions, but effectively having 3 (maybe 4 depending on how you look at it) households combined and now living in one house, and discovered that the fixes we’ve tried simply aren’t working for our situation. Here’s what happens:

Someone will go insane about the disaster the house is and frenzy clean, say.. the living room, dining room, and kitchen. All the toys go back to the kids rooms, all the papers get stacked up or trashed, etc.. And for a few hours, it looks good.

But by the end of the night, things have slowly started creeping back out. A couple of days later, it looks just like before – all the toys having crept back out of the kids rooms, more papers accumulated, various things laying on any surface that will hold them. It’s definitely not just the kids, though they play a role in it. It’s really everyone when it comes down to it.

After a couple of years of this never-ending cycle, I’ve reached a breaking point with the clutter. I’ve had enough of it. The way we’re trying to ‘clean’ is not enough to fix the problem, we need to re-evaluate what we’re storing things in and how we’re organizing.

With that said, the first step of my journey has been to start thinking about what storage objects can be given away, reused, re-purposed, and what needs to be totally replaced.

My first zone of attack: The rickety old bookshelves!

Photo Credit.

Today I tried to take my daughter to see a new pediatrician. The hassle factor of trying to find a pediatrician that can see both my daughter and my son has been over the top – and a journey of many months.

One would assume that in a city listed in the top 10 largest cities in the United States, I would have no problem finding an available pediatrician. A fool, such as myself, might even assume from the outset that I would have my ‘choice’ of pediatricians because there ‘must’ be a ton in the city.

Obviously, that’s not the case. No, what did end up happening was me settling on one that actually was accepting patients after months of endless searching and more phone calls than I can remember.

In any event, my daughter and I left at 2:45pm for a 3:30pm appointment. I ‘assumed’ this would provide enough time. It probably would have been enough time – if I had not been searching for an office that apparently did not exist.

I had looked up the office on Google Maps before I took off, wrote myself some quick directions to take along, and then we started driving. I knew this was on absolute opposite end of the city from where I live, so I allotted 45 minutes just to get there. A half hour later we were in the right area, driving up and down the highway access road looking for this non-existent address.

I was looking for a building located at an address number 10505, and not on a street but on a highway access road. No problem. I found the right direction to drive on the small highway and started driving looking for the address. Except… there was nothing on the side of the road … except trees that is.

About 5 minutes of driving later I saw a building. It wasn’t it. I had only progressed to the 8900 ‘block’ – if you can call 5 minutes of driving at 70 mph a few ‘blocks’. This continued, until I suddenly saw a sign that said 10605. Crap, I passed it. Okay, loop back around. Wait… that was an odd number, it should be on this side of the road right? Well… that can’t be because I didn’t pass anything.

I took the turnaround and go onto the opposite access road heading back in the direction I came. Oddly enough, directly across the road from the building labeled 10605, there’s another building with the address number 10459. Okay, so not only is it another odd number on the opposite side of the road, but according to that number, the building I need is somehow right between the two where there’s nothing.

By this point, I’m getting seriously frustrated and decide to loop back around to the side of the access road I had been on and drive further down, to see if the highway loops around the numbers go back down in a circle. No such luck. Many more minutes of driving only yielded a random building here and there. Then the road ended.

Suddenly I was only given the choice to go North or South on a main highway that goes around the city. I glanced at the clock and gave up, we were already almost 30 minutes late for the appointment. I got on the highway going back home.

Of course, by this time, its heading in closer to heavy traffic time and it took twice as long to get back home. We finally pulled into the driveway at 4 minutes to 5:00pm – after leaving at 2:45pm. On the bright side, we got to see a lot of trees and my daughter took a nap on the drive. In retrospect, it was really a mildly amusing adventure.

Needless to say, I’m not going searching for the building again – I’ll start my phone search again for a closer pediatrician with an actual building.

Photo Credit.

My son had his Tuesday double-therapy today and did great! As I had mentioned last week, I was concerned that maybe it was too much in one day, but I was also hopeful that it was just an adjustment period.

I think therapy today really gave me some reassurance that he simply needed some adjustment time. He did have one little tantrum in his first therapy (speech), but after a brief hitting/kicking/scratching fit, he stopped, got back in his chair, and got back to work!

I’m seeing significant improvements in his speech lately, although we’re also now having a few more of those times he’s getting stuck in word cycles. However, none have lasted as long as the one I wrote about previously, so I’m taking that in stride.

Right now I’m still riding on the cloud of improvement, and hopeful that next week turns out even better.