Bean Spot

Adjusting

2011-09-17T13:32:00.002-04:00

I don't know about your families, but my family is having a hard time readjusting to the new school year. I don't know if it's my schedule or if it's because Dermot and I had two months of very little scheduled time. My schedule changes every semester. Most of my colleagues get roughly the same schedule every semester, but I haven't been able to do that. This semester I've already had several meetings in one week, and I just got an email setting up a bunch more meetings. I have real work to do. I don't need to sit around in meetings. I'm teaching 5 classes face to face, and one online course. That's a lot of grading and preparing.

I haven't even added in Dermot's extra-curricular stuff yet, and I really have to do that. The thought of having to take him to math twice a week is just killing me. If I take him as early as possible with my schedule, then we get home late for dinner. If I take him to the latest possible session in the day, then we're rushing to eat dinner. I don't know what the right answer is for us. I could do math on a weekday and a Saturday, but Dermot has asked for a day off, and I don't blame him. I do want him to rest. He will be attending Magic class at the Montclair State University gifted weekend program from the beginning of October to the middle of December. I can choose Saturday or Sunday, and I think that Dermot wants Sunday. Since I'll be handling math during the week, magic will become Ethan's task.

I don't remember feeling so rushed and over-scheduled before. I have a feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better. How soon before Dermot can stay at home after school by himself? Can you imagine if he was an athletic kid too? I would go crazy.

Wait... What?

2011-09-12T21:03:00.004-04:00

This morning I got to meet Dermot's teacher finally. He has to be there early all week because he is "classroom helper". He gets to set up the calendar and tell the students what the current temperature is. Because of his assignment, he has to be at school 15 minutes early. I took advantage of the empty school to meet his teacher.

Even better, I only teach one class today. I was home by 3:00 after doing some grocery shopping on the home. The phone rings around 3:30, and I assumed it was Ethan. Behold! It was Dermot's new second grade teacher. She was calling me to tell me that she had had a talk with Dermot's principal about Dermot's academic background. She told me that she knows things are too easy for him now, especially in math, but that she's working on it. She said that there's going to be a meeting on Wednesday when the gifted teacher is at Dermot's school to talk about what they can do for him. She asked me to be patient. Even better, she told me that she pulled Dermot aside today and she told him that she knew the work was too easy for him, but that he needs to be patient and she'll work on something for him.

I told her that when he came home on Friday, he asked me if I had told the teacher he was smart, because he was really irritated that the math they were doing was simple addition and subtraction. I told her that I told him that he was going to have to deal with it for a while. I reminded him that she needs to figure out where 21 different kids are. Plus, the beginning of school is always review because some kids really do forget stuff over the summer. I told him to not worry about the academic component for know and to just enjoy being around his friends. I told his new teacher that and she repeatedly thanked me for helping her out and being on her side.

I've never been against Dermot's teachers. I just always want a little bit more than they are giving. I am very aware that teachers have one of the toughest jobs on the planet. I am a huge believer in parents and teachers creating a team to work out the best outcomes for kids. In the long run fighting with a teacher is just going to hurt a student regardless of how it might make a parent feel.

I did have to remind the teacher that Dermot needs advanced work in spelling too, not just math. His school keeps forgetting that. I told her that I had test scores that I had sent to the principal, but apparently, he didn't pass them on to her. I, of course, have made a copy for her. She's the one directly working with Dermot. She's the one who needs all of the information that I can give to her.

His spelling words this week were plan, am, etc. I told Ethan that we need to demand that no spelling words be allowed to be one syllable unless they are really difficult or irregular (like weird). I'm kidding. I'm not that invasive. The teacher can figure things out on her own. She told me the spelling would take a few weeks too. Dermot seems to give teachers the benefit of the doubt when they talk to him one on one give their perspective. So hopefully the teacher's chat today, and my reinforcement of it at home will keep him happy for the few weeks it takes to get things up and running. We'll see. I am delighted, however, that she was lovely enough to make the phone call today. She certainly did not need to. I am hoping this is a sign of a great year.

First Day - 2nd Grade

2011-09-08T15:25:00.003-04:00

My baby started second grade yesterday, and it was a good day. We had some rain here, which makes for a weird first day of school, but it turned out nicely because the parents were less likely to hang around and let the little ones be clingy. Dermot, of course, didn't care, and I'm happy about that.

Here's the crazy part - we got tons of communication telling us how the first day of school was supposed to go down. All kids would line up outside by their new teacher, then the teacher will take them inside. For the rest of the year, the kids line up inside. So Dermot and I get to the school and every single class is outside except for his. His teacher (and I don't blame her) didn't want to wait out in the rain, so she had them go inside to wait. Unfortunately, this means that I didn't get to meet her. I was hoping to introduce myself to her on the first day, but it didn't happen.

The worst part about Dermot's first day of school was that it happened on the day of the week when I teach my night class. I wasn't home when Dermot got home. I didn't get home until 9:30. Of course, he was so excited and I knocked something over and made a noise, so he came down to see me just a little bit before he went back to bed. I didn't get to hear all of the stories that Ethan got to hear, though.

Dermot was so excited to be back at school and with his friends that he talked about it all night apparently. That makes me happy. We've had a really hard time getting his friends together. In a couple of years, he can walk over to their houses by himself, but for now, he still needs some parental involvement.

Last year he didn't get to pick who he ate lunch with, this year he did. So Dermot and his three friends sit together for lunch and they also got to sit together for art class which started yesterday. He's thrilled, and so am I. His teacher did some puzzle-y, silly things for day 1 and that really made a positive impression on Dermot, too. He's really looking forward to seeing what she has to offer.

Dermot likes to play cool and pretend that he doesn't like school during the summer break, but he really does. He likes having a purpose and being around his friends. I love that for him too. I'm not even worried about the academic component yet. I just want him to take his time re-adjusting and enjoying the social aspect of school. Now we're going to have to have talks about how great friends are, but goofing off with them at school will probably mean that they don't get to sit together. All things in moderation. Right?

The Start of School

2011-09-04T22:23:00.000-04:00

I have never been so ready for Dermot's school to start. He only gets two months off, but he never wants to do anything during those months. I also come up with plans that just don't happen. I need to be more forceful and ignore his whining, but it's my summer break too.

Anyway, Dermot starts school on Wednesday, and because of all of the flooding out here, I start school on Tuesday. He'll be at his daycare on Tuesday, which will give all of us a break.

I'm excited for Dermot to start second grade. Every year I keep thinking, this will be the year where they get it. I sent off Dermot's test scores from the Gifted Child Clinic and all we got back was a "thank you" note from the principal. I did mention skipping a grade, but I knew that wasn't going to happen. The social scientist in me is so angry that educators don't make decisions based on research, but based on their gut feelings. What is the point of research, especially well-done research, if no one heeds it? But again, my self-righteousness is a common characteristic among gifted people. If grade skipping was so bad for kids, then why are thousands of kids skipped each year with minor problems? I'm sure it isn't for everyone, but if it was bad for everyone then it wouldn't be happening to several thousands of kids. My mom was skipped, I was skipped, my mom agreed to skip several children - all successfully - when she was principal, and everyone was fine.

Oh well, I will continue to advocate for Dermot in different ways. The saddest thing to me, is that it seems as if Dermot's curiosity has disappeared, and that kills me. He doesn't want to learn about anything anymore. He doesn't want to dig around on google or wikipedia to see how things work, or why things happen, or what has happened in the past. That to me was what was so beautiful about my childhood. There were so many things to learn and know. There still are. I don't know if Dermot just has the end of the summer blahs (which is what I am hoping for) or if it's something else. I guess only time will tell.

Perfectionism

2011-08-30T23:47:00.002-04:00

This is a post that has been simmering in my head for a long time. When you start reading about gifted kids, several common characteristics come up. Dermot has most of them. The perfectionism and intensity are the two main ones that we are trying to cope with, unsatisfactorily, I must admit. Ethan and I both have perfectionist parts to ourselves, but they are mainly work-centered. We try to keep that out of our house, although, I would argue that I do a better job of that than Ethan does. Either way, we both slip up and Dermot does see our perfectionism. That being said, he is worse than the two of us combined, and he has been since toddlerhood.

Dermot has no patience for anything that he cannot do perfectly the first time. He will either hit himself or the couch, quit and never try again, or scream/grunt. I have a million examples, but I'm going to try to focus on the classic examples.

Dermot hit all of his early milestones on time or early until it came to sitting up. Dermot didn't sit up until 8 months. I was told that if he wasn't sitting up by 9 months, the doctor would be worried and would start running tests. I knew that Dermot was okay, and I didn't want to deal with tests. As a developmental psychologist, I was taught that babies reach the milestones when they are meant to. Pushing kids doesn't really make the early physical milestones happen any earlier. So I hadn't really pushed Dermot. Once I got the warning about testing, however, I started working with Dermot. We had a bunch of toys that Dermot needed to sit up to play with that we had stored away until he was sitting up. Within a week of pulling out all of these toys, Dermot was sitting up. It was as if he didn't have a reason to sit up, so he didn't try.

Later, he walked late. He started cruising at around 10 months of age. Our house in Iowa had an open plan and he could get pretty much anywhere by holding on to walls, railings, or furniture. He didn't walk until 15 months. He practiced walking for 5 months because he was afraid to do it without being able to do it perfectly. Once he started walking, he never fell. Ever. He also never took one or two steps. Once he walked, he walked. Within a week he looked like he had been walking for months and he was running within days. He wouldn't walk until he could do it perfectly.

When Dermot was in preschool, I pushed pre-reading on him pretty hard. I was an early reader, and I assumed because Dermot was bright that he would be an early reader too. He wasn't, and that's fine. I had to get over my assumptions and focus on who he was. The hard part was hearing him talk about reading. At 4 he would tell me that he was never going to read. It was too hard and therefore it wasn't worth doing. He told me that when he was in college, I would need to read his books to him. He saw no point in reading. Thank goodness for video games and Pokemon. He eventually got sick of having to ask us to read everything in order for him to play.

By the middle of kindergarten Dermot was opening up to reading. They taught reading in his kindergarten by having the kids memorize 150 sight words in groups of 5. Dermot loved this because he got a reward for knowing a certain amount of words. Then, of course, Dermot hit the point where he was not the first kid to learn all 150 words (I think he was third). This was horrible. As soon as the first kid got 150, Dermot gave up for a while. How dare he not "win". Finally the lure of the prize for all 150 was enough to get him back on the horse, but we had to be really careful how we handled him during this time.

More recently, Dermot won't bowl because he can't beat us. He won't play mini golf because he can't beat us. When we were in Ocean City this last time, I asked him if it would be okay if he played mini golf by himself. I thought that I found the answer. I told him that the only way to get better was to practice and that a person should always compare their performance to their previous performances, not to the performances of others. Dermot said that it would be stupid to play by himself because then his score wouldn't matter. His score only mattered if he could compare it someone else's. He decided that it would be okay if he played mini golf against Ethan as long as Ethan played with his non-strong hand and with his eye closed. Well Ethan did all that and still managed to get a hole in one on the first hole. Oh my goodness, did Dermot throw a fit. So then he started just hitting the ball without looking. He was losing on purpose. Half way through he was so frustrated that he just started crying. It wasn't fair that he couldn't win even with Ethan closing his eyes.

Honestly, I hate to see Dermot go through this pain, when it feels so self-inflicted. I know that it's completely who he is and at this age he has no control over it. I try to demonstrate handling loss and imperfection the correct way. I laugh at myself. I point out how I'm going to do better next time. I analyze my mistakes in front of him, so that he sees that not succeeding is just a chance to figure out how to do things better. The problem is it's hard to pay attention to someone being calm when things go wrong. His emotions also come up so hard and fast, that at this age he has no control over them. I try to keep that in mind when working with him, but it's also really annoying having an intelligent child act like a toddler when things don't go his way.

I am slowing working with Dermot on two fronts. First, having to work at something and being challenged is fantastic. That's when you know you are learning. Easy stuff is boring. Challenging stuff is life affirming. Second, no one is good at everything. Eventually we all have to do things we are not good at. Childhood is the best time to learn how to cope with that reality.

The hardest part is that I have limited coping skills when it comes to my own perfectionism. So it's hard to pass on what you don't really have. Right now I'm mainly trying to do it verbally and by being emotionally supportive, but that's a really slow road.

Frustration

2011-08-28T23:05:00.002-04:00

I originally went to graduate school to better understand typical teenagers. I was so sick of the bad rap that they got. Most teens are good kids. They are not having sex all of the time, they are not criminals, they are not all drunk or on drugs, and they aren't always talking back to all adults. Those bad kids get the spotlight. I wanted to know what "normal" kids are like. That's what developmental psychology is all about.

When I went to Purdue and I started taking my classes from some really bright developmental psychologists, I realized that I didn't recognize "typical" development. I have always felt like an outsider. Even as an undergraduate I found psychology fascinating because I didn't know that people worked like that. I thought it would be different when I started studying how we grow up. Psychology is a science of averages. What does the typical person look like? How does the typical person change over time? There are always exceptions to our rules. I tell my students that statistically people are full of error. That being said, when normal people start learning about developmental psychology, they see themselves. They at least recognize stories that their parents have told them about themselves. I didn't. Part of it was that I was forced to grow up too fast. Part of it was that I was suffering from mental health issues at an early age, and part of it was associated with my giftedness. I'm not like most people. I'm like two percent or less of people. Honestly, that made learning developmental psychology more interesting because I wanted to know what this organism "human being" was like since it wasn't me. I tell my students that I think of psychology as the zoology of people. I feel like an outsider studying a specific species. People are just infinitely fascinating to me.

The reason I am writing this here is that having a non-typical child also makes parenting much more difficult. I know what's supposed to happen and then Dermot doesn't follow that course. I know how to change his behavior, but it doesn't work. This affects my perfectionism and I feel like a failure as a parent. I should know better. Hell, I have a Ph.D. in child development. I could charge money to tell other parents what to do, and I'd probably do a pretty good job. But, I can't figure out anything in my own home. Dermot doesn't mind being punished. I refuse to spank him, but I take things away, I verbally correct him, I talk to him about why he should and shouldn't do certain things, I praise him for correct behavior, etc. I do everything that I should be doing, and yet Dermot's negative behaviors don't change. He's so involved in his own world, that he doesn't mind that his actions affect us negatively. I also think that we've gone so far overboard in building up his self-esteem and letting him know that we love him, that he knows he can't really push us away. That as bad as he can be at times, we will still love him.

Now I grew up getting the belt daily and really not thinking my parents loved me, so I would rather have this problem, than having him hate me already, but it's frustrating. When I think of the behaviors that drive me craziest, I realize that I had variations of the same behaviors. When I think of how my parents controlled me, I know that it was entirely by fear. Even then, I was so willful that I still knowingly disobeyed at least daily, and usually more. But I grew up to be a good kid who was overly empathetic. My fear is that Dermot doesn't really seem to be all that empathetic with us. He's extremely so with the cats (at times) and with other kids. So it's not a lost cause. When he gets hit with empathy he gets hard, but he doesn't feel it as often as I would have expected. Now he's only 7.5, so it might still increase. I remember 10-18 being my hardest years about really feeling everyone else's pain. But those are long term concerns. For now, I just want him to quit burping and farting at will. I want him to stop hitting himself or the couch or yelling when he's frustrated. I want him to put away his toys. I want him to turn off the TV and the lights when he leaves a room. and I want him to sit in a chair and eat at the same time as we do. I don't think that's too much to ask a 7 year old. If he only knew what was expected of me at 7, he would freak out.

I'm not really asking for suggestions, because I really have tried most things. I have a friend with an adult child who was even worse than this. She said that she couldn't punish him at all. He always found a way to either ignore it or turn it into something positive. He's turned into a great adult. So that's my hope. I think that Dermot will be fantastic in the future, and I feel like shit waiting for things to get better because it means that I'm not fully enjoying 7-year-old Dermot, and I should be. I don't know if I need to be harder on him or if I need to just learn to let things go. It's probably a mixture of both or somewhere in the middle. That's also something that psychology tends to tell us. Whenever there are two views or theories, eventually we find out the truth is a mixture or in the middle. I need to keep that in mind.

Vacation

2011-08-26T17:05:00.003-04:00

Writing about myself is starting to feel a little icky. I've actually worked out some things by what I have written. I may pick this thread up later, or I may not. School starts for Dermot on the 7th and I'm gearing up for the big powwow with his principal and teacher now that I have ammo. First, I want to talk about what going on vacation with Dermot is like.

When we bring up going on vacation, Dermot doesn't want to go anywhere but Ocean City in New Jersey. We're close to Boston and D.C., and we've brought up Disney in either FL or CA and even Legoland in San Diego, which looks great. Dermot always screams bloody murder. Those places won't be any fun. Those places will be boring. Those places are too far away.

He's completely afraid of new things. I am so torn on how to deal with this. Part of me (and this part is winning, it's just a slow process) is convinced that my job as parent is to expose Dermot to new things. I need him to learn that new things are fascinating, not scary. If you try something and you don't like it, you have learned something. The learning itself is valuable. Most things that I know I do not like, I have tried. I can tell you 100% that I don't like going down any slides at the water park that involve an inner tube. The lazy river is okay, but no slides. I can't handle spinning amusement park rides any more, but I tried. The trying is important. Dermot won't try. He has fear that I never had.

The other part of me (the psychologist) realizes that this is part of Dermot's temperament. He was just built this way. He's been this way for most of his life, and it's actually gotten worse, not better. As a psychologist, I know that parents really don't have that much impact on temperamental issues. Parents hate to hear that, but it's really true, especially for kids in the top 10 or bottom 10 percent of a trait. Within the middle, there's more room for movement. Dermot seems to be fairly extreme in this trait of his. That being said, he will have to do new scary things throughout his life. He can't have everything be the exact same as it is now forever. My responsibility to Dermot is to teach him coping skills for dealing with his fear. To balance these two sides, I pick my battles. I know that all parents pick their battles, but Dermot's reactions to everything are always so extreme. SO EXTREME!

I also struggle with the need to balance Dermot's fears with my own need to explore. Gifted children are supposed to be curious and inquisitive, and Dermot only shows that in specific domains. Even when we go to OCNJ, he won't try anything new. It always has to be the same thing. He would be happy to just go to Jilly's arcade, Hollywood arcade, and the hotel's pool. I can do all of those things at my house without paying for the hotel. I'm the one who made us rent a surrey for the first time (which he loved). On the other hand, I made him play mini golf and that was a complete disaster, but that's for a different post. I am going to tackle his perfectionism in its own post. It's that huge.

I want to explore everything. A big part of being a professor is that I have a pleasant income and summers off I should be able to explore things. I thought that Dermot and I could have some great day trips, but he won't even do things like that with me. There are tons of cool places around here, and he shows no interest in them. Or he has already been to them on daycare field trips and once was enough. Dermot doesn't even want to go to New York City because he says it's boring. NYC is never boring. Never.

I'm hoping that in the next few years, I can slowly prod Dermot into trying more new things. I'm also encouraging him to remember how many fun things we have done that he was completely against doing. He never wanted to go to Philly, but we made him and he loved it. Of course, he thinks its boring now and doesn't want to go back, but that's a different subject. He doesn't trust Ethan and I enough to know that we know what he likes. When we force him to do things against his will, most of the time he enjoys himself because we do know what he likes and doesn't like. I told him that it's not like I'm taking him to flower shows or art museums, which he would hate.

Fourth Grade - Part 2

2011-08-15T22:55:00.002-04:00

I don't have much to add about fourth grade, but it's important to the topic at hand. In fourth grade my school district decided to implement a gifted program. Schools were given very little instruction on how to actually do this (so I have heard through the grapevine). At my school, we gifted kids were introduced to the Great Books system. The librarian (a close family friend) came to my classroom and we gifted kids were whisked away to the library to work on these Great Books. I don't remember the whole school year, but I remember spending a lot of time on Aesop's fables. We were to read the stories on our own and then come together once a week (I think) and talk about what we were reading. My probably contorted memory of this remembers that we spent most of our time talking about vocabulary (what was a pomegranate?) instead of talking about themes. It would seem to me that if you were truly a teacher focused on the gifted you would love to hear what these atypical kids were thinking about morality-based stories. I don't remember really getting to that sort of discussion, however. I think that Mrs. Crow was out of her element and that was totally the school's fault - not hers. I do know that at the end of the year, pretty much all of the adults realized that we hadn't really gained from the program. The gifted program the next year basically started from scratch.

The other thing that happened in fourth grade demonstrates how schools interact with gifted kids and their parents. My entire grade was given a paper and pencil IQ test. I call it that as an expert in the field. These IQ tests are nowhere near as accurate as a one on one 60-90 minute test with a well-trained professional. They can however be helpful for labeling or getting a child services. That being said, my mom set up the meeting one on one with the principal to go over my scores. Now remember, the principal is a friend of my mom's, he knew that I had been appropriately tested at 4, and he knew that I had been accelerated one grade. When my mom went in to the meeting, he still told her first thing that parents quite often expect their kids' test scores to be higher than they really are. He told my mom not to expect that I would test much more than above average. Then he actually opened my file and saw my test scores. Apparently, his jaw dropped. The test, especially since it wasn't a one on one IQ test, had a lower ceiling than a better test would have. That is, the test would give students different scores up to a cut off. After that point, all the test could say was that a child was beyond that point. It could not accurately give an IQ score for kids beyond that point. That was the case for me, and I would have been compared to other fourth graders, not other 8 year olds (who were mostly in third grade). He told my mom that I was the only child he had ever seen this happen to in all of his years as principal. That being said, nothing changed with regard to my education. He didn't say, wow, we are really not challenging this student. Instead it was status quo. A big part of that was that my mother did not take the opportunity to advocate for me. Personally, I would have been all over that, but I am much more educated about this than my mother was, and I was harmed by the education process, and my mother was not. My mother was taught in a one room school house until high school. She got to follow her interests and she was taught at her level. Again, I think that they thought that my one grade skip and my advanced reading group were probably plenty of help for me. They were wrong.

I won't be blogging for the next week because we're off for a family vacation. Dermot refuses to go anywhere other than Ocean City, NJ for vacation. So we are off for a full week of fun in the sun. Next year I think I am going to push him out of his safe place, but none of us were up for that battle this year. For the summer after I received tenure, I just wanted to relax and wind down. So we will be swimming, playing at arcades, going to the water park, riding rides, eating Curly's fries and Rita's water ice, and maybe I'll even convince the boys to spend some time on the beach and in the ocean. I just wish that I could convince the other two thirds of the family to actually do some relaxing while on vacation.

Fourth Grade

2011-08-14T21:42:00.003-04:00

This may be too long for one post. Fourth grade was a monumental year for me in so many ways. Before I started fourth grade, my mom had me go in and meet with the principal. She wanted him to show me around and basically talk to me about how his school was set up compared to the Catholic school I had been attending. Of course, my mom was friends with the new principal, and this becomes important later.

I was lucky that I started fourth grade knowing a few of the kids. My mom had me start in Brownies near our new house so that I could meet some of the neighborhood kids. I didn't really get to do much with them outside of Brownies and girls scouts, but we knew each other. When I switched over to public school, I immediately had a group of girls who were willing to take me in. That was actually really helpful. In fourth grade, I had to take the bus for the first time, which was was weird for me. The really weird thing was that in retrospect, my bus stop was me, some little kids, and a bunch of older burnouts. I think that eventually all of the older kids were kicked out of school and put into special alternative schools for behavior problems. These older kids hated me. I was such a goodie two shoes to them (and I really was). I was also placed in higher reading groups than they were. Boy, did they hate me. Luckily, that didn't mean too much to me, since I only saw them for a few minutes in the morning.

Part of the before school year discussions between my mom and the principal involved my academic abilities and teacher preference. All three years that I was at Edgewood, my mom requested that I get the strictest teacher at each grade level (there were two classes at each grade level). In retrospect, I think I would have benefited from the more maternal teacher each year since I was already getting a lot of strictness at home, but maybe it would not have made much of a difference.

Math at my previous school was not grouped, but at my new school it was. In fact, after a few months, they decided to let the advanced students (about 8 of us, I think) do our math with a self-paced program. Great thinking, but it bombed in practice. No one was watching us and all we did was sit around and talk. Eventually they realized we were actually behind the other kids. Good thing we were all advanced and we caught up easily. I do remember loving that math was grouped and that I was around other kids who were good at math. Of course, I also think I may have been the only girl in this group. There were 50 kids in two classes and for math and reading, we were grouped across the two classes.

Reading was a real problem. They put me in the advanced fourth grade reading group, and the textbook they were reading was the textbook I was assigned in first grade (Images - I can't believe I remember that). I remember complaining to my mom and she told me to wait things out. Eventually, I fell apart at school. I remember having a major crying fit during recess. Kind Mrs. Mahlke, who was a fifth grade teacher, asked me what was going on. I told her that I was so upset that I was reading a baby book. I felt like I was being punished for being a good reader and for being a transfer student. She decided to test me. I don't remember if this was on the spot, or after discussion with other adults. I do know that at some point in fourth grade (I was 8 years old), she had me tested on my reading during recess with no other kids around. I had to do different types of questions (I'm sure reading and then comprehension) for all grade levels. She ran out of material by 12th grade and I hadn't got any wrong. She was shocked. I did get my reading group changed, but it still wasn't where I should have been. They had my mom explain it to me, I think. I should have been in the highest sixth grade reading group based on where I had been at the end of third grade. The problem was there were only two girls in that group. When I moved to fifth and then sixth grade, I would have no one else in reading my group. They didn't want that. Instead, I was moved to the middle sixth grade reading group, and boy, did I receive grief from the kids in the lowest sixth grade group. They hated me. My own group accepted me pretty well. This was so that when I moved to fifth grade, there were still a few kids in sixth grade to be in my reading group with me. I was upset that I was still being made to re-read one textbook, but at least it wasn't three. Also, my new reading teacher was my favorite teacher ever. He supplemented our reading with more advanced stuff, and he loved me. He loved to ask me questions and to see how my mind worked.

Other big changes in fourth grade included two huge steps back (in my little kid mind). Catholic schools, in general, are advanced in reading and writing. When I went from third grade to fourth grade, I had to go back to printing instead of cursive and from pen back to pencil. I really felt that I was being treated like a baby. To this day, I hate writing with pencil.

Handwriting at my new school was a bigger deal than it had been at my old school, and my handwriting is, and was, atrocious. It was so bad that eventually they had me pulled aside to learn typing. When the rest of the class was in the library doing library things, I was learning to type. I, actually loved this, because the reading stuff was way beneath me, and typing was cool. Remember this was just before computers were really available (1978). I used to plink away on my dad's old manual typewriter from when he was in high school. It was awesome to realize that there was a method. I still prefer to type because my writing is so horrible. Even after being together for 13 years, Ethan has trouble reading some of my writing. My brain works way faster than my hands and fingers. Typing allows for that, handwriting does not.

Fourth grade was also a really big deal because it was the first time I got in official trouble at school. At my new school, if you didn't do your homework, you got a notice that your parents needed to sign. After five of these notices, you got a detention. By fourth grade, I noticed that the homework wasn't useful to me. Just like Dermot, writing my spelling words five times each did not help me. So I stopped doing the busy work. Now, I would do homework that I saw the purpose in. I don't think I ever missed a creative writing assignment. To learn to write, you must write, but I didn't see the purpose in rote, repetitive homework. For example, if I was given worksheets of addition, I probably wouldn't have done them either. I was an education snob at a very early age. I also stopped giving my parents the sheets about missed homework. So I got in more trouble. In fourth grade I got my first detention and my mother was livid. Oooh, did I get in trouble. There was no bus ride home for kids in detention, so my mom had to pick me up at 4 after school. She was worried about the sunlight and about getting home in time to get dinner ready for my dad when he got home at 5:30. I got yelled at for days. I'm sure I probably got the belt for it, and I know I got extra chores because of it. I was also told that there was no way it was going to happen again. So, of course, it happened again. The second time was worse. When I realized it was my fifth offense and I was going to get a detention, I lied to the teacher. She asked me what happened to my homework, and I told her that it got destroyed in the rain. She nailed me. I already had some trouble with this teacher because she would call me Lonna May (my middle name is Michelle), and all of the kids called me Fannie Mae (chocolate store out of Chicago). This of course got shortened to Fanny. This teacher also had a dog named Murphy, and she made sure to tell the whole class about that. So I was also called a dog all year by my classmates. So much of my teasing stemmed directly from dumb things this teacher said. After I lied to her, I got the whole sob story about how she tried to be so good to me and yet I let her down and I hurt her by lying to her. Yet, she was the first teacher I talked to about being bored and she told me that I was wrong. She completely ignored me. All of my report cards from her contained the phrase "Lonna is a space cadet." She had no idea that she contributed to that by not engaging me in the class at all. She was also one of those teachers who wouldn't call on me because she knew I knew the answer. So I basically gave up on doing anything at school in her class.

I started down a lot of bad roads in fourth grade, that I never really fixed. This was the beginning of the label "underachiever" being attached to me, which is very common for gifted kids. My grades never really reflected my abilities because I was being graded on stupid, non-interesting stuff. My best grades were always in my hardest classes. If I had to work, I would, and you would see amazing things. Unfortunately, that was all too rare.

As long as this, I do have more to write about. I'll save that for next time.

Second and Third Grade

2011-08-11T14:13:00.002-04:00

I don't remember much about second and third grade. I think this might be because we moved (just across town) in March of second grade, and school wasn't all that important. I was dealing with moving from a court with 13 kids between 4 and 9 (and I was 7) to a court with only two other kids (on boy a year older, and one girl a year younger, both in retrospect who were probably LD). In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing that school wasn't hard for me, because I could see my grades plunging because of my personal struggles.

My second grade was part of an experiment that my school was trying. This was not for educational reasons, but for space reasons, I think. They combined the top half of second grade with the top half of the third grade. Therefore, there was one second grade, one third grade, and one combined room of second and third graders. I wish I remembered more about this now that I am a child development specialist. I remember that they sat us on separate halves of the classroom. When the teacher was teaching the third grade, we second graders were supposed to be working on projects at our desks. I remember that I always tried to sit on the dividing line so that I could listen to the third graders' lessons since I could finish seat work in no time. I remember liking that, but I don't remember learning much. I do know that it was nice not to have to leave my classroom for reading like I had in first grade.

I remember very little about third grade except that I had Sr. Gemma. Sr. Gemma was dying to have me in her class. When I was in kindergarten I would sometimes spend time in the Catholic school teacher's lounge while my mom was doing something for the school. Sr. Gemma would find me and run math problems by me. She said that she couldn't wait to teach me math in third grade. The only thing I remember about third grade was multiplication tables. I remember being so angry because I was the second student to memorize the tables (we did 0-12 in those days). Even worse, my cousin beat me! Oh, I was so angry - just like Dermot gets. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that I earned my last sticker the day after my cousin did, but I remember being so upset with myself. So perfectionism runs through our family.

The bigger issue in second and third grade was getting to school. Before we moved, I only lived a couple of blocks away from the school. Also, this was during the days when all kids walked to school unless they lived too far away. When we moved, I lived .9 miles away from the school. The rule was that you had to live one mile away or more to get to take a bus to school. Believe me, my mom would have made me walk the .9 miles to school if it weren't for the fact that I had to cross a really serious intersection to get to school. If there was no traffic, I'm sure I would have had to walk. The other problem is that my mom has really lousy vision and she's night blind. She was legally blind until I was in first grade. I remember her taking driving lessons and getting her license once she could pass the eye test. When we moved, my parents only had one car and my dad needed that for work. So, my mom didn't have a way to drive me, and on days when it was dark in the morning, she couldn't have driven me anyway. I am pretty sure that a friend of hers with a kid at my school drove my brother and I to school. It's amazing that I don't remember any details about that. Wow, I'm getting old.

In third grade, I think, my mom got an old beater of a car. This is a great story. One of my mom's college friends, who is completely blind, inherited a car from one of her aunts. Since she was married to a blind man and their kids were small, she certainly couldn't do anything with the car. So she sold the car to my mom for some small fee. So we had a beat up blue Gran Torino for my mom to tool around in. Now that she had a car she could drive some times, but she still couldn't if it got dark. This doesn't just mean mornings in the winter. My mom also can't drive if there's any kind of storm that darkens the sky.

Because of the transportation issues, because there were no more nuns teaching at the fourth through sixth grade levels at my school, and because my brother was graduating from my school, my parents decided to let me go to public school at the beginning of fourth grade. That will be my next post. Public school was fantastic for me, but there were some horrible growing pains, especially in fourth grade.

Away

2011-08-03T22:25:00.003-04:00

Sorry that I haven't written much here this week. I am still committed to blogging. I am going to Washington, D.C. tomorrow for the American Psychological Association Convention, and I've been running around trying to get everything ready for the trip. I also didn't have Dermot in his math classes this week so that I didn't have to worry about taking him anywhere.

I know that you're not supposed to publicly admit this, but I am so very much looking forward to 3.5 days away from my child. That kid is "go go go" from 6:30 AM until 9:30 PM. And he talks while he's doing all his crazy stuff. I think that I am just going to enjoy the silence of my hotel room for a couple of nights. I'll be thrilled as punch to see him when I get back, but boy, am I looking forward to a vacation where I get to do adult, Lonna things. I'm going to go to art museums, which neither of my men like. I'm going to take my time and read the notes attached to each piece of art! Yay for me. The boys always rush me through museums. I like to dawdle and soak up everything that I can. I'm a details type of person. Dermot can go through an hour exhibit in 20 minutes, and be perfectly happy. More frightening is that he will have picked up on much of the exhibit, but that's a different story.

Anyway, I will continue writing about my own experiences next week. I don't have much left to write about Dermot until school starts back up on September 7th and/or I get the official report from the psychologist.

Testing

2011-08-01T21:16:00.004-04:00

I decided that I needed to have Dermot tested to bring more information to the school. I was told that the school would need to test him if I asked, but they said that they wouldn't test for giftedness. Dermot's school has a pull out program that starts in the third grade, and entry seems entirely based on tests taken at the end of second grade in reading and math. What is irritating to me is that the state law requires schools to identify gifted kids in kindergarten and to provide them academic challenge as deemed appropriate in kindergarten. I have brought in a copy of the law and it hasn't gotten me very far. Anyway, I went through a series of tests as a child, and they were helpful. I was hoping that Dermot's testing would be helpful too. Turns out it was a mixed bag.

I don't want to go into too much detail because numbers can follow people and it's very possible that Dermot may read this some day. I don't want him to know the numbers. We took him to the Gifted Child Clinic run by UMDNJ (the medical and dental school of NJ - near Rutgers). Everything that I found online suggested that this was the best place to go to get an accurate reading of your child. Dermot and I went one day and he took the WISC-IV (IQ test) and then we went the next week and he took the PIAT-R (which I had never heard of, but it's an achievement test - testing what he has learned, not what he is capable of).

The best part was that I got to watch him take the test behind a one-way mirror. It was fascinating to see. In fact, Ethan took the next day off of work to watch Dermot take the second test. Dermot was bouncing off of the walls. He couldn't sit down at all. I'm shocked that ADHD has not come up from the schools. It was killing me not to be able to go into the room and tell him to sit down and focus. Then it happened, he got hit with his first hard question and he slowed down a lot to think. It seems that he knows that he doesn't have to focus for most things, and so he doesn't. I don't think he can. This is part of why gifted kids can look so immature. Dermot hasn't had to learn to self-regulate when it comes to academics. He hasn't had to work hard on anything or focus on anything. I know he can do it when he has to, but it's not an everyday skill that he has.

The second test was even worse. I don't know if it's because he was so excited that his dad was around or if it was just that the questions were multiple choice and fairly simple to him. We went in last Friday for the results. The psychologist asked us a bunch of questions about why we were having him tested, our backgrounds, and Dermot's background. Then she went over the results. I think she wanted to make sure that her interpretation fit things that we saw.

Here's the bad news, his IQ score was lower than any of us expected. I don't care except that it's going to close doors to opportunities that should be open. After the psychologist went over the entire test with us, she stated that the official IQ score is not accurate for him. One subtest (digit span) dragged down his entire score. The funny thing is that I teach digit span every single semester, and mine is way below average. You have to remember a string of numbers and say them back in order. It's such a stupid task and not tied to reality that I have zero attention for it. I have the digit span of a 7 year old, as does Dermot. She said that it was very clear that it was a motivation issue and not an intelligence issue, but she had to score things the way they fell. The funny thing is that there are three subtests for this section of the exam. Most kids do worse as they go through the three tests. Dermot did better as they got harder. In fact, he scored at the 15.6 year old level in arithmetic reasoning. Wow. Unfortunately, that's some newfangled score that doesn't get included in the final score.

She said that for Dermot it would be more useful to focus on his achievement test. They tested reading comprehension, reading, spelling, writing comprehension, and a couple of different types of arithmetic. He scored at being at the beginning of 4th grade on average and he's about to start 2nd grade. Math and spelling were noticeably higher than the other scales.

Her take home message was that he's gifted, and he's more gifted than the numbers say he is. He has motivation issues (as do his mother, father, and all of his uncles), which can look like attention problems. Again, I wanted to be proactive and not reactive to this situation, which she appreciated. We haven't gotten the official written report yet. I'm interested to see how she lays everything out. Dermot's test scores really do need explanation and interpretation. I'm afraid that the school may not see things the way we do.

The psychologist says that Dermot's so off the charts mathematically, that we really need to focus on the math. That's where he will go off the rails first. Supposedly the school is willing to work with us on that, so we'll see.

I'm really torn if skipping a grade is the way to go. I am pretty sure that he could handle it academically. I'm afraid for him socially, but I also know that he will rise to the occasion when he has to. Everything that I am currently reading seems to think that acceleration is the best way to handle kids in Dermot's shoes. Even with a grade skip, I think he would need advanced math. I also think that it would be awkward to go from first to third grade. It might be better to go from third to fifth since fifth grade would be a new school. But again, what if that's too late and he gets bored and checks out before that? I haven't written about it yet, but fourth grade was really where I decided that I had had enough of the work that was way beneath me. I'm so scared of Dermot's fourth grade because of that. Also, because I was accelerated, I was only 8 when fourth grade started, and I had already figured how useless school was for me. I only have one year left before Dermot hits that age. Fortunately, he doesn't seem nearly as internally focused and as reflective as I was and still am. Maybe that will help him. Anyway, lots to think about and no clear answers. Isn't that always the way with this parenting stuff? I'm interested to see what the psychologist recommends in her final report.

Dermot's First Grade

2011-07-28T10:09:00.002-04:00

Dermot started first grade with 150 sight words, and he was able to read pretty basic children's books. As far as his math, he had been doing weird advanced math worksheets on top of the regular stuff at the end of kindergarten (after much cajoling on my part). So I set up a meeting with Dermot's new teacher for about the second week of class. I was so excited by Dermot's teacher. She was young and her master's degree was in reading. She listened to me about Dermot and gave me suggestions and tried things out for Dermot in the classroom. She was also willing to communicate with me by email instead of by notes in Dermot's folders, which I hated when his kindergarten teacher insisted on that.

So, first grade started off really great for Dermot. He was excited, and he had several of his kindergarten friends with him in the new class. We had the library problem that I spoke about earlier that was pretty much it at the beginning. Dermot's reading blossomed. I hate to say this, but playing Pokemon really helped Dermot read. He saw the point of reading, and the language is simple, but useful. He no longer needed to ask us what everything said in his video games and that made him feel good about himself. We also dug around trying to find books for him, and that was hard. His reading ability was noticeably below his interests. So now that he could read, he could only read books about stories that he thought were silly or too watered down. It took us months to wait out the discrepancy. Finally, Dermot found the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books and they were perfect for him. He's already read all five of them multiple times.

Once Dermot was reading the Diary books, I knew that he was way beyond the simple reading in his classroom. I finally had had enough and I emailed his teacher asking for her to send home more difficult books. She did, and he fell in love with the Magic Tree House Series. He's still reading those from the library. He has a growing interest in history, and these books are really fulfilling that need for him. The problem with first grade, however, is that they use the DRA system for testing reading ability. Dermot doesn't test very high on the test because it focuses on comprehension. Dermot doesn't pay attention to the stories he is reading for the test because they are way too simple for him. When he is asked to repeat back what happened, he doesn't know what is important because it's all stupid to him. I brought this up to the teacher and she didn't seem to get it. I am not that worried about it, because as long as he is reading appropriate stuff at home, I don't really care. I make him read every night before bed, and he enjoys that.

A new subject in first grade was spelling. Oh, the monotony of spelling homework. My poor boy really suffered through that, and that's not even close to being over. Monday they had to write out the seven words five times each. Tuesday they had to write sentences with five of the words. Wednesday they had to do something else (I don't remember). Thursday they had to "study". As if first graders know what that means. Dermot refused to study because he insisted that he already knew the words. He was right. He got one hundred percents on all of his spelling tests. At our end of the year meeting with the principal, I brought up the fact that Dermot was obviously not being challenged in spelling. The funny thing, which wasn't funny to poor Dermot, was that he missed one extra credit word - Illinois. He put an "e" on the end. He, of course, is still pissed off at himself for missing that word even though it was a surprise word and he had never really looked at it in class before. I was horrified since I'm from Illinois, especially since he knows how to correctly pronounce Illinois.

Math, of course, was still a huge problem. I think that a lot of early grade school teachers are not very good at math and they don't know how to teach math that is more advanced than they are used to teaching. My mom says that her teachers were like that when she was a principal. At the beginning of first grade, we had a meeting with the teacher about Dermot's math ability. She said that she would challenge him. She created a challenge folder for his desk with work for him to do when he finished what the other kids were still working on. She also sent home copies of worksheets from the third grade textbook. Dermot liked those, but they were still a little too easy. Eventually, we hit a point where we were frustrated that no one was "teaching" Dermot math. They were sending home worksheets and expecting him to pick things up. He did, but Ethan and I are not math teachers. We were worried that Dermot might be missing small pieces of math that we no longer did because we get to use shortcuts as adults. Math, more than any other subject, really builds on the previous material. If you don't learn everything that you need and learn it correctly, you fall apart once you start algebra. I didn't want that to happen to Dermot, especially not with his perfectionism. I wrote to the teacher and for some reason the principal got involved. They decided that Dermot needed to work more on word problems. I think that they thought that Ethan and I were forcing Dermot to do basic, rote math. As if he were just doing sheets and sheets of problems at home. That was never the case. Dermot has seriously figured most of math out by himself. Anyway, they started sending home second grade worksheets that were much more wordy. Dermot was irritated because it was obviously a step backward, and he didn't have trouble with word problems. Dermot has always understood math within real life applications, so word problems are how he views math. Because of this, I got really fed up. I started freaking out about how was I going to help this boy with his math. I knew that he needed guidance that the school wasn't able to give him. I spent a whole day checking out Sylvan, Kumon, Huntington, etc. That's when I found Mathnasium. It does tutoring for older kids, but it also does enrichment for younger kids. The owners have three mathematically talented children themselves. They have been a great source of information for me. They have a son who is two years older than Dermot who is starting algebra. Dermot is in awe of that child:) Mathnasium gives pre-tests of material and then a child does worksheets while guided by a teacher only covering the material that they did not know. Dermot scored a 75% on the second grade test at the end of his first grade. He just took the post-test for third grade yesterday and he got a 96%. He, of course, was enraged that he missed two items. The scary part is that he knew all of third grade math except for three concepts. He finished all of that material in seven 1.5 hour sessions. Next week he will take the fourth grade pre-test, I guess. Dermot is now doing long division with remainders. Seriously. He understands modes and medians. Seriously. You show him, he gets it. He just needs to be shown.

Near the end of the school year our public school district had a family math night. Awesome, we thought. I couldn't go because I was teaching, but Ethan and Dermot went. I had emailed the organizer to make sure that it was still going on and that a little kid would be okay. The organizer wrote me back and said that she had worked with Dermot and that he seemed really advanced in math. I noticed that this organizer was a new hire who was in charge of the entire math and science curriculum for our K-12 system. She also has an ED.D. I immediately wrote her back and told her my concerns about Dermot. I told her that I am going to pay for Dermot to be enriched as long as he likes it. That means that he will be advanced in math. I wanted to plan for the future now. He very well may be doing algebra when he's in fourth grade, and there's no way his fourth grade teacher will be able to teach that and the other kids. I had to do seventh grade math twice (sixth grade and then again in seventh grade - horrible experience), and I told them that there's no way I'm going to let that happen to Dermot. So this led to a big powwow at the end of the year to start to plan for Dermot's future.

This final meeting consisted of Dermot's first grade teacher, the principal, the math coordinator, and the gifted program instructor. I should start off by saying that we had previously had a meeting with the gifted teacher, and I'm not a big fan of hers. I kept begging the school to test Dermot and they won't. All she did in her meeting was tell me how the gifted program works and who gets to participate. It's way too little and it's already not challenging to Dermot. The one nice thing she did, though, was she gave Dermot access to an online math game that's for the second grade and higher math team in the gifted program. He got to spend a lot of time on that while the other kids were doing first grade math.

This last meeting consisted of me explaining the Mathnasium program and giving them lots of information. Then we talked about Dermot's social development (whatever, I'm so sick of that being a topic of discussion when I know it's related to his giftedness and they don't understand that). They told me that in second grade, they will prepare his new teacher for him, but they only focused on math. They have told us that Dermot will do pretests of the second grade math material. If he passes, he won't have to work on that material. If he does not pass a topic, he will need to work with the rest of the class. When he does pass a topic, he will have a special project to work on. What that means needs to be fleshed out. Personally, I would like it to involve writing since that's his least liked subject, which means that's the most difficult subject for him.

The big point I ended up making at the end of that meeting was that Dermot isn't just gifted in math. He seems to be light years ahead in math, but he's also bored out of his mind in other subjects. He never missed a spelling word, and he's reading books and understanding them at the 9-12 year old range. I think he could read older books, but the content isn't of interest to him, and I don't need him rushing into adult topics before he can handle them. He also finds grade school science silly because he understands the scientific method and the point of experiments. He doesn't understand how learning the types of clouds counts as science. He also learned solid, liquid, gas, and plasma through They Might Be Giants songs and through a great demonstration at our local science museum when he was 4. Doing that in class at 7 seemed really silly to him.

The overall picture, though, is that Dermot loved his first grade teacher. She was really good for him. She tried to learn who he was. He cried when he got home after the last day of school because he said he was really going to miss her. It made me cry too. What a sweet child he can be. His friendships deepened and that meant the world to him. The teacher even commented that when he was getting in trouble in school it seemed that it was because he was trying to find his place in the class' social world. She said his shyness really lessened over the school year. Dermot insists that he still likes school (Thank goodness!). I'm trying to have a positive view of all of this. It's hard to know what to do with gifted kids. It's also hard to know how gifted they are. Even worse, most gifted kids are at different levels in each subject, so you can't just assume that they are at a certain level for all material. The principal has been very open with us. Hopefully the next teacher will be willing to work with us too. We just had Dermot tested and we'll have more information for the school soon. We get his results back tomorrow. My biggest problem is that the school thinks that by giving him slightly more advanced homework in a few subjects they are meeting his needs. I think that he is way more advanced than the school either wants to admit or than the school thinks a child can be at his age. I don't think Dermot is one of these geniuses who could handle college at 13, but I am pretty sure that he's at least two grades above in all subjects except for writing and grammar. This kid even finds the technology class boring because we've let him do so much on the computer. Again, the good news is that I have a kid who enjoys school. The bad news is that I see the future unfolding and I know that things only get worse. He's lucky enough to just live for today.

Intensity, etc.

2011-07-26T22:51:00.003-04:00

"Gifted children and adults are often misunderstood. Their excitement is viewed as excessive, their high energy as hyperactivity, their persistence as nagging, their imagination as not paying attention, their passion as being disruptive, their strong emotions and sensitivity as immaturity, and their creativity and self-directedness as oppositional."

This blurb is from "Living with Intensity" by Susan Daniels and Michael Piechowski. I will talk about these issues later, but I wanted to put this out there to remind myself of where I found the quote. I almost cried when I read this quote because it captures so much about myself and Dermot. These kids require more patience than most human beings are capable of. I suppose that seems true of all kids, but this is my personal experience.

First Grade

2011-07-26T13:40:00.002-04:00

First grade was probably the most miserable experience of all of my education. I transferred from a public kindergarten to a Catholic elementary school. To state that St. Scholastica and Sister Virginia were not ready for me was an understatement. Thank goodness my cousin Ron was with me, because he was in the exact same boat. I don't know if public schools worried about class sizes back in the mid-70s, but Catholic schools surely did not. I think there were about 40-some kids in my first grade. Can you even imagine teaching that many squirming 6-year-olds? Ugh. Dermot's class had 24, and that seemed like a lot whenever I was volunteering in his classroom.

My brother had been Sister Virginia's classroom three years before I was, and apparently my parents had a few conversations with her back then, but I don't know the details. All I know is that first grade was worse than kindergarten in terms of curriculum and expectations. We were not expected to read, and my reading had obviously improved over one year of formal schooling. At this age I was going to the public library twice a week because they had a seven book limit. I was reading 14 books a week, and that's not including the books that my parents bought for me, and all of my brother's books that I "borrowed" once he was finished with them.

When I started school, we were put into different reading groups. Because my mom was well-known among the school employees, they did know that I was reading and they didn't put me in the beginner reading groups. I don't know if they tested me or if they just put me in a reading group. I ended up (with my cousin) in the highest level second grade reading group. I don't remember that being a bad fit, but Mrs. Haffner was a great teacher compared to Sister Virginia who could barely spell her own name. Seriously, I don't know how she made it through college. The problem was they wouldn't just let me start at that level. I had to makeup all of the other books. So I had to read five textbooks and do all of the workbooks associated with those textbooks during the beginning of first grade. I was so irritated about having to read the early books. The workbooks were stupid. I am pretty sure that today's educators would do some sort of post-test to make sure I knew the material included. If I passed, then I would be done. Back then, I had to demonstrate that I could do stupid, remedial, rote work, I guess (this will also become a theme as I continue to write).

I don't remember much about learning math in first grade. I think that we were all in one large group, regardless of our abilities. What I do remember about math is that the two brightest kids (my cousin and I) were asked to "tutor" the two weakest students in the hallway during math time. So my poor cousin and I would sit out in the hallway theoretically teaching basic counting and addition to Doug and Kimberly, who probably had learning disabilities. Doug didn't finish high school, and I have no idea what happened to Kimberly. What really happened was that Ron and I either sat in the hallway talking to ourselves while Doug and Kimberly talked to themselves, or even worse, Ron and I made fun of Doug and Kimberly. As an educator I am horrified to admit that, but seriously, what was the teacher thinking? To us 1 + 1 was so obviously 2. We couldn't understand how that wasn't clear to the other two kids. I was still doing workbooks at home, so at least my math education wasn't stunted by learning nothing new in first grade.

The only subject that was new to me in first grade was religion. I was fascinated by religion class because it was the only new information I was presented all day. The funny thing is I think it was just presented to us as stories, and I found the stories interesting. I didn't really like the morality or the rules part, but the Bible stories were interesting. Also, because I was raised Catholic, I was taught that they were stories and/or allegories. They were never presented to me as factual. In fact when I brought up how the Bible was full of stories to my Fundamentalist grandfather he was horrified. Live and learn.

The worst part of first grade was phonics. Now, I'm a big believer in phonics being part of reading education. I was frustrated with Dermot's daycare because they believed a little too strongly in whole language. You clearly need both approaches. I'm old enough that we had a phonics workbook. I remember it to this day. It was green with black plaid on it. The problem was that the workbook was designed for pre-readers. It was probably a great tool for them. I remember things like having multiple pictures of balloons on a page. Each balloon contained a different word. Our task was to color in (with crayon) each balloon that contained a word that contained a K. That is basically teaching the alphabet. Again, as a child who was reading at probably a high school reading level, this was ridiculous. Because it was stupid to me, I went home and completed the entire workbook after the first day of school. My teacher was furious at me. She ended up giving me another, identical workbook so that I could work at the same pace as the other kids. I went home crying after she punished me for doing the work. Five-year-old Lonna thought that I would be praised for knowing all of the information and finishing it so quickly. I knew nothing about pacing, and working as a group. Again, I shouldn't have known that stuff. That was on the teacher, not on me.

Another problem that I had in first grade, which Dermot has also had in kindergarten and in first grade, was the school library. When we would go to the library (which was a trailer outside of the school), my class was only allowed to check out first grade books, which were basically picture books. The first day we went to the library, I immediately went to the sixth grade section (my school was 1-6). I found a bunch of books that I wanted, and I was told there was no way that I could check them out. I told the librarian (Sister Generosa - I'm not making this up) that I could read the sixth grade books. She said that I couldn't. I told her to open one up at random and I would read it to her. She said no. Fortunately, this is one of the few times that my mother did advocate for me. She had a talk with the stubborn nun and I was allowed to check out any books that I wanted. We have had to email Dermot's librarian both years to let him have access to more advanced books too. In fact in kindergarten, they wouldn't let him check out non-fiction books. It was just ridiculous. Dermot didn't like the story books because they were beneath him. He loved, loved, loved reading science books and encyclopedias. Curious George just wasn't cutting it. So after a few emails, they let him and other kids have access to the other books. That's always the concern - what about the other kids? What about them? If they want access to more advanced stuff - good for them. If they can't handle it, that's for you and the teacher to figure out.

In retrospect, I'm not so sure that I shouldn't have been skipped another grade at this point. I went home from school crying almost daily in first grade. This is what I know was going on in little Lonna's head, and what I think is going on in Dermot's head. I was told that school was going to be challenging. School was going to be this wonderful place where I learned all sorts of new things. Basically, school was put on a pedestal for me. My mother was a teacher, and my parents are both first-generation college graduates. They both had to work hard in school. I think that school was that wondrous, beautiful thing for them that they told me it would be. I got to school and all they did was talk about stuff that I had known for a long time. I never got the "good stuff" that I had been promised, and oh, how badly did I want all of that good stuff. When I ask Dermot about school all he says is that it's boring, it's too easy, and that they aren't teaching him anything that he doesn't know. From what I can gather he's not totally wrong. The only thing that I think he has learned is grammar. Now that's important and I certainly would never want to minimize that. I'm thrilled that he's learning the rules of language, not just how to read. In fact his school is so awesome that all kids (his school is K-4) write every single day. He hates it, which means that he's having to work at it. I love that for him. But, because of the type of kid he is, he gets really irritated when books break the grammar rules that he is learning. For example, a lot of children's books start sentences with "and" or "but". Dermot insists that they cannot do that. Again, he's Mr. Black and White.

The other rough part of first grade for me was the social component. I did have friends in first grade, but I was not very well-liked. I was already being made fun of for being fat, which I don't see when I see pictures of me at this age. By fourth grade, those hurtful words were not wrong, but I don't think that was true in first grade. Maybe the kids could sense it was my destiny:) My best friend from my neighborhood was in my classroom and I remember at least one other girl who would play with me. My problem was that I was a total bitch about my abilities. I was a big bragger in first grade. I always knew that I would be the first to complete something. I always knew that I would be the one to not get anything wrong. The problem was that I was dumb enough to tell my classmates that I was smarter than they were. I honestly deserved all that I got in return. My mom tells me that she stayed out of it because she wanted me to learn on my own. I did, but it took two years. I think that things would have been very different for me if someone had mentored me on what it meant to be gifted. This is why I am so sensitive now when it comes to talking about my giftedness and abilities. You all know how mean first graders can be. I remember purposely using words that I knew they didn't know. God, I was just awful to my poor classmates. Thank goodness I had a best friend who lived across the street who was also gifted. He was lucky enough to go to public school, though. My cousin was in my class, but in first grade it's hard to cross the huge gender divide. I, of course, did have some male friends, but they didn't seem to "count" in bigger picture. All that mattered was the girl half of our class, and boy, they didn't like me very much.

The other thing that I remember about first grade was constantly getting in trouble for talking. Again, that never really went away until high school. Whenever I was bored, I would talk. I had no self-control at that age. Again, I shouldn't have had self-control at that age. A good teacher would have realized that I was talking when I was bored. A good teacher would have had extra work or more challenging work for me to work on when I started getting out of control. Dermot's teacher gave him a "challenge folder" full of harder math homework. He still got in trouble for talking, but it was much less often than I got in trouble. I should point out that Dermot's first grade teacher had these folders for all of the students, not just Dermot. It's just that Dermot's work was more advanced and she had to fill his up more often.

This is long enough. I will write about Dermot's first grade experience in its own post. It's so fresh to me, that I am sure that I will have a lot to say. Suffice it to say after writing this, and comparing it to Dermot's experience, he did have a better first grade experience. That's actually good for me to recognize.

P.S. You see all of this detail and all of this emotional intensity in these posts? This is what gifted kids are like. They call it intensity and overexcitability. I see it in myself to this day, and I don't know how to help Dermot cope with it, because I don't think I ever learned how to cope with it. I'll talk more about that later as well.

From the Beginning

2011-07-22T13:22:00.002-04:00

I have a couple of things I would like to put out there before I start reminiscing. First, obviously I don't remember my early years. I don't have any personal memories until school started. The school calendar gave me something to hang my memories onto, I think. So the early part of my story is only as good as my memory of the stories my mother has passed down to me. Second, it's very awkward to talk about one's own giftedness as well as one's child's giftedness. It's considered socially inappropriate to talk about one's talents and gifts. Giftedness does not make a person better than others. I had problems dealing with that as a child, but I learned things the hard way, and I'm okay with that. Being gifted to me is the same as being blue-eyed. It's part of who I am. I have always known about my gifted status, and it's a large part of my identity. On the other hand, I am very aware of what I do know and what I do not know. When I write about my giftedness in this blog, I am not trying to be arrogant. That's not really who I am. I am seriously trying to get over some of my own baggage so that it doesn't spillover and affect Dermot's education.

I have not heard any family stories about anything about me that made me look unusual until I was three years old. In fact, my mother was always worried that my brother and I were late talkers. My mother was a grade school teacher (grade 1 and 2 before I came along, I think) and she quit working and stayed home once I was born. Because of that I think that she provided cognitive stimulation to my brother and I before I was in school. The first incident that pointed to my giftedness was that I could read at three years of age. My mother, I assume, was reading to me everyday, as we did with Dermot. One day she noticed that I was reading the newspaper out loud to myself. At that point, she knew that I wasn't just spitting out stories that had been read to me a million times. I was actually reading new material, and if I remember correctly, newspapers are written at the fourth grade level. I don't think that my mom thought much of it other than that she was happy that I could entertain myself with books instead of her having to read them to me. I read everything I could get my hands on. I don't know if my mom realized that what I was doing was special, or if she figured that it was just because I was exposed to reading and my older brother's reading. I know that he did not read at that age, but I do not know when he started reading. My brother is gifted as well, but he was labeled at a much later age than I was. He has also had a different struggle than I have with what giftedness means to him.

Because my birthday is in December, I turned 5 in the middle of the school year. The policy in place in my town in 1974 was that kids had to be 5 by December 1 to start kindergarten. I missed that deadline by two weeks. My parents were really torn about what to do. I was smart and ready for school. In fact, I was dying for school. I grew up around schools because my mom used to volunteer and bring me around. I knew that schools were where you went to learn, and I couldn't get enough of learning. I also knew that my cousin and all of my friends who were my age were going to start kindergarten in the fall. The only way around the firm birthday date was to be tested. My parents didn't know if I would pass the test. It was also $100 which was a lot of money back then, especially for young parents with only one working. My parents decided to take the plunge and I spent a good chunk of one day at a psychiatrist's office. I don't remember much of the testing. I know that they gave me at least one IQ test, and my mom says they gave me some social tests too to make sure that I could handle the social and emotional requirements of kindergarten. I know that I needed an IQ over 130 to be allowed to enter kindergarten. My mom says that she was never told my actual score other than that I passed. So I got to start kindergarten a year early. Thank goodness. I cannot imagine how miserable I would have been if I had to wait one more year to start school.

When I started kindergarten I was reading at a very advanced level, and the curriculum did not involve much literacy at all. We weren't expected to even know the alphabet at that time. A lot of kindergarten was spent listening to the teacher read and learning the alphabet. To a child who was reading beyond a fourth grade level, this was torture. Of course, since this was the days of 2.5 hour kindergarten, it wasn't all that bad. We actually took a nap during my session since I ended up in the afternoon session. Even worse, my mother was yelled at for teaching me to read. The teacher was seriously angry at my mother and told her that she might have taught me how to read incorrectly. First, my mother didn't really teach me to read. Second, my mother had a degree in elementary education and was certainly trained and able to teach me to read. Third, there isn't really a wrong way to read if a child is really reading.

Because of my advanced reading skills, I was exposed to the first of many inadequate band-aids to deal with my abilities. While the other kids were having literacy lessons, I was sent down to the library, by myself - with no chaperon - and that's scary for a 4 year old, to work on System 80. It was a pre-computer self-teaching device. Basically I think it would tell a story and then ask a question about the story. I had to push a big button that was under different pictures to show that I understood what was being read. I actually didn't mind the System 80 except that it was way too easy. The worst part was the isolation. I was weird. I wasn't like the other kids. At 4 I had to navigate a huge school all by myself. Part of it felt like punishment, which is a common theme among gifted kids.

I just read what I have written. I realize that I haven't mentioned math skills. Math was a weird world for me. Apparently I was really good at math as a preschooler, but no one really seemed to care. My mother is very bad at math, and my father honestly wasn't around all that much. He's an accountant who loves math, but I wasn't really exposed to that. If anything, I got the sense that girls weren't supposed to be good at math, but I'll hit that theme much later when I get to high school. I do know that when I was taking the IQ test, they were going to leave out the math (addition and subtraction) because they thought I was too young for it. My mother told them that I could do math and that they should leave it in. I ended up successfully doing more math on the IQ test than they expected, but again, I don't really know details. I do know that I was adding and subtracting before I entered school and that math in kindergarten only involved counting. I hit a point where I was "borrowing" my brother's math books without him knowing it and teaching myself math from three grades ahead of me. Also, since my mom was a teacher, she used to go to the teacher's store and buy me all sorts of reading, phonics, grammar, and math workbooks. She remembers that I was always doing workbooks for 2-3 years ahead of where I was when I was little. I loved workbooks.

How does this relate to Dermot? I thought we dodged a bullet when he ended up born in February. He's nowhere near the cut off for kindergarten. He's smack dab in the middle. Dermot was not reading when he began kindergarten, but he on the cusp. He was also doing addition and subtraction before kindergarten. So I knew that he was already ahead of the kindergarten curriculum, but maybe not all that far ahead. It turns out that he was barely ahead in reading, but math consisted of counting, patterns, and shapes. He would come home disgusted by what they were having him learn. I ended up having a meeting with his teacher and all I got was the Dermot was socially immature. She would not admit that he bright or that he was bored. She was only concerned that he was still touching other kids. Again, this is a common theme among gifted kids. A lot of educators do not want to see giftedness. It's easier to see all kids as equal. Also, a lot of gifted kids, especially boys get seen as socially immature because they have attention problems in class. I know it's boredom. I got in tons of trouble myself for inappropriately spent energy. But that's on the teacher. It's not on the child. His teacher refused to focus on his strengths and always focused on the negatives with us. I was convinced this was probably going on in the classroom as well. Again, I thought, kindergarten is only 4 hours in our school district. Things will get better when he's in first grade. And it did. A little. What drives me crazy is that Dermot does look socially immature when he's acting with his agemates. He acts older when he's with older kids. He thinks that his agemates are little kids because they are not his cognitive age mates. Many gifted kids have trouble interacting with kids their age because they just aren't like kids their age. Dermot went as one of the Mythbusters for Halloween and it was awesome, but not one single classmate knew who he was. Dermot's school is all about sports and he doesn't like sports. They don't like math and science and he did at that age.

What fascinates me is that Dermot has a need to be like the other kids that neither Ethan nor I really had. I had no problem being different if it was tied to my intelligence. My looks and weight are a totally different story - I hated being different in that way. Dermot, I think, has already learned to hide his intelligence from his classmates a little bit. I am shocked by this because you don't usually see the stigma of giftedness appear until middle school. He's much more socially sensitive than Ethan and I were. He knows what the other kids will make fun of and why. He has a much stronger need to fit in than Ethan or I did. I was fine with 2-3 friends. Dermot needs the whole class to like him, and that's not going to happen. He's well liked, but no kid is liked by 23 others. He's so emotionally intense that he thinks that kids who don't play with him hate him. There's no middle ground with Dermot. I'm trying to teach him about apathy. Most people who don't like you, just don't have any feelings toward you and that's fine. One of the hardest things about gifted kids, and I know I did this to my parents too, is that they tend to be very stubborn, very black and white, very concrete, and very emotionally intense. Why be a little mad when you can be a lot mad? He's just like his parents in this case because gifted kids become gifted adults. We may have coping mechanisms that Dermot doesn't have yet, but they don't always work. Dermot has the conviction of his beliefs like Ethan and the easily hurt, sensitivity of his mother. Poor kid. He's such a mix of us.

Next post - First grade, for me and Dermot.

It's Been an Eternity

2011-07-21T09:49:00.002-04:00

I have not written on here in forever, but I have been processing something over the last two years and I haven't made much headway. I hope that by writing about it, I will hopefully figure something out. Before I get to that topic, I want to catch up a little on the past two years.

I started this blog because several of us were needing parenting and nursing support when our kids were really, really young. Doesn't that seem like ages ago? Hardly any of us are blogging anymore because life got faster-paced and twitter and Facebook fit our lives better. I also knew that raising a vegan child would be unusual and that I might need some social support for that task. Well Dermot is now 7.5 and nursing, feeding, and sleeping issues are so thankfully behind us. Raising a vegan child isn't really that big of an issue either. Dermot hasn't asked us about eating any other way. He has internalized that he doesn't want to hurt animals and he's happy being a vegan. That might change. I'm not blind, but as for now, it's really a non-issue. The bigger issue is that he won't try any new foods, and he hates most food. I'm a really picky eater (really picky), and Dermot makes me look like I will eat anything. He seriously eats about 8 things. But he's healthy, and he hardly ever misses school. I give him a vitamin, cross my fingers, and hope that some day he will want to explore the world of Thai, Indian, and Ethiopian food that his parents love so much. If not, that will become his problem.

The much bigger issue, and part of what I am processing, is that Dermot has entered public school. Wow, has this ripped off a bunch of scabs for me. Scabs and scars I didn't even know I had. As you could tell from previous postings, even years ago, Dermot is really bright. When it comes to math, he's really, really bright (he just scored a 75% on the 3rd grade pre-test at Mathnasium). He's also reading at about a 5th-6th grade level. This actually might be higher, but he's not interested in books more advanced than that right now, and I'm fine with that. The school is just not prepared for him, and why should they be? He's one of 24 kids who are all at different levels and have varying levels of support at home. I go in about 2-3 times a year to talk to the teacher and principal and try to see if we can work together to challenge Dermot more. They say all of the right things and Dermot is still bored out of his mind. He got 100% on all of his spelling tests last year and he never missed a math question. He complains that he's not learning anything in school and that they keep trying to teach him things that he knows. He also told me that the other kids are starting to ask him for the answers and are trying to copy off of him. I don't remember that starting so young, but I was in Catholic school with 45 other kids when I was his age.

What I'm working on is separating my school problems from Dermot's school experience. I was extremely under-served in my K-12 education, and I went to good schools, and even a college prep Catholic high school. I don't think that anyone truly understood what I was capable of. No one pushed me, and that's how gifted kids suffer. No one pushes them. So my goals are to write about my own personal experiences in K-12 education while trying to see how they do and don't relate to Dermot's current situation. The good news is that Dermot loves school. He loves it when he can show that he knows things. He also loves his friends and the other social aspects of school. So far that has actually gone pretty well. I get the feeling that he's pretty well-liked, but he also knows that he's not like the other kids. I remember that feeling well and it was 34 years ago. It's amazing how fresh some of this stuff can feel when there's a reason to bring it all up again.

There are a ton of parenting-of-the-gifted blogs out there, and they have been really helpful, but few, if any, are talking about how their own childhoods and education are affecting how they relate to their gifted child. Many of these parents talk about how they are just now discovering that they have many of the traits of the gifted that they see in their children. Ethan and I are in a totally different boat. We were both labeled as gifted as kids. I was 4, and Ethan was older, but he was still definitely a kid when he was labeled. I know I was a gifted child and I was treated as a gifted child, but it's not giving me all that much insight into how to advocate for my child and how to parent my child. Gifted kids are a pain in the ass to parent because they fight all boundaries, they are extremely emotionally volatile (intensity in the gifted-jargon), and they do sometimes know things that their parents don't know. Parenting Dermot is exhausting because of his giftedness, but throwing on my own baggage is just making things worse.

Anyway, enough for now. I'll start at the beginning in my next post. We'll go back in time to little four-year-old Lonna in 1974. Yikes.

More Math

2009-02-25T07:43:00.001-05:00

Dermot: Mama, what's 100 plus 1 plus 1 plus 3?
Mama: 105
Dermot: So if I had 2 instead of 3 I would have 104.
Mama: Yep

Wow. Ethan also told me that one of the kindergarten teachers at Dermot's daycare saw what Dermot was working on and told him that he looks like he may be ready for kindergarten. I'm in no rush, but no kidding. They have no idea what this kid can do. They look at him with the same eyes they look at every kid. They look for typical, not strengths, talents, and gifts. Sigh. I hope public school is better, but I fear that it may not be. I feel like I may be doing a lot of advocating for Dermot in the future.

Finally - The Birthday Party

2009-02-15T11:49:00.003-05:00

Fortunately, Dermot's birthday party was much better than the real day when he stayed home with us. I should point out, though, that Dermot's birthday party was on Saturday and the Friday before he was diagnosed with his very first case of strep throat. Antibiotics and Tylenol kept the boy going. We had the party at Little Gym, which I really like. The parties there are only for the kids invited. So many of the kids' parties around here involve going to some obnoxious place with tons of kids and then spending half an hour in a side room. At Little Gym, it was just us. We were supposed to have 12 kids including Dermot, but 2 kids got sick and couldn't come. That happened to me all the time with my December birthday. So I had talked about that to prepare Dermot for the possibility. He was fine with all of that.

We got there a little early and set up, but everything was really all ready for us. We just had to put the food in the party room and put the goodie bags behind the counter. This year, since the kids are older, some of the parents stayed outside of the gymnastics area. So I played host to them and Ethan went inside with the kids. There were two teachers there too to help the kids. They did a mixture of free play, dance, and organized games. Dermot had to sit out a couple of times because he just didn't have the energy. Poor guy, but he didn't let it get him down. He cuddled with Ethan for a little bit and then he took pictures of all of his friends having fun. The kids had a blast. Since it has been so cold here, the kids had been locked inside for over a week. They all took advantage of being able to run around like crazy people. They all followed directions and didn't bother each other too. It was really lovely.

After an hour of play, it was time for the party room. Everyone else always has pizza for the kids, but I refuse to spend my money on non-vegan items, and I knew the kids would freak out about cheeseless pizza. So instead we just brought snacks. We brought Tings, pita chips, and hummus. Tings were mostly what the kids ate. Little Gym provided juice boxes and we brought in bottled water. I didn't even think of soda until we were there since we don't really drink it. Dermot wanted his vanilla soy milk, but that would have been obnoxious to bring. They make juice boxes of it, but I can only find them at Whole Foods. I wasn't about to go to another store for all of this stuff.

After the snacks came cupcakes. We bought 30 cupcakes from the vegan bakery (sweet avenue bake shop). We bought a mixture of red velvet, vanilla, and chocolate. We had asked what the kids wanted ahead of time. The people at the store are so cool and they have gotten to know Ethan and Dermot a little bit. They made Dermot a special cupcake without us asking them too. They put a picture of Batman on top as a surprise for him. The owners are a young couple and the wife's sister. The husband is a total Star Wars and Batman fanatic. Dermot has a Batman hat and gloves and so the guy started talking to Dermot about them. That's why they knew the cupcake would make him happy.

After the cupcakes it was time to go. Goodie bags for everyone. Dermot wanted a Batman theme for the party and all of the goodie bags had a ton of Batman stuff - masks, rubber bracelets, blowouts, and I sent out Batman thank you cards. I also put in Swedish fish, ring pops, and now and laters. Everything was very Dermot and he wanted a goodie bag for himself. He even put his name on the bag after I made them. I'm such a sneaky mom that I went out and bought him some extra stuff for his bag that he had no idea about until we got into the car. I bought him a small Clone Wars Lego set, a Spiderman lollipop, and orange tic-tacs (since he's always eating mine). He was so surprised and happy.

The best part of the party was that all of the kids had a great time and then we all go to leave. It was really fantastic to just leave when it was over and not have to put anything away or clean up. That was totally worth the money.

The sweetest thing is that one of the girls who was at the party was talking about how much fun she had at the party when Ethan dropped Dermot off at daycare on the next Monday. She was also wearing her Batman rubber bracelet. That made me happy too.

Dermot got quite a haul with his presents. His friends really had an idea of what he wanted. He got a sticker maker (Disney), a Spiderman car, a Batman cape, two action figures that he didn't have, two sets of generic legos for him to create his own stuff, some stuff he did have, but we already went to Toys R us and turned them in along with his gift card and got more Legos.

After all of that, I still think that next year I don't want to do a party. I think I would rather have 2-3 friends over at our house. But we'll see maybe I'll change my mind by the end of this year. Dermot will have all new friends once he starts kindergarten, and that may change a lot of things.

That's Right

2009-02-14T21:22:00.001-05:00

Dermot tonight in the car after talking about another kid who likes to bother Dermot.

"I'm not a copycat. I'm a normal kid who's five. I'm not a weirdo."

Call 'em how you see 'em kid. I wish I felt that way about myself at 5.

Math

2009-02-12T08:39:00.002-05:00

I didn't want to leave my whiny post at the top of the blog, so here's a quick one. I'll write about the birthday party later - I swear. I just don't have time right now.

Here are some quick examples of Dermot's burgeoning mathematics ability.

When Dermot's playing Lego Star Wars he needs to collect 10 "white things" on each level. Ethan and Dermot have found most of them, but Dermot is still looking for the few we don't have. A while ago, Dermot was playing and Ethan and I were just sitting in the living room with him. Dermot says to himself, "I have 7 white things so I need 3 more.". I was blown away. Now if I ask him what's 10 minus 7 he can't answer me, but the real life stuff is more useful anyway.

Two days ago when we were getting ready to bed, Dermot had Puppy and Bat with him (he now has two stuffed animals that are always with him). Dermot tells me that if he farts twice, Puppy farts twice, and Bat farts once that will be five farts. So my kid has already moved on to three addends, not just two. If he would just put any of this energy into reading, I would be so happy. He's still fighting me on that front.

I do want to point out, though, that Dermot has some sight words. They are not the normal ones like "the" or "at". No, not my boy. He knows "to be continued", "Save", and "continue". His words are mostly video game related or tied to the cartoon series we are renting through Netflix. In fact, when he creates his adventures with Ethan he has started telling me what disc they are in which season. For example, they just finished disc 2 of season 4 of their adventures. This side of Dermot makes me happy and laugh.

Lousy Day

2009-02-10T22:52:00.000-05:00

So, I was planning on writing some sweet, sappy post about Dermot's fifth birthday. 5 years and 22 minutes ago, he was pulled out of me quietly. But no, instead I am going to write about what an awful day I had today.

Dermot had requested that Ethan and I take off work and stay home with him. Sweet, right? So we did - especially since tonight's my night class and I wouldn't have seen Dermot except for about an hour this morning. Dermot woke up and ran downstairs to see his presents. We got him four Lego kits. So Ethan started building one while Dermot and I were eating breakfast. Dermot was just in a lousy mood. I don't even remember what happened. I just know that he was talking horribly to me, and that he was being a real jerk. So he got a birthday timeout. It's like he thought that since he was the birthday boy he could be an asshole. Not on my watch little kid.

Then Dermot realized it was video game day. So he and Ethan went to Blockbuster to rent some games and return the old ones. As usual, Dermot got frustrated when things got hard and he ended up yelling at Ethan who was just trying to help him. Then Dermot picked up the Lego kit that I had made (Count Dooku's Solar Sailer which is a piece of crap!) and he broke part of it. Granted, it was two pieces that I had had trouble keeping stick, but still - icing on the cake. This, of course, happened right before I was supposed to go to the knee doctor. So I said "Perfect" and then I left.

I get to the doctor's office and I realize that I only have four bucks on me and they don't take credit cards. I ask where the nearest ATM is. The receptionist tells me it's just down the street, but I couldn't find it. I ended up walking another way and seriously wasting a half an hour just to get ten bucks for my copay. Finally, I see the doctor and get some x-rays. My knees don't have anything wrong with them on the x-ray. I have to do exercises and take some prescription dose naprosyn for ten days to see if that helps. If not, it's an MRI. My knee isn't that bad, but it hurts by the end of the day and it's popping like crazy. It keeps feeling like it's going to give way. After this horrible experience, I was tempted to not go home for a while, but I did. Since I had to go to CVS to get my prescription, I called Ethan to see if he needed anything. He told me that he had given Dermot a time out because he never settled down after the Solar Sailer incident.

I forgot. Also, before I went to the doctor I made Dermot a cake. He had requested a fat-full vanilla cake unlike the usually fat free white cake I make. He wanted a yellow cake like when he turned 3. He also didn't want any frosting on it. So I made him one 9-inch round instead of two. After I got the cake out of the oven, I couldn't get it out of the well greased stupid pan. So the cake is in pieces. It tastes great, but it looks like shit. Dermot wouldn't eat it because it didn't look like the cake from the pictures of when he turned three. I told him that the cake in the picture looked that way because it had FROSTING on it - which he wouldn't eat. So he told me he wouldn't eat the cake.

Things mostly settled down before dinner, although dinner was really late because I just couldn't handle having to think of something to make, trying to make sure that it would make Ethan happy, and then actually also making it. It was that crappy of a day. Now I'm up still up at 11:03 when I should be sleeping because we'll all be up at 6 tomorrow. At least this day is almost over.

I'll write about Dermot's party another time.

Car

2009-02-05T22:12:00.002-05:00

I've been posting things on facebook, and I haven't been writing about them here. Just in case anyone is interested and doesn't see me on facebook our biggest news is that we bought a new car! I know crazy in this economy right? When Ethan and I met in 1998, we both still had our first cars. I had a 1988 Sundance I bought from my brother (piece of crap), and he had a used Escort that he bought in college. Around January of 2000 some lady went through a red light while I was turning left and she totalled my car. So Ethan and I had the Escort. Then his Escort's second transmission died. We figured it was a bad idea to put a third transmission into a car. So we were stuck needing a car. I must say that I married into the most marvelous family in the world. We were planning on asking Ethan's lovely aunt for a low interest loan, but before we got to that point, Ethan's parents offered to give us their 1996 Civic. They went down to one car so that we could have a car. To this day I am still blown away by that kind of generosity. My parents didn't even give me things they had promised me, much less anything extra.

When we had Dermot we put it off, but we needed a second car. That's when we got my 2004 CR-V, which I still love. We have been happy with both cars, but the Civic is 12 years old and the gas mileage was hovering around 20 miles to the gallon instead of 30 - even after being worked on. I don't believe in driving a car until it actually does die on you, if you are lucky enough to have a choice. We had been planning on buying a car this summer, but the deals just got to good for us. Ethan has had his eye on a hybrid for a while. We are not as "green" as we could be, who is?, but we certainly do try. Ethan is better at than I am because he was raised thinking this way - I was not. Anyway, we were looking at the Prius and the hybrid Civic. Ethan had decided on a Prius based on a bunch of research, and after driving them both he liked the Prius better too. I went and tried the Prius only, and I really liked it. It's totally space-age. He does not need a key to turn on the car. How Jetsons! He has an electric component that looks like my electric opener for the CR-V, but he only needs to have it in his pocket.

I haven't really driven our car yet because Ethan's still thoroughly enjoying it. As a passenger, though, the Prius is great. It has more room than the Civic did, and it rides more quietly. Which is funny because we chose the CR-V over the Rav-4 because the Honda had more room than the Toyota. Dermot loves having a new car. He kept talking about it when we first got it. He thinks it's cool that he gets to go to school in a brand new car. So now, Ethan and I have both had the pleasure of having our first, own, new cars.

Funny Story

2009-02-03T12:49:00.003-05:00

So, I'm putting Dermot to bed last night. He wants to pretend that he's the dad and I'm the dad's son. I decide to go full force and pretend this is true.

Me: So you're my dad and I'm the kid, right?
D: Yes.
Me: Why are you trying to sleep with me? I want to sleep by myself. You should go sleep with Mama - your wife.
D: She's dead.

I'm not making this up. I was hoping he would see my point of how much Ethan and I hate helping him fall asleep. As soon as he said "she's dead." I just lost it.

A Rare Work Post

2009-01-16T09:18:00.002-05:00

I normally don't talk about work on here for several reasons. First, there are privacy issues being a professor, and second, this blog really was started to talk about our experiences with Dermot. But work is taking over all of my thoughts and I haven't blogged for a while.

This semester is going to be a big "sucker of time". I don't know what I was thinking. I will be teaching six courses. I will be teaching two intro to psych courses, but one will be writing intensive, which means tons of assignments. I will be teaching one section of human growth and development - three assignments. Two sections of child psychology - one online and one ITV which means that I will have students on two campuses and there will be a camera on me beaming over to the campus I am not at. Finally, I will be teaching human sexuality which not only have I never taught before, I have never even took it as a student. Sigh. So much work. Child psych and human sexuality are two hundred level courses which means that I have to assign a serious writing assignment in each of them. So my big things are that I'm going to have to create a brand new course - which means creating lectures and power points for 19 chapters (I have 2.33 done), and I'm going to be doing a ton of grading of 2-7 page writing assignments. Also, the online course involves constant feedback since all of our communication is basically written.

I know this seems like nothing to K-12 teachers. I am officially only in the classroom 15 hours plus the online course, but I get no down time when I'm in the class. I'm an old fashioned lecture only type of gal.

I also have a ton of service work to do. This is the part of being a professor that people don't know about. That and research, which I don't have since I'm at a two year school. I am on a ton of committees. The faculty basically help run the place. We do a lot to keep things going and to make improvements to how things are being done. For example, I was just picked to be the faculty liaison to the president regarding student success. I have to pick two other faculty members to work on this committee. Our goal is write a report by the end of the semester giving suggestions about how we can help our students during their time with us. A great deal of our students do not officially graduate. We are trying to figure out why they leave and to see if there is anything that we can do about it. This is true across the nation at all two year schools, but we need to figure out what we can do for our particular situation. Important work, but hard.

I'm also co-chair of a committee that is in charge of writing a report regarding the state of online courses and other types of distance learning at our school. That report is really due some time next week. Then we get to spend the rest of the semester merging my report with about 12 other reports into one big final report. This report will help determine if we get to keep our accreditation. Which basically means that our degrees will continue to be valuable instead of just a blank piece of paper.

I'm also on the writing committee, the general education committee, the assessment committee, and the educational technology committee. Sigh. I get scared just seeing all of that in print. Fortunately, most of these commitments just involve attending meetings and thinking on the spot. Although, I am in charge of one project for Ed. Tech and that's going to eat up some time.

I also have a lot to do for my department. There are only three psychology professors at my school. One is chair of the entire humanities and social science department, and the other one is in charge of a huge project and a big committee. So a lot of the work has been given to me. We need to decide what we expect psych "majors" to know after two years and worse, how do we intend to measure what they have learned. That's another big project I have to work on this semester.

All of this being said, I may be posting even less regularly. Dermot's getting older and there's less to talk about other than his intense love of me, and that's getting a little creepy to see in print. Living it is fine, but once I see it in writing, it seems strange. Wednesday he told me I was a hottie (again with the too much TV). I asked what that meant and he said that it meant I was gorgeous. So he really did get the meaning. I then told him that it creeped me out a little bit. I told him that it sounded like he wanted to date me. Then he said that he did not want to date me, but that he did love me. So hopefully "hottie" will disappear. Ethan, however, was fantastic to me and told me that I shouldn't be upset with Dermot since he was just being honest and pointing out the truth about my beauty. How fantastic are my two guys?

Enchiladas

2009-01-06T09:29:00.002-05:00

I haven't posted about food in here forever, but I made a good dinner last night. I have been trying new recipes during break, and I haven't had much luck, but last night I made a batch of yummy enchiladas. My sauce is homemade, but it's from a copyrighted cookbook. So I'm not going to post it, but you can buy it. I have to admit, though, I've never even tasted bought enchilada sauce. I don't know how different it is from what I make. Here's the filling, and I created it myself.

First I sauteed up some onion and garlic. Then I added 2 cans of black beans, 2 cups of already cooked jasmine rice, one bag of Morningstar Crumbles, and one taco seasoning packet. I let that cook together for a while covered. Then I put the filling into fat free tortillas, rolled them up, put them in a glass casserole, and covered it all with the enchilada sauce. I baked them at 375 for 15 minutes. Ethan and I were sad that there weren't more. I do, however, have tons of filling left over. I just ran out of tortillas. I think that I will eat the filling plain today as a version of beans and rice. I should also say that we put torn up lettuce on the enchiladas, and you could use diced onion as a topping as well. Oh, I also put a little bit of vegan fake cheese sauce in each enchilada.

Conversation

2009-01-06T09:17:00.002-05:00

Dermot: Mama, you're the best mama in the whole wide world.

Mama: Thank you Dermot. That's sweet, but maybe your friends would think that their mamas are the best in the whole world.

Dermot: Then they're messing with the wrong sistah!

Too much TV, I think. Even Dermot knew that he picked this up from Total Drama Island on Cartoon Network. I'm trying to teach him "...messing with the wrong brothuh". At least then it would be gender correct.

The Holidays

2008-12-28T21:37:00.003-05:00

Let's pretend that my last post wasn't almost two weeks ago. Actually, the last post was on my 39th birthday and I forgot to say anything about it. It feels weird to have 40 on the horizon.

We spent Christmas at Ethan's parents' house, which was lovely as always. All three of his brothers and their families came by, as did Ethan's aunt and uncle. Which means that the entire family was under one roof. Rare and exciting. We were thrilled to see Dermot's cousins. We have seen Brynna a couple of times before, but we got to meet 9 month old Zachary for the first time. So much cuteness and sweetness!

We drove up to Perkasie on Christmas Eve in all of the rain. We woke up to ice on the streets, so we left a couple of hours later than we usually do, but it was the right decision. We had a smooth drive up there. We brought all of Dermot's gifts with us, except for two that Ethan decided to save for later. Ethan's brother and his family from SC arrived around dinner time, and much chaos ensued. Ethan's oldest brother had also arrived by this point. Before the family arrived from SC, we let Dermot open one gift. I had grown up with a tradition of opening one gift before bed on Christmas Eve. We were pushing Dermot to open a Lego gift in order to keep him busy, so we let him open his present during the afternoon. This turned out to be a good call. We got him a big Lego Pirate ship from their new pirate line. It took us all afternoon to build it, and we got it done right before the baby arrived. Little Zachary is moving quickly and putting everything in his mouth. The last thing any of us needed was Lego pieces all over the floor.

That night after we put the kids to sleep, Pop Pop brought out the kids' presents and I hung up stockings for all three kids. I really wanted to start a stocking tradition this year, so I got stockings for all three kids. I wanted them to be able to wake up and rip right into their stockings in order to tide them over until it was time to unwrap their presents. Dermot got a Batman stocking and I just got plain stockings for the other two kids. I thought that they may not make the trip back to SC due to luggage space. Dermot and Brynna mostly got candy, but I did find Dermot two tiny lego packs. I also got Brynna some small stuff. All I got Zachary was two baby toys since he doesn't really need candy yet.

I should point out that I actually got up before Dermot. I was one of those kids who couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve and was up at 6, but not Dermot. Brynna was, though. Dermot slept until almost 8. He's been sleepy lately, and I'm letting him pick his own times. After some whining and begging, the kids got to tear open their gifts. Dermot got so much stuff! We bought him the build your own light saber thing that he really wanted, and he's been using constantly. He also got a bunch of action figures (Clone Wars, Batman, Justice League), some more legos, books, board games (mousetrap, sorry sliders, and hulk operation), puzzles, and kid appropriate Spiderman comic books. He also got a microscope that attaches to our tv from my parents. He's been truly grateful (mostly) for his gifts, and even more surprising, he's played with all of it. Yeah! He says the sweetest things about it too. He says, "I love you because you bought me things I like." It's not exactly what I'd like to hear from him since it's so materialistic, but I see the underlying meaning in it. I think that he really gets it that we understand him as a person. At his age I was getting dolls, Barbies, and clothes as gifts and I just hated them.

I should also point out that Ethan totally surprised me with a gift this year. We don't always exchange gifts and there's no expectation that if one of us buys a gift the other one will too. It's completely spontaneous and unexpected between us. I really thought that we were doing nothing this year, and then he presents me with a big wrapped box at his parents' house. So while the kids were opening their gifts, so was I. Ethan bought me a netbook. Basically it's a tiny laptop computer that's just for basic things. I had mentioned, briefly, that it might be nice to get a laptop so that I can teach online courses during the summer and still be able to travel. I really want to take Dermot to Boston this summer, and I liked the idea of not being tied to NJ while I am teaching. I can handle my online courses from anywhere. Ethan took the idea and ran with it. The netbook will also be useful while I'm at the main campus where I work. Since I work at a branch campus, my office is there, but I'm at the main campus usually two days a week. I have nowhere to work while I'm there, and I hate being inefficient with my time. Now I can bring my netbook and check email and work on my lectures and reports. Ethan is really good with gifts.

We left the next day and we haven't been doing much. Dermot says that he doesn't want to leave the house. He and I did stay in all day yesterday and it made us cranky. So today we all went out to the bookstore, which he complained about. We actually wanted to go to New York since the weather was gorgeous here today, but he didn't want to go. Weird kid. Any other time he would have jumped at the chance. He says he just wants to stay home with his family. Too bad kid, we all end up stir crazy and mad at each other when we do that. We already have plans for Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening. I think that Ethan and I are also going to shoot for some alone shopping time while we're all on break. I want clothes and Ethan wants a piano (so do I, but not as badly as he really needs one). Ethan and Dermot don't go back until the 5th and I'm off until the 14th. Of course, I have a ton of work to do, and I will be back at work full time on the 5th too. It's just that I'll be working at home.

I hope that everyone had a fantastic holiday season and that New Year is even better for all of us than the last.

The Meeting

2008-12-15T21:39:00.002-05:00

So we finally had our meeting with Dermot's daycare. It seems that they were not withholding food from Dermot, but there was a misunderstanding. The director, who was rude, as usual, had interviewed all staff separately. It appears that a teacher who is not in Dermot's classroom came by during lunch to talk to one of the other teachers. When she noticed that Dermot was just going to throw away the cookie part of his Oreos, she suggested that his parents did not send him cookies just to have him throw part of them away. Dermot said that he didn't want to eat the cookie, but this teacher didn't give up. So she's in trouble because she was not one of Dermot's primary care providers and yet she was trying to work with him. I was actually happy to note that the assistant teacher in Dermot's room advocated for him. She told this guest teacher that Dermot wouldn't change his mind and that she shouldn't bother him.

Apparently, they were working on broadening Dermot's food preferences. Good luck with that. He eats about 5 things, and he refuses to try things. He would live on Pop Tarts (frostingless), vanilla soy yogurt, hummus, wheat thins, fruit roll ups, pasta, and Boca vegan chikn patties if we let him. How dare I try to get fruits or veggies into him. I'm at a point where red sauce on pasta counts as a veggie because at least tomatoes have vitamin c and other benefits.

After the heart of the matter was discussed, it came up that they were worried about Dermot getting enough calories. They thought that he was filling up on soy milk and not wanting to eat solid food. Dermot is not a freaking 18 month old. I swear. I know more about nutrition than they do. I send him high protein foods because he does play so hard. They feed the kids there such crap - chicken fingers and fries anyone, but they are concerned about my kid's food? I ate a vegan diet while I was building him. I know what we need to eat. I have books on vegan nutrition for crying out loud. Just because it doesn't fit the old fashioned lots of meat, some veggies and some "starch" that I grew up with, doesn't mean that it's bad. Plus Dermot is good at self-regulating his food. He seems to like one big meal. If he eats a lot of lunch, then he hardly eats dinner, but if he eats a small lunch, he wants a big dinner. It all balances out, and that's supposed to be our goal.

Overall the meeting was okay, but I still don't think that the director sees things from anyone else's perspective.

It's That Time Again

2008-12-14T00:18:00.002-05:00

Well finals start next week. So I have been psycho busy finishing things and grading this past week. Sorry for my absence. Here are some more funny Dermot stories.

Dermot is really wanting to start telling jokes. I have to point out that developmentally he's a little early with this. There actually are psychologists who study humor in children. My brother was really funny at an early age, and I very much was not. Here's Dermot joke. It's actually from the Riddler in one of his Batman books. What is the tallest building? A library because it's full of books. The actual answer is the library because it's full of stories, but I don't think that Dermot understands stories as floors, so his mind switched it to books. So fantastic from a psychologist's view point. But also really funny because it was unexpected.

Today in the car on our way to Ethiopian food (yum, by the way): Dermot tells me that you only grow on your actual birthday day. Then he tells me that soon he will out grow his winter coat because he'll be too fat for it. We tell him that he'll probably be too tall for it and not too fat for it. So then he asks when will he get fat. Of course, we say, hopefully never. Then he says that he wants to be fat because he wants to know what it's like to be fat. Goofy kid. Believe me, after my life time and all of the grief I have had both physically and mentally because of my weight, I never want to see that day. One of my biggest concerns has always been Dermot's weight. I am scared to death that he'll experience what I went through. So far, he seems right around the 50th percentile. I know that by 7, I was already being made fun of by the other children. It may have been even earlier, but I don't look big in my school pictures from that time.

In more Oedipal news, Dermot is constantly asking if he can snuggle with me. Ethan asked when he would get a turn to snuggle with me and Dermot said, "Never!"

Freud Lives in My House

2008-12-06T20:25:00.002-05:00

So I'm a psychologist, but I actually despise Freud's writings. They do not hold up to scientific scrutiny and they are one of the big reasons why people think psychology is either a joke or not a science. I teach my students that Freud is more studied by people in the humanities (arts and English) than by people in psychology. In fact, when I was at Uncle Derik's house, I saw at least one Freud book and one Jung book, which is exactly two more than I have (Uncle Derik went to art school, is a writer and a librarian). Freud's ideas are fantastic to mine for the non-real world, but useless when it comes to raising kids.

So here's the really funny part. My kid is so very much living the Freud life. Between 3 and 8 kids are in the phallic stage. Part of this stage is the Oedipal complex for boys. Boys fall in love with their mothers and dad becomes the "enemy". For more than a year, I have been living out this scenario. Dermot and Ethan are okay, but sometimes Dermot says some really strange things. For over a year he has wanted to marry me and give me married kisses. Fortunately, married kisses are normal kisses but you turn your head to opposite sides. He also says "Mama only" quite a lot. "I want Mama, not Daddy."

Well today for the first time Dermot told Ethan that he wanted to fight him and that the winner would get Mama. Then Dermot pretended to hit Ethan in the stomach and declared himself the victor. After that he said, "Mama's mine." If that kid even brings up something related to castration anxiety, so help me god. I don't know if I can handle 2-3 more years of this. It's funny, and it will make for great conversation to future dates, but it's really creepy. I'm focusing on the aspect that this means he really loves me and that I mean a lot to him. I know that by his age I was already having negative feelings toward my parents. When he does, they are very fleeting.

Little Trump

2008-12-05T21:05:00.001-05:00

Just a quick one. Dermot told me this morning that I was fired. Just like Donald Trump used to on TV. Then he said that since I am fired, I dont' have to go to work. Since I don't have to go to work, I can stay home with him. Then just to top it off, he started fake coughing. It's starts early, I guess.

Haircut, Office, and Pee

2008-11-25T07:31:00.002-05:00

This past weekend was very low key, which I needed. I think the boy may have needed some more excitement, but I just wanted to hang out at home, which is exactly what we did on Sunday. On Saturday we started out with a hair cut for Dermot. His hair is thick and grows crazy fast - just like both of his parents. We always let it go too long before we go to get it cut. It never bothers him, but I hate to see it start to stick up in the back. That's even worse now that it's winter hat weather. It's also easier to clean his hair in the bath when it's short, but I hate paying 20 bucks plus tip for a kids' cut.

After the hair cut we were off to Mama's office. Dermot's daycare requested pictures of the kids' parents at their desks. They want to put them around the kids' computer in the kids' "office". I thought that was cute. Of course, when I got to work one of my colleagues was there. We ended up talking business for a while, but then we got pictures of me and Dermot at my desk. Then we also took pictures of Daddy and Dermot at my desk since Daddy's office is a little off limits. Ethan works on some top secret pharmaceutical stuff, and it's never worth messing with the FDA.

Dermot was totally shy as I was introducing him to people. I realized that he hardly ever meets new men. At school I introduced him to a male English professor, our male IT guy, and a male custodian. Dermot wouldn't talk or look at any of them. I thought that Dermot might like my friend Alan (the English prof.) because he's fun, youthful and good with kids, but Dermot went and hid behind me. After the office visit we came home and just chilled out.

In other Dermot news, there is no news on the daycare front because the meeting of the teachers and administration was canceled. The director's husband ended up in the hospital the night before with a heart attack or stroke and that's the last we have heard.

My news, however, is that I have been up since 2 AM. Dermot woke up at that time and started changing his pajamas. I asked him if he had peed while he was sleeping. He said, "No", he was just a little wet. I told him the wet was pee. Then I told him to go to the bathroom and change that I would handle everything. He was upset, so I told him that accidents happen and we were prepared for them. I also told him that he would not get in trouble for wetting the bed. I just need to know so that I can take care of it. Then I went for his real fear, and I told him that he would not lose the Star Destroyer for wetting the bed. I told him that he had earned that and that I would not take it away for wetting the bed. This morning when he woke up he told Ethan that I wouldn't take away his Star Destroyer. So we had another talk about how I wouldn't take it away for wetting the bed. I, however, might decide to take it away if he's really bad like hitting or yelling or not following directions. He seemed to accept that. Poor kid is so hard on himself. I wonder where he gets that:) Sometimes that's the problem with marrying someone so like yourself - your kids are going to have so many of the characteristics that you share. This can be good - smart, math-y, and science-y, and bad - perfectionist, stubborn, worst personal critic. Even worse, I don't think that either Ethan or I have particularly good coping skills to pass on to Dermot regarding these traits:)

He Did It!

2008-11-19T07:25:00.001-05:00

Dermot made day 14 this morning. Tonight he gets to sleep in underwear and we will be building the Lego Star Destroyer! Oh Happy Day!

Fourteen Days

2008-11-17T22:37:00.002-05:00

I don't think that I wrote about this on here, but I made a deal with Dermot months ago that if he was able to stay dry throughout the night for 14 days, he would get a big toy. Dermot was potty trained about a year ago, but he still wears a pull-up every night. Until recently, he has been wet every single morning. Once in a blue moon he would wake up dry, but not very often. I thought that buying Dermot a big treat would help motivate him. He saw me buy the Lego Star Destroyer months ago. It's been down in our basement since then, and we mention it regularly. Well finally, Dermot has hit day 12. I hope that I am not jinxing him. He made it to day five and then he had 2 wet days and the clock started over. At day 7, I bought Dermot a half-way there gift, because it really was a big deal for him. So I went to TRU and bought him a Spider-man figure. I am so excited for him. I think that sleeping in underwear is going to be a big thing for him. Although, all he talks about is the star destroyer. I think that he gets the milestone he's about to hit.

To prepare for the accidents that will inevitably come, we went to Target this weekend. Dermot's bed is pretty waterproof, but ours needed some help. Dermot still crawls into our bed almost every night, so there's not reason to deny the fact that our bed needs to be bedwetter proof too. Also, it was time for some new sheets and a new bed spread. I get bored really easily with these things. I bought a new blue striped comforter and matching sheets as well as solid blue sheets. I also bought a new waterproof mattress pad. To further get ready, I decided to buy Dermot some more pajamas. I don't want him to run out in the middle of the week. Ethan and I are nervous every single morning until we know that the stars are still there.

In other news, we're having another daycare hub bub. This one made Dermot feel bad so Ethan went on the attack. Here's some back ground. We send Dermot's food every day, and we were under the impression that he could eat or not eat whatever he wanted. One day Dermot asked for a "field trip" lunch. This just means a sandwich, chips, fruit, and some cookies. This day, Dermot ate his oreos like he always does. He took them apart and only ate the creamy filling. He really hates chocolate. Apparently one of the teachers told Dermot that he couldn't have his soy milk to drink until he ate some of the cookie. We wouldn't have known except that when Dermot got home, he told Ethan that he didn't want us to send cookies to daycare any more because they got him trouble. Poor kid. So we had to tell the daycare that Dermot is allowed to be in charge of his food intake. In fact, it's against the daycare's policy to use food as a reinforcer or punishment. Based on current science, this is exactly the way to go. I feel that they were withholding food as a punishment for not eating all of his lunch, which is ridiculous. Sometimes I don't know what decade these teachers are from, and this is a teacher who is younger than I am. Sometimes it's like it's more important that the children follow their teachers' commands blindly than that the children actually matter. Dermot actually said that he had to do what the teacher said because "she's the boss". Sigh. So sad to me. He does need to learn to follow directions, but he also has the right to speak up when something is wrong. He's smart, he's passionate about certain things, and he can see through things. I think that needs to be respected. Not all 4-5 year olds are "just kids" in the sense that they don't understand anything. I really don't think that know just how much these kids know. I think the teachers were shocked that Dermot actually came home and talked about it. If they even tell us that he made up the story, so help me. It will not be pretty. When Dermot is confused about something, he leaves out details. I can tell when he's not remembering something versus when he's really concerned about an incident that really did happen.

So apparently, the staff are meeting about the situation on Wednesday, and then we're supposed to have a family meeting about it. I really hate those. The director goes into defensive mode, doesn't listen, and then condescends to us just to top it all off. I just hope she takes this seriously. Sometimes I feel like we're stuck at this place just because it's affiliated with Ethan's work, and that the director is counting on that. There's not really anyone above to complain to.

Shopping for Preschool Clothes

2008-11-11T16:26:00.005-05:00

I knew that I had forgotten something in my last post. I had last Tuesday off and I spent part of it at the mall. I bought myself a new sweater, tights, and skirt. That was the easy part. I then wanted to buy Dermot some more shirts. My views of buying him clothes have changed so much since he has had such a strong personality and opinions from such an early age. Long gone are the cute clothes with the puppies and baby dinosaurs. That's cool with me, but that stuff really is cute. Dermot would never wear any of it. He gets himself every day all by himself. So I try to buy him clothes that he will actually wear. That means that I am buying him a lot of logo-ed stuff. I didn't think that I would succumb to that so readily, but he really loves the stuff that he loves. So he has Batman, Spider-man, lego Star Wars, a ferocious T-Rex, etc. He will also wear plain stuff. He likes the soft, striped shirts from Children's Place. In fact, I bought them in all the colors that were in his size.

Here's my big complaint. Last Tuesday I thought that I would take a stab at Macy's again. I haven't been there since Dermot was 2, but I thought maybe they would have better clothes for a preschooler. He's now wearing a 4T on the bottom and a S (4-6) on the top in boys. So I went to Macy's and nothing had changed. Who is buying this stuff? Everything was either Roca Wear, Sean John, Ralph Lauren, Puma, or Nike. Dermot has no idea what any of that means. Some of the more plain stuff were polo shirts, and Dermot has a giant head like his dad, and he has trouble getting them over his head. The main reason I tried again is that Ethan said that his mom used to get reduced priced, basic t-shirts for him in high school. That just didn't exist there at all. I thought that they for sure would have super-hero stuff. What kid doesn't love whatever is the coolest TV show out there right now? They had one Marvel super stars shirt in white. What kid needs a white shirt? It would be stained within one day. I was actually going to buy it, but then there was a line of 7 people in front of me, and I just couldn't do it. So I ended up at Sears. I got three shirts that Dermot loves for about the price of the one Macy's shirt. Geez. I also bought Dermot his first Toughskin piece of clothing. I think that might be a new milestone.

What kind of stuff do you buy for your kids?

I should also point out that we are the worst parents in the world. I am at a point where I don't push Dermot on things, and therefore, he is living in sweat pants. It always makes me think of Chandler from Friends. You know someone has given up when they are living in sweat pants. I don't even know if he has any real pants that fit him.

Halloween and Election Day

2008-11-10T15:48:00.003-05:00

So I didn't post last week, and I wanted to write about Halloween. Apparently, I'm about a week behind in my posts and I don't remember half of what I want to write about. Friday Ethan took a half day and went to Dermot's daycare's Halloween parade. After the parade, they hung out for a little bit and then they went to get vegan cupcakes. YUMMY! They are not part of my diet, but it was a holiday, right?

That night Dermot helped me hand out candy at our house. He loves to see the little kids. We had such a strange mixture of kids. They were either 3-6 or over 12. I'm not a big fan of the older kids. They seem so rude and demanding. It's like we weren't giving out enough or good enough candy. We gave out Peanut Chews - Vegan Philly pride! - and Swedish Fish. I saved as many of the swedish fish as I could for Dermot, and he did almost get a whole bag left at the end. He didn't ask to go out trick or treating, but he liked to pretend he was doing it at home with our candy and his new Spider-man bucket.

Saturday we went to Target because I was hoping to get him some more sweat pants and some new sheets. They only had twin sized sheets in what we were looking for. So I ended up ordering them online anyway. Dermot was happy, however, because we got discounted Halloween candy (Twizzlers and Dots), and he got a Spider-man figure and a Green Goblin figure. He's now hooked on the Spectacular Spider-man cartoon series. Oh, I also found him a pair of Batman pajamas that lights up. Of course, the lights woke me up last night, but mama's all about making her kid happy.

Tuesday was a big day here too. Ethan and I stayed up and watched the whole thing. Yeah Obama. I really hope that he can even accomplish a sliver of what he promised. So many things need to be cleaned up in this country. Of course the next morning we were disappointed about the three rulings against gay marriage, but happy about the failing of the strange pro-life ballot initiatives. And, being the huge Air America fans that we are, we are still waiting for the recount going on in Minnesota. Go Franken!

I was so tired the next day and I had to teach three 75 minute classes, but I just had to be a part of everything. I have to admit that it was exciting knowing that Obama was giving his acceptance speech in Grant Park. I loved seeing my Chicago as such a happy political place considering the history of the city - especially regarding people of color and politics.

This weekend I spent Saturday morning redoing Dermot's room. He went from a Dora and Diego room to a Spider-man and Batman room. He now has Batman sheets and comforter. I also bought him more removable wall appliques. He has Batman above his bed and Spider-man across from his bed. He also put some on the door all by himself. We also put up a dinosaur skeleton poster that we had bought at the Museum of Natural History. He's thrilled about his new room. He's no longer my toddler. He's such a big kid.

Sunday I didn't do much because I started getting sick. In fact, I canceled my classes for today because I just feel lousy. My head is just full of nastiness and I am sore all over. Actually, we did try a new Indian restaurant Saturday night, and it was good. In fact it inspired us to try to make our own moong dal (split yellow lentils). I went a little too heavy with the ginger, but it was good.
Now that I'm caught up, hopefully I won't forget what we do around here any more.

New Pictures

2008-11-02T16:40:00.002-05:00

I just put up new pictures on Dermot's photo blog.

Beloved Emily and Dinosaurs

2008-11-01T22:31:00.002-04:00

So last weekend Dermot attended his friend Emily's fifth birthday party. It was at a real nice place with token-fed games downstairs and soft mat play upstairs where the party itself was held. Dermot loved running around and being crazy with his daycare friends. The funny thing to Ethan and I is that Dermot loves Emily. Ever since they moved him up to preschool, he has been talking about how much he loves Emily. And to his credit, she is a smart, mature, cutie. He seems to have his dad's taste:) But, even though he claims to love Emily, he didn't talk to her at all at her party. He spent the whole time running around like a lunatic with two boys his age. They were having a great time. It was fun to watch Dermot being a normal little boy with his friends.

I hate to admit this, but buying Emily's gift was hard on me. I had to go into the girl section of Toys R us and find something for a girl who likes ponies and princesses. I have gotten really used to Dermot's boy toy section. All the princesses, pink, and fake make up (for preschoolers!) was nauseating to me. Maybe I am better off with a boy. I always figured that if I had a girl, she would be super girly just for karma to get back at me. My mother was always upset that I wasn't the girly-girl she had wanted. I honestly like legos, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and super heroes. This stuff is fun. I just wish that Dermot would like cares more, but maybe that's in the future. I loved laying down race car tracks.

On Sunday of last weekend, we went to New York. Dermot has been asking to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History, and we thought that last weekend might be the last nice weather weekend to go. It turns out that the weather was just right for a day trip to the big city. We got a late start because Dermot actually slept until almost 8! We went right to the museum from our train stop. We walked in to see the largest dinosaur and a baby. Dermot loved it. Then as we were walking around, Dermot was mad there were no dinosaurs. So we checked the map and they were all on the fourth floor. So up we went. Then he was mad because we didn't see any pterodactyls. He loves the flying dinosaurs. Actually, it turns out they are not really dinosaurs, but that's a different story. At the museum we bought Dermot a couple of books on dinosaurs, a poster of dinosaurs, and a stuffed stegosaurus. Whichever idiot (me) wanted to buy Dermot the books forgot that it's almost impossible to pronounce most of the names of the damn dinosaurs. From the museum it was off to lunch at Cafe Blossom - an all vegan restaurant on the upper west side. Yum. I had the soup of the day which was sweet potato puree, ginger, and coconut milk. Ethan had a Cajun seitan sandwich and sweet potato fries. Yum. From lunch we went to Toys R Us in Times Square. They actually didn't have a lot of interesting stuff. Usually we find some great stuff that we can't find near us, but they didn't even have some of the TRU exclusive toys that we had hoped to get. The weird thing was the amount of crap they had. For the Clone Wars figures they had about 200 figures of one guy, and no one else. Why would they stock that much? Weird. Dermot ended up getting a lego garbage truck and a Batman lego set. Even poor Dermot was upset at the selection. We had better luck at our last trip to Target when we found the next round of Ben 10 Alien Force toys. I also want to point that Dermot was really good on the whole trip. He's starting to take direction a little better and he's starting to reign in some of his crummier tendencies. At home we still see some of that, but out and about he's working on making everything more pleasant. I'm trying to encourage that and I'm putting a bug in his ear about Boston. I would love to take a real family vacation to Boston next summer. We can take a train like he's used to. He hates being stuck in a plane, and we can take trains pretty easily to either Boston or DC, but I think I want to start with Boston.

Halloween and Pumpkins

2008-10-21T11:02:00.002-04:00

Sorry, no time to post last week. It was crazy. I have a campus wide presentation to do in a week, and I had to prepare a draft for my committee to go over.

The weekend before last we made our annual trip to the pumpkin patch. Dermot really loves this, and honestly, so do I. We don't have a ton of traditions, but it seems like Halloween is inspiring some, and I love me some Halloween.

This year we met our friends Rich, Amy, and their 15 month old Landon at the farm. Landon just wanted to look at the scarecrows all day. What a cutie. Dermot likes this particular farm because it has a play area for kids. He got to climb bales of hay, crawl through tunnels, walk on balance beams, swing, and bounce on a mini trampoline. He loves it and it cost us two bucks. Then it was time to pick pumpkins. I always go overboard on this stuff, but I love it. We got two big pumpkins, 3 small pumpkins, 4 mini pumpkins, 5 funky small gourds, and one red mum plant. Dermot also bought a small straw scarecrow. I like to line up all of the gourds and pumpkins on my front steps. It's so autumnal, and it makes me happy. After an hour Dermot was ready to go, so we left our friends there. They stayed and took a hay ride and apparently the baby loved it. I've only been on one hay ride and I was sick as a dog - even with my allergy medication - so I don't push that particular event.

On Wednesday of that week, Dermot went to the same pumpkin farm with his class on a field trip. He said he had a great time. He spent a lot of time picking out just the right pumpkin for mama. The other kids picked out the biggest pumpkins, but Dermot picked out a really cute, perfectly shaped smaller pumpkin. With his class, he also went on the hayride and then went into the corn maze. He said it was really fun.

In other Halloween news, Dermot has dressed up as Batman most days since we bought him the costume. He did dress up as Spider-man, however, on Sunday. I'm so glad that he's not just wearing it for one day of the year. Both costumes were cheap (30 bucks for the pair), but still it's great that he's really playing with them. His passion for Batman just increases. We've been renting the cartoon "The Batman" from Netflix and he watches them all as soon as they arrive.

In food news, I am in love with a new soup. It's a variation of this soup, but I need to make more, and I made it a little more simple. I used 2 big potatoes, one whole onion, one whole cauliflower, three big carrots, 4 cloves of garlic, and 7 cups of water. I boil that until it's really soft and then I put it through the food processor in batches. It turns out orange and thick. After that I added 1 tablespoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of nutritional yeast, but I'm sure you could leave that out. I hate steaming the cauliflower, so this time I diced a few small red potatoes. I just steamed them in a little bit of water and added them to the soup when it was done. You could probably just eat the puree, but I wanted something else in the soup. I haven't done it yet, but I bet it would be good with some Baco-s added to. Yum.

Mama Update

2008-10-11T12:53:00.003-04:00

Not much is going on with Dermot, so this post is about me. October 1 was roughly my one year anniversary of taking better care of myself. I was actually in a bit of funk regarding my weight at that point, so I didn't post. I had gained a couple of pounds in one week, and I just wasn't happy with things. But I have gotten over that hump. So as of this morning, I have lost 84 pounds! I have had to go from 30 minutes to 45 minutes of working out and I'm eating less. That whole deal with portion sizes really does matter. I have gone from a 3X to a L - sometimes a M. These are still plus sizes and my main goal is to get into misses clothing sizes. I would love to be able to walk into any store and find clothes, but we'll see. My wedding band also now fits on my forefinger. In fact, I can sometimes get it over my thumb. For right now I'm just happy that my health and energy has improved. I had an EKG and I've had blood tests and they are all good. Actually, none of them were bad before because of the vegan thing, but my sugar had started to rise. The sugar is actually what scared me enough to lose weight. I'm now at that place where I lose .5 to 1 pound a week, on average, and that's hard to live with when I started out at 3-5 pounds a week. Of course, a half pound a week still means 26 pounds in a year. I just need to be satisfied with any loss.

I also went to a dermatologist for the first time in my life. I have always had skin problems. I am extremely sensitive and dry. I thought it was just the Irish thing, but I think it's even beyond that. The rosacea is what got me to go to the doctor, but he's taught me a lot about skin care. I am one of those women who never did anything for my skin. Whenever I would get in a place where I wanted to take care of my skin, I would buy products that ended up hurting me. So earlier this week I went to the doctor and he told me that I have to use moisturizer every day, and that I need to be very careful about my cleanser and moisturizers. He told me to go see the skin care center they actually had in the middle of the doctors' offices. I was there for 1.5 hours. I had been hoping to wear makeup again, but when I went to MAC and I bought a bunch of makeup last January, it ended up hurting my skin. I am that sensitive. So I spent just under 200 bucks on moisturizers, cleansers, and makeup. I hope that I am not being swindled. I never know if people are making this stuff up about it being so great for your skin, or if they just think I'll be happy because it's more expensive. So far, though, so good. It's not irritating my skin. The doctor also gave two more medications to add to the topical I was using because my face still hurts when my rosacea flares.

In work news, I just found out that I was granted a travel award from a professional society to which I belong. I'm at an institution with no reward structure. I understand why they have chosen that path, but it's hard to adjust to. As grad students, there are tons of opportunities for awards, recognition, and money. As a research professor or even a professor at a 4 year school, there's research money, recognition, and awards. There's very little out there for people who just teach. A lot of schools have students vote for their favorite teachers, but we have an all for one, one for all philosophy at my school. So, anyway, I am very excited about this award. I am not going anywhere fancy (Tarrytown, NY), but it's a conference that is entirely about teaching psychology. It should be a great place to meet other local psych professors. Hopefully I can also pick up some new tricks. This is also great for me professionally since I am still trying to get tenured. It will look nice on my resume.

Finally, a little bit of Dermot news. He's just the funniest kid ever. This morning he was jokingly mad at his daddy and he called Ethan "penisy". I guess that was an insult in his self-made language. We just laughed and laughed.

Stereotypes

2008-09-30T11:53:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about the stereotypes that we have regarding boys and girls. I have reached a point that when people at work ask me about Dermot, I just reply that he's all boy. And he really is. Ethan and I are both pretty hardcore feminists. Not in the "men are all scum" vein, but in the "gender shouldn't really be an issue other than when it comes to childbearing" vein. I have tried to raise Dermot without mentioning gender very often, and I have tried to make it clear that he can do whatever he wants. I am also a realist, and I understand that peers quite often make a bigger dent in this realm than adults do. But I want him to know that home is a safe place to try things. That being said, Dermot is really all boy. And that's fine.

As a developmental psychologist, one of the biggest things I emphasize in my classes is that both nature and nurture matter. In fact, you can't talk about one without it being tangled up with the other. Genes affect environment and environment, surprisingly, affects genes. But I also believe that when it comes to parenting, people depend a little too much on environment. Our kids are the way they are, and it's up to us to accept that. Dermot is a ball of energy. So are most kids, but Dermot is a little bit more energetic, and his energy likes to turn aggressive. I am convinced that that's his temperament. I can't change it, but I can teach him that there is a time and place. That's why I like to sign him up for physical activities. He's now in tumbling and karate.

Here are the other ways that Dermot is all boy. A lot of this stuff cracks me up. He's totally into super heroes. He decided to be Spiderman for Halloween, and he now wears the costume every day. We bought him Spiderman pajamas and he wanted to wear them last night even though they have long sleeves. He did change his mind once he got to bed and realized that it's not that time of year yet. He has a Batman mask that he was wearing a lot for a while. Apparently Spiderman has won that battle. He loves any TV show with super heroes. He likes to create new super powers. The other day he was smash man. He was also ketchup man at daycare when he was wearing his Heinz ketchup shirt. He would squeeze his waist and pretend that ketchup was coming out of his head. He's always worried about protecting me from the bad guys.

Dermot is totally into video games. I question our position on this a lot, but he really has learned a lot of puzzle solving skills from them. He quite often can figure his way out of spots that Ethan and I are still trying to figure out. His hand-eye coordination has also improved.

He adores building. He likes to tear apart and re-build his Legos. He also lives in the building section at day care. They need to make him move out of it every day so that other kids get a chance and so that he can do something else. He's very mechanical and he can already build things free-style.

He loves aliens and robots. He's also starting to get into dinosaurs. Now that we've been going to the library, we've been going pretty regularly. We found the non-fiction section in the kids' section, and Ethan brought home books on dinosaurs and fossils. Dermot is fascinated. He loves to have Ethan read things to them, and then he tells me all about it the next day. He's getting so smart. In fact, he's doing subtraction in his head. At 4 1/2. Wow. The other day I had him helping me make pancakes. I needed 4 tablespoons of baking powder. Dermot put two in and then said that he needed to put in two more. He's done it a couple of other times since, too. In the Lego Batman game, you need to collect 10 black containers per level. The other day Ethan had 8 and Dermot, out of the blue, said "Daddy needs two more". We were flabbergasted. He can't add, or at least he won't when I ask him too, but he can figure that out. I think he's going to be real big into numbers like his Mama. I took an IQ test when I was his age, and they were going to leave out the math section, but my mother told them that I could do it. I have no idea how well I did, but I do know that I was doing addition.

Speaking of gender and kids, one of my grad school friends (Hi Shenan!) has a little girl who is almost exactly one year younger than Dermot. My friend is also a feminist and is well trained in gender psychology. I have noticed in her recent pictures that her little girl is "all girl". Ballet, pink, Barbie, etc. It's funny that you can make any type of toy available to kids, and so many of them still choose the items that supposedly fit their gender. I was so not like that as a kid. I collected football cards and Hot Wheel cars. I had a ton of Barbies because my mom bought them for me, but I hated them. I wanted to play with my brother's really cool building toys and race tracks, but I wasn't allowed to. I loved to play with my friend Jeff's crash 'em up remote control cars. I was such a tomboy. It's funny to have a boy who's totally into boy stuff, and yet he's still not into the boy stuff I liked as a kid. I never liked pretending to fight or any of the violent stuff. I think I liked the building that was involved in laying out the race tracks and moving the cars. All I can say is that Dermot has been allowed to explore and choose to be who he wants to be, regardless of how non-conforming his parents might be, and he has very much chosen to be Dermot.

I should also say that he's an incredibly sweet, loving kid who adores his Mama right now. Apparently I am cuddlier than Ethan is. Dermot likes to faux-argue with me about who loves each other more. He tells me that he loves me more than anyone else could possibly love me. He also loves me so much that there are no words for the number (he got that from me). He also loves me one hundred seventy one hundred sixty four one hundred forty seven much. He loves to string together large numbers. He just cracks me up.

Also, I am really sick and it sucks. I canceled class yesterday, which I rarely do.

The Secret at the Zoo

2008-09-23T20:53:00.002-04:00

Sunday was a lovely day around here, and I wanted to do something outside that involved a little bit of friendly exercise. So I suggested we go to the zoo. Dermot had gone to the zoo over the summer on a field trip, and by the time Ethan offered to chaperon, there were no more tickets left. So Dermot had an adventure at the zoo without either of us there. He has been talking about a secret at the zoo that he wanted to share with us. He also got to see the new home for the penguins, and of course, he wanted Mama to see that too. So we set off for the zoo Sunday morning, right after they opened. We decided to start off looking for the secret. Dermot insisted that it was by the prairie dog display. You would think that he would like the prairie dog display since you can go inside and pretend to be a prairie dog, but Dermot is hit or miss with it. On the way to the prairie dog display, we passed by the penguins. So Dermot thought it would be okay if we checked them out. The secret could wait until later. The new penguin exhibit is cleaner, brighter, and larger than the old one. They seemed pretty happy, but they weren't doing too much. A zoo worker said they were probably waiting for their food.

After the penguin we ventured off to look for the secret. Apparently it was a real animal that looked like a deer. We didn't see it by the prairie dogs, but we were near the small play ground. So Dermot climbed up and went down the slide exactly once. I hate to complain about other parents, but this drives me crazy. There was one small entry way into the equipment, and all of the parents were standing right in front of it to watch their kids. I had to tell Dermot to go ahead and push his way in since the adults should have known better. I have seen this happen at other places,but this was the most crowded in the smallest place I have ever seen it. Each kid had two to three family members blocking the way. Just not smart.

After the playground, Dermot decided to give up on the hunt for the secret for now. So we went to the train. None of us had been on this train before. I have taken Dermot to a different zoo train twice, but this train was wider and faster. It didn't go through the zoo, though. We saw the reservoir nearby. It was cooling, though, since we were moving and there was a breeze. I wonder if it would cool you off in the summer or if it would just be more hot air. Then we went to the reptile house. Dermot loves the reptile house. We saw bats and snakes. I love to look at the pretty poison dart frogs. Their colors are just so vibrant. Dermot started asking about the gift shop since it was next door, but we convinced to look around.

I think that this was the most attention Dermot ever spent on the zoo. We saw the cougars, the alligator, the wolves, and then we kept walking. Eventually we came across the "secret". Apparently Dermot was really taken by the male Elk. He's huge and so are his antlers. I didn't see any elk friends for him, though, and that makes me sad. He was hanging with some bison, but that's just not the same. Maybe the lady elk were hiding from the sun or something. After all that we did make it to the gift store, and Dermot added a small frog to his "aminal" collection. I also left with a stuffed platypus, which means that Dermot has a stuffed platypus. I have wanted one of those since I was a kid. My mom had bought a set of books and accompanying cassettes for me when I was a kid. All of the books had similar titles, but they were about different animals. My favorite was "A Platypus is a platypus". I read that over and over. In fact, my mother has kept the set. I'm supposed to get it some day.

So, all in all, Sunday was a lovely family day at the zoo full of adventure and tracking down secrets.

Rosacea

2008-09-18T10:55:00.003-04:00

I don't know if I have mentioned on here that I was diagnosed with rosacea over the summer. I went to the dermatologist to see what was going on with my face. My mother has it, and I tend to get everything that she gets, which she hates to hear. Anyway, I've been treating it since June. I have to wash my face every night and then put Microgel on on it. I've been doing this for a while and I am not getting any relief. It was okay for a while, but now that I'm working out for 40 minutes a day, it has been killing me. There are several ways to experience rosacea, and I have the painful one. My mom has the embarrassing form (pimples after 40), but my cheeks flush, turn really red, are dry and patchy and hurt. It feels like I constantly have real bad wind burn on my cheeks. It reminds me of my Chicago winters without a scarf, except that wind burn goes away. This doesn't. I am really sensitive to changing temperatures because of it, and that's probably made worse by my thyroid condition. Last night I was so hot and uncomfortable. As soon as my cheeks were flaring up and I was hot, I took my temperature. It was 99.2 which is nothing for most people, but that does mean mine was elevated. I get really low grade fever all the times just from being sensitive to heat. It's very strange. My face is just killing me right now (I know it's killing you, too, huh. Rim shot please). The worst thing is I don't think there's anything the doctor can do. I've read about much worse cases online, and some people are so sensitive that they can't leave their home because they always need to be in a room that is the exact right temperature for them. I don't think this will get worse, but I will need to ask my doctor about that in October when I go back.

In happier news I am wearing a skirt that I bought 3 months ago without trying it on. When I got it home, it was too small. Today I am wearing it and it is quite comfortable.

I know, I know

2008-09-16T20:59:00.003-04:00

So I am already starting the new school year by not blogging for over an entire week. Excuses, excuses, but I got nailed by my two online classes. So much responding to do! Actually a lot of the work was organizing for the future. So that should free up my schedule a little in the future. I actually went in today on my "prep day" - which is supposed to mean a "non-work" day. Ha! But I did get a lot accomplished before our all faculty and administrator meeting.

Anyway, the good news is that while I didn't write last week, nothing really happened. Things went along fairly smoothly. I have a new attitude toward Dermot and it's helping me a lot I finally realized that I wasn't really enjoying him. While my job is to shape him into a productive member of adult society, it is also my job to let him be a kid and to understand his weaknesses. So he's getting away with a little bit more, but he's hearing about why it's bad in the hope that eventually he'll get it, and I'm enjoying his company more. It's amazing what attitude can do for you.

This weekend was actually unremarkable, and again, that's a good thing. Yeah! I actually spent 2.5 hours at the mall. I have hit a point where very few of my clothes fit me again. So I have ordered a bunch of basics online, but I wanted to try some things on too. The weird thing is that now that I have lost all of this weight, my body shape has changed. Styles that used to look good on me, now look kind of strange. I have hit the point where I actually need clothes that are more fitted than I am used to. I'm used to wearing long t-shirt like dresses. Now they look like I'm wearing sacks. So a lot of what I tried on just didn't work. The other thing is that hopefully I'll be going down more sizes, so I didn't want to buy anything that I didn't really like since hopefully they won't be around for very long.

I ended up with two pairs of socks, a skirt, and a dress. I had gotten two skirts the day before at a different store. I'm desperate for tops, but that's mostly what I ordered online. Dermot actually ended up with more stuff than I did, and I went alone. I bought him a new winter coat, and several long sleeved shirts (Spiderman, Cars, Halloween, and some plain striped shirts). I also bought him Ben 10 shoes, but he has decided that he hates them. He would rather wear his old Transformer shoes with the holes that are starting to appear. He says the new shoes feel funny. Yeah, they feel new. I also bought myself a new watch. I have needed a new watch forever. I bought one a couple of years ago at Target and it was always too big. I took out all the links that I could and it still kept spinning around on my wrist. So I went to the Swatch store and I bought a watch. Remember when Swatches were 20-25 bucks and that seemed a lot for a plastic watch? Those watches are now 50 bucks or more. My watch is metal and I really like it. I have a hard time finding silver watches that are petite enough for my taste.

TMI ALERT!!!
Here's the crazy thing. My bra band has shrunk a lot (eight digits), but my cup has not changed at all. My chest is killing me. My back hurts from my breasts even more now than it used to. I guess since I had extra weight all around it didn't all fall on my back. Now that there's less weight everywhere, but my breasts, they are really giving it to my back. We'll see what happens as I, hopefully, lose more weight.

Quick Weight Update

2008-09-07T10:18:00.004-04:00

So the plateau is over. Yeah for that. As of this morning I have lost 80 pounds. That is twice Dermot. That means that before I lost the weight it was as if I had a Dermot in my right arm and a Dermot in my left arm. I am carrying that much less weight right now. Wow. That's a lot. The funny thing is that food is much simpler now. I eat a lot of potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, brown rice, carrots, broccoli, and salad with oatmeal for breakfast. Oh and an apple, orange, or pineapple thrown in for some sugar. I have also started working out again. I stopped riding the bike during the summer because my life had no structure and it just didn't happen. Now that school's back on I have a schedule and I rode the bike every day last week (M-F at least). I also find it easier to eat right when school's in session because I don't have any food at my office and I can only eat what I bring with me for lunch (and dinner on Thursdays).

Six Days

2008-09-02T21:44:00.000-04:00

Last week I started fretting about having Dermot home with us for SIX WHOLE DAYS. I know the SAHMs are laughing at me, but really, this is different for us. Dermot's daycare was closed W-F, and then we had the three day weekend. I arranged my schedule so that I didn't have to be at school during any of that time, but I still asked Ethan to take one day off of work to give me a break. So I took Wednesday and Friday, Ethan took Thursday and we obviously shared the three day weekend. What did we do? Not much, but that was okay. Wednesday I let Dermot call the shots and he didn't want to do anything but play at home. Fine. So be it. Thursday Ethan and Dermot dropped me off at the train station while I had Mama's day in the big city. They went back to Magiquest and then they went to get cupcakes. Friday I was working on some big plans, but again, Dermot didn't really want to do anything. I finally convinced him to let me walk him to the library. Can you believe that none of us had been to the library yet and we've lived here two years? I finally got a library card. Dermot got several books and two DVDs. He still declared the place boring. What a grumpy kid. I think that he doesn't get the point since most of the books are lined up with just the spine facing out. Since Dermot can't read, he sees a bunch of nothing. I finally drew his eye to the carousels where he could see the book fronts. That helped a little bit. We got some Clifford, a David Shannon book, and some other series I don't remember. Saturday and Monday we did nothing, but Sunday we finally made a trip to the Liberty Science Center. It just reopened last year. It's supposed to be a hands-on science museum, but I think that it's more for older kids. It involved more reading than the Franklin requires. They were really selling the fact that it made the Parents.com top ten list of science museums. We were both shocked that it beat the Franklin in Philly. Both of us prefer that museum. Dermot did get to help during a presentation of "Be a surgeon". He was a circulating nurse and he got to help the surgeon with his gloves, mask, hair net, etc. Dermot loves being in front. He still has the gloves and he likes to pretend that he's doing experiments. At the gift store we bought the coolest things. Dermot got an E Coli virus and I got a mono virus. How cool are these stuffed animal microbes? I am dying for a stuffed brain cell for school.

So we all survived the weekend. Dermot was a little grumpy during a couple of mornings, but for the most part he was very pleasant. We've been "turning up the heat" and dishing out punishment more often than we used to, and I think that's helping, it's just a slow process. I think that Dermot figured that he didn't get in trouble way more often than he did get in trouble and that it was worth the risk to him. So we've had to ramp up punishment quicker than we used to. He used to get a few talkings to, then things taken away and then time out - which is the most feared at our house. Now we try to remember to go through the steps quicker. It would be so much easier if he would just listen to us and follow our directions. Don't all parents think that?

News

2008-08-29T18:55:00.004-04:00

It's that time of year where I start freaking out because I have no human contact besides Ethan and Dermot. When I'm not at work, I don't talk to anyone other than my two men. It drives me crazy. I don't have any friends here in New Jersey and my friends who I could talk to on the phone don't have schedules that mesh with mine. ARGH. So I'm going to talk to y'all about current events.

Stupid me fell asleep and missed Obama's speech last night. I read it this morning and watched a video of it, but still, I would have liked to have seen it in the moment. I was always going to vote for Obama. Please, no one with my views of the world could ever vote for McCain, but I had been hoping for someone more progressive and more left wing. But after his speech last night where he addressed not only the war, the economy, health care, and energy - which are obviously huge issues today, but he also addressed poverty, gay rights, racism, sexism, and just human decency. That's the Democratic Party I have always felt affiliated with. Not just the party that wants to win by trashing the Republicans. I believe that government should take care of people, but we should care about each other too. That's always been the force behind my votes. Which candidate will do the most for the most people, especially the least of us. Anyway, go Obama.

McCain's VP pick. What? I have only heard of this woman on the celebrity baby blog. I kid you not. In March she had her fifth child who has Down's syndrome. Personally, and I really do hate judging other mothers and this is going to come across like that, but personally, I couldn't take the time away from my family right now. Campaigning is like two full time jobs. You are away from home all of the time. Your work takes place during the day meeting funding people, during meals with lobbyists, and at night giving speeches. You have no time for yourself, much less an infant. I, of course, also think it's strange to bitch about Obama's lack of experience and then to pick someone with even less experience. Also, just a note to John McCain, this does not make you a friend to women if that was the point. You are still an anti-woman candidate. You don't think that women should have the right to choose, the right to fight for equal pay, or the right to have birth control pills covered by insurance when Viagra is.

In goofier news, David Duchovny is being treated for sex addiction. What? That's just crazy. His poor two kids. What does his wife tell them? And why now? Weird stuff.

Finally, here's something totally unrelated. I have been meaning to ask people this for a long time. To any of my readers who have cats. Have you tried any of the automatic cleaning litter boxes? They sound dreamy to me, but when I read the reviews online people seem unhappy. I can't tell if the litter boxes are not any good or if they just aren't as good as people want them to be. If they don't live up to high expectations, but they are still noticeably better than scooping out the box everyday, buying one would still be worth my time.

Edited to Add: Dermot while on the toilet: My pee is so hot my penis is going to die. For those of you who know him, is this child Ethan's son or what?

Cooking Mama

2008-08-25T17:36:00.002-04:00

So I have been eating better (more whole foods - salads, potatoes, and fruit) which entails more complex cooking. The good thing is that I have moved off of my plateau (I hope). So since school starts next week, I am enjoying having time to cook. Today I made curried carrot soup, savory lentils (tomato paste, soy sauce, dijon mustard, and balsamic vinegar), fat free vegan mac and cheeze (for Dermot), broccoli, and brown rice. I also made up more of my salad dressing (soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, water, ginger, and garlic). Boy does my back hurt and am I hot. We'll see if I can keep this up once school starts.

My Sensitive Little Man

2008-08-22T18:37:00.003-04:00

We just got the rosters for Dermot's daycare for this upcoming school year. It turns out that his girlfriend (best friend) is moving up to the kindergarten at his daycare. I just told Dermot and he got a few tears in his eyes. Poor kid. Fortunately, she'll still be at his daycare center, but he'll only get to see her when they play outside, which is obviously reduced a great deal during the winter months. Poor kid. His class also now has very few girls, and he loves girls, as he tell us. It looks like 3 out of 13 for the regular kids and two more who are on drop in basis. I don't know who Dermot is going to hang out with. His other male best friend got moved to the other preschool class at the beginning of summer. Everyone seems to love Dermot. So he'll be okay, but I would like it if he didn't have to "settle" for a best friend. That didn't come out right, but I know what I mean.

Boston

2008-08-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

So I am back from a useful trip to the American Psychological Association annual convention. It was in Boston and I just love Boston. I went to a conference there last year and I was able to stay in the same neighborhood. This way I didn't have to figure anything out. I stayed in the Back Bay area if anyone out there knows Boston. I got to go to Newberry comics and buy myself some music (Wire, White Stripes, Modest Mouse, and PIL) and I also found Dermot a light up crystal skull key chain from the latest Indiana Jones movie. I took the "T" out to Brookline and ate at an all vegan Thai restaurant called My Thai. YUM! I had Malaysian food, Thai again, stir fry, and Ethiopian. I also ate a lot of Whole Foods bakery items and Wheelers vegan ice cream. Yum. I gained 6 pounds in 4 days, but since I have lost 4 of those pounds, I am pretty sure that most of it was water. My last night I wandered around the Prudential Center and found Dermot a Boston pirate t-shirt and a stuffed lobster. He doesn't like the shirt (although he has worn it already), but he does like the lobster. Apparently his water animal collection is growing. He keeps carrying around a purple dolphin that I won out of a crane machine. It was so nice to be able to walk around see the city without having to watch over a little one. I wish that I had had company, but none of my friends attended this conference. I also enjoyed sleeping alone for a change, although I didn't sleep well - ironic, huh?

One of the crazy things that I learn from these trips is that I really need a break from my family, and that means nothing against them. I'm one of those crazy extraverts who also has real severe introvert tendencies. I love to be alone, but if I don't see people on a regular basis (daily), I go nuts. It was really nice to be away from Dermot because I came back refreshed and my patience meter was refilled. I'm spoiled because I do get to get away at least once a year and I know he's in great hands with Ethan. Most moms don't get a decent get away from their kids. In fact, I bet there are some moms who don't really want one. But that's not me. Dermot can be such a hard child raise - he pushes every button - that I think it's mentally healthy to get a break. It really does make me a better mother when I return. What makes me sad is that I already don't see Dermot during the day and I need a break. Imagine if I was home with him all day.

APA was good for me professionally too. I don't talk about work much on this blog because it's not the safest thing to have a lot of that information floating around in cyberspace - especially since I don't have tenure. But, APA was a good experience. They have a special group set up just for psychology professors at community colleges. I have desperately been trying to find colleagues who are dealing with my same situations. I work with two other professors, but I wanted to talk to people at other campuses. I met a bunch of people and I probably talked their ears off, but I really needed to know what's going on at other campuses. Many of the other faculty also feel isolated and we're trying to get together and see what's going on across the country. I only hear about certain amazing programs that are doing things we never can do, but that's because they are the schools that get the press. They also seem to have a huge amount of students - which means more resources. My school is fairly small for being a community college We are growing, but we'll never serve 80,000 students like some of these schools do. I also went to some good talks about teaching issues that come up in Intro psych. It got me thinking about some things I may want to do in my own classrooms. It has really got me in the mood to think about school starting. I'm not ready for school to start - mentally, that is. I'm actually prepared in every other way. But at least my thoughts are going toward how and what I should be teaching and doing in the classroom.

Philly, Pirates, and the Please Touch

2008-08-12T15:57:00.000-04:00

Boy, I should have blogged about this long ago. I think that I have forgotten many of the details. We went to Philadelphia two weekends ago to see the Real Pirates exhibit at the Franklin. We got free tickets from the Marriott where we stayed for the Star Wars exhibit in order to make up for their screw up with those tickets. Ethan took a day off and we left Friday morning.

Dermot has been taking sack lunches to school for his field trips and he loves them. So we decided to take our lunches with us so that we could check into the hotel, eat lunch and then head right out to the Please Touch Museum. I think for the first time Dermot is finally realizing that he's a little bit beyond the Please Touch Museum. It says that it's for kids up to 7, but a lot of the stuff is just not interesting to Dermot. He ran around and did everything for about five minutes each before he finally settled into the building exhibit. I'm interested to see how much they change things when they move. I think the museum seems a little stale and hopefully they will do some crazy things in a new, bigger space. After about an hour there we went just a few blocks to the Academy of Natural Sciences. We had been there before, but Dermot has had a lesson on dinosaurs in his summer science class. So we thought that this time he might be a little bit more into it. He really liked the dinosaurs, but the stuffed, real looking animals freaked him out. I'm with him on that. That's why I hated the Field Museum in Chicago as a kid. Boring and creepy to me. We went to the Inside Out or whatever which is their kids' section. It was staffed by 4 teenagers who spent the whole time in a corner talking to each other. Nothing was going on and none of the stuff was stocked. Finally one guy left his buddies and pulled out a skink to show the kids. Dermot wanted nothing to do with that. So we convinced him to go downstairs and see the real animals. That was fairly unimpressive because there were so few animals and they were just in like the back area of a vet's office. We did see Maurice a crested duck who looked like he was wearing a toupee. Dermot liked that guy. He also liked the real bees building a hive inside of glass in the kids' section. That creeped me out a little bit.

Apparently we just missed Nicole and her boys. We probably got there around 2:30. This trip came up so quickly, that I didn't plan anything. I know that I should have called the Philly contingent of our little piece of the blogosphere, but boy, was I unprepared. I actually let Ethan come up with everything. I was almost ready to cancel the trip, but Dermot was too excited.

Saturday we went to the Franklin Institute early in order to see the real Pirates exhibit. Dermot walked through it pretty quickly and I thought that he wasn't really interested, but he soaked it all in. He wanted tons of stuff at the store, and we got him a treasure chest, a pirate's hat, and some doubloons. Then he kept talking about everything he saw. I guess when you can't read, there's only so much looking you need to do at stuff in order to take it all in.

Then all hell broke loose. We told Dermot that we wanted to check out the rest of the museum. The Franklin is awesome. It's Philly's hands-on science museum. I couldn't get enough of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry when I was a kid and this was similar. Dermot didn't want to do any of it. He wanted to go back to the hotel room and watch TV. We told him, "no way". There was no way I was going to pay for a hotel for him to do what he can do at home, plus this museum was fun. So after much crying and whining, we convinced him to try one room. The first room was all about sports. Dermot got to throw balls, spin around, etc. At one point - my last straw - Dermot got mad about not being able to throw as well as he wanted to. He ended up calling me a son of a bitch, and boy, was I pissed at him. I threw my purse down and ran down to him. I then picked him up and told him he was in time out. So he had to suffer through that in public. Then I told him that he had been misbehaving all weekend, and that I wasn't going to be out in public with a kid acting like that. I told him that not only were we going to leave the museum, but we were going to check out and go home. I would have stuck to that too, but Ethan didn't want to go. He gave Dermot one more chance. So then we continued to drag Dermot through the museum. After each exhibit he said he wanted to go to the hotel. Then we said that he should try one more. "Let's try the trains". Then, "let's try the planes." Eventually we saw the entire museum. In fact, he walked through the giant heart twice. He first went with Ethan and then he had to show me too. And Nicole, you were right. It's a tight fit at one point. By the time we were done, we had been there for 2.5 hours and Dermot declared the Franklin better than the Please Touch Museum - which is high praise indeed. I don't even remember what happened next. I know that we went back to the hotel and ordered delivery from Singapore, a vegan Chinese restaurant where we had dinner the night before. I also made Dermot some spaghetti with red sauce. That's the beauty of having a suite. We went out for some pretty average, but nearby, Indian food that night.

The next day we went to Ethan's parents' house and Dermot was much better. I think that he might have been nuts in Philly because it was one step in the way to seeing his grandparents. I bet he would have been better if we hadn't even mentioned going to see Nana and Pop Pop. Also, Dermot has been tired lately and as soon as he's tired he's a mess. I just can't get this kid to sleep enough. He got up at 5:00 this morning after finally falling asleep around 9:00 last night. I can not convince him that sleep is necessary for your brain, for growing, and to make you feel happy. He does not see the link between behavior, emotion, and sleeplessness. I have told him that sleep is so important that I teach about it to my students in my psych class, but that didn't do much either. Four-year-olds do not "get" the whole professor/teaching thing.

I'm off to Boston for the American Psychological Association meeting starting tomorrow. I'm so excited to see Boston again and there are tons of presentations on teaching psychology courses at the college level. There are even two days of programming just for community college professors. So hopefully I can network a little bit too. See you all when I get back.

Daddy's Birthday

2008-08-06T12:02:00.001-04:00

So the 30th was Ethan's birthday. We got a new LCD/HD TV about a month ago, and that was supposed to be Ethan's birthday present, but I wanted to do something else. So I got him the Boom Blox game for Wii. Dermot was mad that I didn't get a game that Dermot wanted like Wall-E or Kung-Fu Panda. Of course, now that he has played it, he likes it as much as Ethan does. I also bought cupcakes at our newly found all vegan cupcake place - Sweet Avenue. In fact the boys are going there today after Dermot's field trip which Ethan is chaperoning. I just didn't have the time to make a homemade cake, which is tradition. Dermot's been requesting a full fat birthday cake like I made for his 3rd birthday - I swear the memory on this kid. I need to do it, but I am just so busy getting ready for school.

I also bought cards for Ethan. I got him a mushy one from me, but I also got him a funny card. I found the weirdest card. The outside is about all the things that husbands usually do around the house and the inside was about things husbands do in the bedroom - focusing on role play. One of the scenarios was that my husband is so sexy he is even hot when pretending to be a chemistry professor. I just had to buy it. Ethan's not a professor anymore, but a chemist isn't exactly seen as sexy in our culture either. Dermot's card involved a lot of fart jokes, since that's where Dermot's humor is these days. Both Ethan and Dermot thought it was funny.

The nice part was that since I went on a field trip with Dermot that day, Ethan went to work really early so that he could come home early. The three of us had a really nice time. Ethan and I ordered delivery from our vegan Chinese restaurant, did gifts, and had cupcakes. It was a really nice time, and that isn't often true with holidays around here - especially if they aren't focused around Dermot.

So that was the substance of the day, but I want to write about Ethan. I don't mention him much in here as a husband. I mostly write about him as a father because that seems to be the focus of this blog lately. I always love other person's birthdays because I see it as a time to make a big deal about the fact that they are alive. Like, Yeah you are here and that makes life incredibly better. This is true for friends, not just Ethan, but obviously it is even more so for one's life partner.

Ethan's birthday always comes at a horrible time for us. School is around the corner. Now that we have Dermot we seem to be traveling or doing something to celebrate summer. It's also right before our anniversary as a couple (Aug. 3 - 10 years this year!) which we usually forget. That's why I try to make it somewhat special for him, even though I don't think he cares about his birthday that much.

Anyway, after 10 years with Ethan I realize the characteristics he has that make him such a great husband and father. He always sees the big picture. He's great at keeping the house focused. He's extremely responsible and I mean that in a good way. I can trust him like I have never trusted anyone before in my life. He makes sure that my life is easier by making sure that everything gets done - even if that involves making me do stuff I don't want to do, but need to do. But the big picture I'm talking about is making sure that we are all moving forward. Life is about family, fun, and growth. And those three things are pretty well intertwined at our house.

I hate to say this, but one of the biggest things that Ethan does for me is keep me sane. I have a history of depression and anxiety. In fact I'm still working through another round of anxiety lately. He has learned to take all of this into stride. There are times when he's strong and he won't let me use it as an excuse - which is what I need. He's also soft and lets me just get it out. He knows my history and he knows when things are creeping in and he's good at reminding that he's not like the other people who triggered some of my mental health issues and that now isn't anything like the past. Now is tremendously better. He's good at keeping me in the present.

The funny thing is that Ethan doesn't have a lot of the traditional characteristics that go on most women's "want lists". He's not romantic, he doesn't buy me lavish gifts, he doesn't send me flowers, etc. He's also known as being very opinionated and he doesn't suffer fools gladly. He has little patience for people who don't make sense to him. But my want list was always different than other people's. I wanted someone who was incredibly smart - which he is in spades. I wanted someone who is political and opinionated. In our first 6 hour phone conversation we covered gay rights, feminism, racism, the death penalty, and abortion as well as our veganism. I honestly had never met anyone who had gelled with me so much in my political beliefs, and that's still true. I wanted a skeptic and a cynic who wasn't religious. Again, I got that and more. He actually goes way beyond me in these topics. But I learn from him which is an important aspect of our relationship. We still are teaching each other things about important aspects of our lives. I think that's probably important for all couples, but I think it's especially true for academic couples.

Our biggest thing now is time. This true for almost all couples with small children, but I miss Ethan. We actually say that to each other. We hardly ever get couple time. Fortunately, we still do talk every day even with Dermot around. I want him to grow up hearing what loving adults talk about. I also want him growing up hearing our views on politics. My parents hid all of that until I started being political and than BAM there was a huge clash I never expected. Ethan and I have non-Dermot related conversations every day, and for that I am grateful. I know that some couples have trouble doing that. I just wish that we could do the stupid things like have a relaxing dinner together, see a non-child oriented movie, see a show, even just spend a day together in NYC shopping and walking around. Even more I wish just talking in bed together before we fall asleep. With Dermot's crazy bed time needs, we don't even get much alone time after he goes to bed. Of course, I also know that in a few years Dermot won't need us much. In fact in about 8 years we could theoretically leave him alone by himself and do whatever we want. We both choose to spend our time with Dermot. Every time I mention a baby sitter, Ethan is actually the one who balks. Our babies are only babies once and only for a short time. Ethan and I will have a life time together after Dermot is no longer small.

Enough rambling for now. Next post Philadelphia, pirates, and a giant heart!

MagicQuest

2008-08-04T14:05:00.000-04:00

The Friday before my parents' visit was Mama/Dermot day. I haven't had as many Fridays free to spend with him as I had hoped, but we did have time on that Friday. I had wanted to check out the Funplex for a while. As usual we got there right when they opened since I was trying to avoid the crowds. There was one camp group there, but that was about it. Dermot's face got a huge grin and his eyes were huge when he saw this place. It was huge. It has regular and mini bumper cars, video games. ticket earning games, a huge foam pit, and magiquest (which I will talk about later). Dermot wanted to go right into the huge foam pit. I had hoped this would be more fun than it was. I think it might have been better if he had been older. The climbing part was fun, but the major part of this involved shooting foam balls at other people. Dermot couldn't load some of the "weapons", and they were a little heavy for him to move and aim. The other kids in there were also about 10. So it they were a little big and "tramply" for him. They were very respectful of Dermot and his size, but they were full of energy and they were attacking each other. Dermot just seemed a little small in comparison.

Dermot wouldn't try the bumper cars - even with me driving. I have no idea why. I thought this was great to have inside. I thought that he would like the idea of driving, too, but no way. Dermot always loves the stupid games that these places have even though, he usually quits half way through and makes me play, but this time he put his quarter in a random luck type of game and he got a jackpot first time out. He won over 300 tickets with which to buy cheap, plastic crap. I don't even remember what he got. He wanted to play one of those crane games for a webkinz toy, and I let him have a couple of tries, but I could tell that the toys were wedged together. So I found a crane game that lets you try until you won. After three tries, I took over and got him a purple dolphin that he still carries around.

The big event to Dermot was Magiquest. I was told that it was 7 and up, but I knew that Dermot would like it. I bought him his own wand so that it would remember our adventure and we could go back later. I also knew that Dermot would love having a wand. Magiquest takes up about a 1/4 of this place. It was pretty big. Basically you set off on different adventures, which means that you are looking for different things. You look for things by pointing your wand at different types of things. Our first adventure was looking for a lightning rune. We had to find armor, a big warrior book, a sword, and something else. You also find money along the way. We did find that rune and we were about half way through the next adventure when Dermot gave out. He loved it, though, and he wants to go back with Ethan.

As soon as Dermot and I got home, I emailed Ethan and told him to get ready for Ren fairs and D and D in our future. Luckily, Uncle Derik has already offered to teach him D and D if that is still in Dermot's future. The friends that I made during high school were and still are into all of that stuff. I never really was, but I did it so that I could be with my friends and away from my house. Half the time, I just sat around and watched. Bleech, but with his genes Dermot is destined for geekhood, I think. Actually, he's not as socially awkward as I was. I hope that continues for him.

We just got back from Philadelphia, but I'll post about that later.

My Parents

2008-07-31T11:00:00.003-04:00

Hello everyone. I'm in super procrastination mode, and apparently that includes this blog. My parents were here last weekend, and that has slowed me down too.

Edited to add:

So I knew that I wouldn't be leaving this post up for long. I don't want this information floating around on the internet. But thanks for the comments. It seems that yes, this is not normal, and two, I should have expected that. Good things to be reminded of.

Pictures

2008-07-19T09:32:00.003-04:00

I have added some pictures of our summer adventures to Dermot's photo blog. I've been really sick, and I still am, so there's not much to report here. I have been feverish, having the chills, having a runny nose, muscle aches, sore throat, etc. Horrible stuff, but the end is finally in sight. Dermot had a really bad cold and stayed home with me on Thursday, but he's always full of energy when he's sick. The two of us were a bad combination. Sick kids with energy have no patience for sick parents with absolutely no energy.

Special Delivery

2008-07-15T13:35:00.002-04:00

Here is Dermot's latest bit of pretend play. He likes to pretend to be the UPS guy. I'm not kidding. Apparently we get too many things delivered to our house. We both get our clothes online, we just got a big shipment from Amazon that was in a bunch of separate packages, and my mom just sent him a box of stuff. So Dermot has taken the empty packages and he has written his own name on them. Then he has one of us write our own names and UPS or FedEx on the package. The he fills it up with stuff, uses masking tape to re-close the package, drops the package on the kitchen floor, knocks on the entertainment center (which is actually near the entrance to the kitchen), and then he runs away. Then we are supposed to be all excited about getting a package. We have to go get the package, open it up, and be fascinated by whatever is inside. He just loves this. He actually slept with one of his smaller packages last night. Inside is a drawing he made for me, and a note he had Ethan write that says "Dear Mama, I love you way much. I love you more than you love me." and then he signed his own name.

So this is very sweet. He loves it when I read the note out loud. He loves it that I tell him I love him too. He loves everything about the scenario, but you know what? It's really irritating after doing it 10 times in a row, and this has been going on since last week some time. I love the pretend play. I really do. I also love that he's role playing things that are part of our lives. What I don't like is that whenever we role play, Ethan and I are supposed to do whatever we are told. I know that Missuz J went through a phase with Sophie like this. It's irritating. I am trying to explain to Dermot that it's not much fun playing when you are not allowed to make any of your own choices. He doesn't like being told what to do by the other kids, and neither do we. But that message is not getting through. I even bought him a book called Bossy Bear, but the link between the book and him is not obvious to him - even when I point it out to him. It's more fun to be bossy than to think about how that affects other people - especially when you're 4.

Collecting

2008-07-09T09:56:00.000-04:00

Hello. My name is BeanSpot and I am a collector. A while ago I received an anonymous comment about the fact that we buy a lot of toys for Dermot. This is true, and I've been pondering about that topic for a while.

I grew up where we received nothing but necessities other than for holidays. That means that I only got toys and other fun things on December 15th and December 25th. That leaves 355 days of nothing. I always hated that. My parents were very generous when they did give me stuff - so I'm not complaining about that, but the timing was bad. I also had access to hand-me-downs and Dermot doesn't have that luxury. The commenter also mentioned that some parents buy toys to prove to their kids that they love them. I really don't think that's our case. I know that Dermot loves me because I take care of him, I make him feel safe, I am fascinated about absolutely every aspect of his life, and all of the other things that make us love each other that we don't have words for. When we buy toys he will say, "Thank you. I love you. You knew just what I wanted." But his emphasis isn't on the fact that he loves me because I bought him something. I get the sense that the fact that I know him well enough to get him things he really loves reinforces my love to him. He loves that I understand him, not that I spoil him.

One of the major reasons I buy Dermot toys is that I am looking for ways to stimulate his mind that do not involve watching TV or playing video games. I want him to use his hands and his brain at the same time. This has actually seemed to be working. His play has expanded greatly lately. He's doing a lot of play acting with us, legos (of course), arts and crafts, and even board games. That's what I want for him. At his age most toys are educational, whether he knows it or not.

The other, more personal reason, why I buy him so many toys is that I enjoy the toys too. So does Ethan. Ethan and I are both collectors, and we were before we met. There's not much research out there, but there does seem to be a personality type who likes to collect. Not the OCD hoarders, but people who enjoy collecting certain items. As a kid I collected piggy banks. Then I got my first job at 13 and any money that didn't go into savings went to the local record shop. I had a massive collection of music when I left home for college, and I was very much a completist for certain artists. I still am today, but my range of artists has shrunk. But anything that comes out by They Might be Giants, Lou Reed, The Stooges, Iggy Pop or Arlo Guthrie is mine. I also have a massive penguin collection that started some time in high school. My mother collects bells, thimbles, and owls, and my grandmother collected owls. It runs in my family.

Ethan is the same way for a different set of music. Ethan collected coins, baseball cards, and comics as a kid. He still has them. He is also a music collector, although he will thin out his collection every once in a while, and I just can't do that. Once we got together we started a Simpsons collection. They are the bulk of what is sitting in boxes in our basement. We have decided that most of our collecting is silly now that we have a child. So I think that we are doing our collecting through him. We have all of the Ben 10 figures, and we love looking for them. It's a great find when we get one we don't have. We have all of the Indiana Jones Lego sets (actually two are on order and a new one just came out last week). We also have all of the Star Wars legos that have come out since we've been buying them. We've been pretty good about not buying the old ones, except for Boba Fett's ship which Dermot really, really wanted. But that was a special birthday gift.

Dermot is already a collector and will say so. He loves to point out his collections. He has a ton of stuffed animals - his and mine, and he calls them his "aminal collection" (he has trouble saying animal). He has this strong urge to have Mama, Daddy, and baby versions of the animals that he has. Dermot is strongly focused on families. He has three ducks, three cardinals, who knows how many penguins (but most of them are actually mine), mama and baby bat, mama and baby collie, etc. But the main thing to me is that he does play with them. He uses them and that makes everything worth the money to me. I love to hear the stories his makes up about his toys. They are such a wonderful jumping off point for his amazing imagination. I really want to keep fostering that.

Sunshine and Rainbows

2008-06-30T15:57:00.003-04:00

Enough complaining. Today is going to be all positive stuff. I feel like I use this blog as an outlet for my whining some times since I don't have many people to talk to about parenting/family issues. Whenever Dermot tells me I'm being mean I tell him that I don't have a mean bone in my body. I'm all sunshine and rainbows. So here we go.

Thursday we took Dermot to Ethan's company picnic and we had such a blast. It was a little kids' paradise. Dermot got to see the other couple and their baby that we know. That made him happy. He saw his first magic show and he got to be the first kid called up on "stage". We made a "build-a-bear-esque" type of thing. He chose a penguin for me, and I found a superhero costume for the penguin. So now Super Penguin resides at our house. Dermot got a temporary tattoo of the batman logo. He had his face painted to look like a cat. He got to take two pony rides. He got to go on a little kid bouncy thing, and he got to climb a huge blow up slide. There were two different playgrounds. It was just non-stop. He even got to see some of his friends from daycare. We were there from 11-4 and we thought that we wouldn't stay long if it wasn't interesting. Heck, we would have stayed longer if we weren't worried about traffic. I got to talk to another mom and Ethan even got to play volleyball. A fun time was had by all. Thank you, it certainly was not cheap.

In other good news, we met with Dermot's teacher last Monday and she said that he's doing great. The meeting was even better than I had expected. After Dermot transitioned to the classroom, one teacher quit and they never replaced her. So it seemed to me that the teacher was a little overwhelmed by the number of students. But when she was talking to us about Dermot she hit every single nail right on the head. She knew him really well within 2 months. That made me very happy. There's another teacher in there right now for the summer, and an experienced teacher will be back there in the fall. The main thing that Dermot needs to work on is following directions and using more appropriate methods of dealing with anger and frustration. So we're all on the same page regarding that.

I also finally convinced Dermot to do some art at home. He has really shown no interested in Mama-lead art projects, but I bought him a big pack of water color paints. Apparently, the 7 tray I grew up with is passe. This one has 24 colors. I also bought him a new white pad. He filled it up with all of the colors and told me that he made an invisible castle. Awesome, and it's really pretty too. Then yesterday afternoon, he and Ethan made three turtles out of molding clay (mama, daddy, and baby, of course). They are almost dry. He also glued some pom poms that I had bought ages ago for this kind of stuff. Fun stuff that normal little kids (sorry big kids) should be doing. I have actually put all of the art stuff out in the open to remind him that he can do any of it that he wants. I hope this will expand his horizons.

Grumpy

2008-06-25T14:48:00.000-04:00

So today I am grumpy, hot, and starving. That's just not right. I am grumpy because I am exhausted. Dermot has been up the last two night coughing. He can sleep through it, but I can not. Although, he is more tired than normal too. I would be napping now, except I am waiting for the air conditioning guy. I noticed yesterday that our house was hot and the air conditioning had been on all day. Turns out the air is blowing, but it's not cold. Bad timing since it's supposed to be getting hot and humid again starting tomorrow. Fortunately we have two ceiling fans downstairs and the upstairs has its own central air conditioning. I am also hungry and who wants to cook when it's hot? Not me. We had veggie sushi delivered for dinner last night. So there are no left overs for me to microwave, and I have already eaten a veggie burger and oatmeal. Maybe I should just wait until dinner.

Speaking of food, Dermot had his first field trip of the summer today. The daycare is providing a sack lunch for the other kids. So I made one for Dermot. I told him that it would be like a picnic. Ethan said that Dermot was really excited that he had his own lunch bag (Dora), and that it had two ice packs in it. I sent him a veggie slice sandwich, a bag of chips, a bag of cookies, and a very vanilla silk soy milk box. I wonder if the adults will notice that his ice packs are made by Medela from when I was bringing home pumped milk? My little boy is growing up so fast lately.

Tomorrow is Ethan's company picnic and then Friday will be our first Dermot and Mama Friday of the summer. So I'll have lots of Dermot time this week, and he'll have lots to do. The picnic, besides free food, will have rides, face painting, bouncy things, and lots and lots of people. I hope that he has a good time. It's not even that far this time. It's just a little further than where I work. I haven't decided what we're going to do on Friday. I may take him to see Kung Fu Panda or I may take him to Kidnetics - an indoor gym type thing. We'll see.

Tolerance

2008-06-23T15:05:00.002-04:00

Remember how a while ago I was complaining about Dermot constantly on this blog? Lately that's going away. Here's why. I finally realized that I was extremely anxious all of the time. I thought it was Dermot's fault. I finally hit a point where I practically didn't want to be near him because I was just waiting for the next bad incident. Well it turns out the problem isn't Dermot, it's me. Once the end of school finally came around and things were less hectic, I realized that my symptoms seemed like hyperthyroidism. So I went to the doctor to get tested. I have been treated for Hashimoto's thyroiditis (a type of hypothyroidism) for years, but my dosage has been the same for about three-four years. So I thought things had finally settled down. But then I thought that maybe all of the weight loss might have affected my dose. I went to the physician's assistant and she took a TSH test, but not the other tests she should have run (T3 and T4). She called back and said everything was fine. But you can't always tell by the TSH test. So I stopped taking my medicine completely and within a week I was a different person. I have the patience for Dermot that he needs. I enjoy his company. I love his presence. That's the way it's supposed to be. Now I know that my hypothyroid symptoms will come back. I will get tired and forgetful. So I have scheduled an appointment with an endocrinologist. I have never been to one before, and I think that I really should see one. Your thyroid affects so many things. I'm sure that I still need medicine, but I need a lower dose. I am just so happy to enjoy being a mother again. It was horrible before. I was in a really, dark, dark place and Dermot doesn't deserve that.

In more upbeat news, the Beanspot house continues with our spontaneity! Ethan took Friday off and we went to the Crayola factory in Easton, PA. Dermot loved it and he got a bunch of modeling clay with the price of our admission. Since we were already in PA, we went to visit Ethan's parents. We were there from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, and we all had a pleasant time. Dermot was on pretty good behavior. He got a little out of control when his aunt and uncle came over, but that's typical. He had a big audience and bed time was approaching. Not a good mix, but he was able to be redirected for the most part. Dermot got to spend more one on one time with his grandparents too. He walked around out back with Nana and played board games with Nana and PopPop. Aunt Lianne got to read him his favorite book too (Froggy's first kiss).

Saturday we went to the park in Perkasie (by the airport for those of you from the area), and at first we were the only ones there. Dermot loves to play with us, but then another kid showed up. This kid asked Dermot how old he was and seemed pretty happy that he was older than Dermot (5 instead of 4). The two of them had a great time together for about 10 minutes, then they were trying to figure out if they climb down a difficult structure. They said, "no", but then Dermot gave it a try and did it all by himself. That made the other kid cry. It was the saddest thing. This kid's dad came over and was really good trying to work things out with him. Eventually the kid said, and this just broke my heart, "I'm older than him. I should be better than him." We've all been there. That's hard to get over when you're little. It just so happens that just recently Dermot really found confidence in his climbing and placement of his feet. He probably has more experience than this other kid because we pay for tumbling lessons for Dermot. The sweetest thing was that Dermot was really worried about this kid. He kept telling us that he was worried about his new friend, and he would ask us about the situation. I was thrilled that Dermot showed such empathy. He's been almost lacking in empathy for us. I was honestly a little worried about his lack of empathy at home. But to see him have such empathy for a stranger - especially since the kid was in mental pain, not physical pain - really showed how sensitive Dermot is.

Eventually the kid's dad convinced the kid to let him help him and he was able to do it. But I think he was still upset that he needed help and Dermot didn't need help. When we left the kid said goodbye and so did Dermot. So they ended on a good note, but that poor kid.

Also, not to say much, but RIP George Carlin. Thanks for all of the laughs.

Outcome of Plans

2008-06-19T14:25:00.003-04:00

So kindergarten graduation was beyond boring. I think that a big part of it is for the staff and not the kids. There were tons of awards given out. It went from 3-5. That's a long time for 2-6 year olds to sit around. The skits were fantastic, of course. Dermot's class did Any Time at All by the Beatles, which of course, is not just a Chase bank commercial to me. They were dressed up as Bert and Ernie and they had watches on. Every time they said "time" they pointed to their watches. Dermot followed directions really well, but he did focus on us more than his teacher a couple of times. I was impressed with how much he had memorized about the routine. His whole class did really well.

Then Saturday we went to NYC bright and early. We did take advantage of the reduced rate on the hotel, but cheap out here is not cheap anywhere else. We got 100 bucks off at the Marriott through their reward program, but it was still 255. You can not do NYC for under 300 bucks. Isn't that amazing? It makes spending 200 bucks in Philly seem like a steal. It was a really nice hotel with a really nice location, and we were on the 17th floor. So we could see the tall buildings. Dermot thought it was funny that people looked to little.

We were busy, busy, busy! We started out at the Children's museum of Manhattan, and Dermot loved it. It's the first children's museum we have been to that had an outdoor component. There was tons of water fun to be had behind the museum. They had a cool Greek Gods/Odyssey exhibit too, but it was a little old for Dermot. This museum had a lot of stuff, but I thought it seemed more literacy focused than others we have been to, and I liked that. Then we went to Blossom Cafe, which is a vegan restaurant that is right around the corner. Yummy and we even got to have shakes! Then we went to Central Park. We haven't been on the West side of the park, so we were just strolling when we hit the Diana Ross playground (I kid you not). I had read in my NYC for kids book that this is a great playground, and it was. Ethan ended up not feeling well, so we took a cab from the park to the hotel. This gave Ethan time to recover and gave Dermot some downtown. No nap (darn), but some relaxation. Dermot started getting a little crazy in the hotel room, so it was time to go back out.

So we decided to check out FAO Schwarz. We were very close to the toy store, but when we got outside it started to rain (pour), so we took another cab. I know this is blasphemy, but all three of us preferred Toys 'r' us to FAO. I guess I'm into the newfangled stuff. I like cheap, plastic toys:) FAO Schwarz was also way overpriced. They wanted 120 bucks for LEGO sets that go for 80 bucks on lego's own website. So we settled for a small lego Indiana Jones set - which cost what it was worth, and Dermot chose a stuffed grasshopper that chirps. He's really getting into stuffed animals right now. I find that funny because he was never interested in them in the least. Now he's like his mama. He likes off the beaten track, real animals. I love to talk about their habits, needs, and endangered status. It wasn't raining when we got out, so we walked to the Nintendo Store in Rockefeller Center. We didn't get to check out the Center because it was pouring again when we were done at the Nintendo store. We had to wait a while, but finally we got a cab. So then we were off to Candle Cafe where Dermot got to have his yellow rice. He loves the yellow rice restaurant. Ethan and I got to have vegan steak and potatoes - basically. It was so good. They also have a great limonade - fresh squeezed lemons, limes, and agave syrup. YUM! After that long day we went home and went to bed after some tv.

Sunday (Father's Day) we woke up and Ethan walked to a bagel place for all of us. After some dawdling we set off for a nice walk to the Central Park Zoo. We got there just in time to see them feed the penguins. This didn't really hold Dermot's attention, so we checked out the rest of the zoo. This time we got to see the Red Panda and the polar bears, who were hiding last time we were there. Then it was another cab ride back to Candle Cafe. We had made reservations to meet my friends Danny and Michael there. After catching up with them we went back home. So this time we had a wonderful Father's Day. That was my big goal after last year's horrible Father's Day and this year's horrible Mother's Day.

In other news, I decided to go back to the allergist (after 9 years) to see why my allergies are worse. So I was without medicine in NYC - bad idea. It turns out that I am now allergic to cats. Wonderful. I was tested 9 years ago and I was surprised that I was not allergic to cats. Because I was not allergic, we decided to adopt Soya and then Chana when the time was right for pets to join our family. Maybe I hadn't been exposed to cats enough to show a strong allergic reaction before. We were dog people and so were all of my friends. I knew that cats made me sick, but then when I didn't test positive for it, I figured it was just a coincidence. So now I have a 6-year-old and a 5-year-old who are absolutely part of my family. I guess we just need to be better about brushing them (shedding season is when my allergies are worse). I may also end up on shots. We'll see. For now, he put me on eye drops, nasal spray, and my beloved Zyrtec. I also found out that I no longer test as allergic to ragweed. So my shots for ragweed worked. I didn't know that. I am, however, still allergic to dust mites and mold. So the shots for them didn't do anything.

Plans

2008-06-13T11:05:00.002-04:00

What is everyone doing for Father's Day? We got an email offer for a discount rate on a NYC hotel, so off to the big city we are going. That means that all of our activities will be Dermot-centered, but that's fine. We really do enjoy seeing him take all of this in. Plus, since Dermot doesn't like restaurants very much, Mom and Dad get to enjoy the great vegan food that New York has to offer. Yum. I am also trying to see if I can arrange some time with my best friend and his partner. I never get to see Danny enough and it's fun to see him and Michael interact with Dermot.

So it looks like we're looking at the Children's Museum of Manhattan (they have a Dora and Diego exhibit going on), FAO Schwarz, Central Park, and maybe one other thing. Actually we'll be near Rockefeller Center, so we may go to the observation section at the Top of the Rock or at least stop by the Nintendo store. Dermot wants to check out the NY Fire Fighter museum, but it's so far downtown, that I think we may put that off another day.

We are also making other plans for the summer. I don't think that we're going to take an official vacation this year. I think we're just going to do a bunch of 1 or 2 day trips. This part of the country has so much to offer. We're less than a 2 hour car ride to Philly, less than an hour train ride to NYC, and NJ actually has a lot of stuff too. Dermot finally seems to be up for some more fun things, so our list is growing. I know that we'll probably be going to the Franklin Institute to see the Pirate's exhibit that Nicole just wrote about. I think that Sesame Place and the Crayola factory near Ethan's parents' house might happen this year too. Bronx Zoo looks good too. It's supposed to be as good or better than the San Diego Zoo. We'll see.

In other news, Dermot is participating in Kindergarten graduation today. I can't wait to see what they do. He doesn't tell me much except that he's dressing up as Bert. Also, he was home with us on Wednesday. The weather here was incredibly hot from Saturday through Tuesday. Then on Tuesday night horrible storms hit. We only had minor branches scattered about, but where Ethan works - only 17 minutes away - huge trees got blown over. Lots of people lost their cars, and some lost their homes. But power was out for over 100,000 people. Dermot's daycare had no power. Ethan's work did during the morning, but then it went out in the afternoon. So Ethan stayed home with Dermot while I taught my summer class, and then I came home to relieve him, but plans changed once he found out there was no power at work in the afternoon. Dermot was going a little nuts so I took him to play at the local grade school's playground. Really hot, but fun.

In weight loss news, there's absolutely nothing to talk about. I am so frustrated. I am working out half an hour a day, and it's hard. I'm really pushing myself. I'm still eating very low fat, and yet I'm not losing anything. I haven't lost weight in over 6 weeks. I've heard of plateaus, but this is ridiculous. I still have a long way to go. It's not like I'm struggling for those last 10 pounds. The really weird thing is that my body is still changing. My clothes are continuing to get larger on me, although that has slowed down lately, but it has not stopped. I know there's the whole muscle weighs more than fat thing, but how much muscle am I really putting on when all I do is ride a bike. My bottom half is getting stronger, but not the top. I'm frustrated, but I know I'm healthier. That's what I'm focusing on these days. We'll see what happens.

Short One

2008-06-06T19:46:00.002-04:00

Here's a quick Dermot story. I don't post his conversations very much, and I really should. There are just too many to remember. This morning in the car:

Dermot: I should wear these new shoes when we finally go to the beach.
Mama: Yes. That would be nice.
Dermot: Because they are SAND-als. Get it? Sand - als for the sand.
Mama: That's a great idea Dermot.

I am so happy that we are that point where language is fun and fluid. Words can mean so many things and parts of words remind him of things. So much fun.

So Ethan got home about 2 hours ago and the two boys are already probably about 15% done with the new Indiana Jones Lego game.

Vegan Kid in Daycare

2008-06-03T13:00:00.001-04:00

So I promised a post about Dermot's veganism. The main reason why there's not much to talk about is the fact that all three of us live this way, and it's a non-issue when life is the just three of us. That, unfortunately, is most of the time. For daycare we send Dermot's food and he's not allowed to eat anything else. Although, we did just create a very small list of foods he can have if his friends are having them too. I think that Dermot has also learned that, in general, Ethan and I don't buy from vendors (like at the zoo, or the carnival, or museums) so he doesn't usually ask. He will, however, ask for Twizzlers at a theater if he sees them. He also loves potato chips out of a vending machine if we see one. The weird thing to me is that Dermot hasn't really asked us why our eating is different. He knows that his friends eat meat and other animal products, and I really thought that would intrigue him since he's such a curious kid. So then a little while ago, Dermot mentioned that he was allergic to Jell-O. I told him that no one is allergic to Jell-O. We don't eat it because it contains gelatin (or the ewie in Dermot-speak). I told him that we don't eat food that hurts animals. He reiterated that he was allergic to it and that was that. He has a hard time understanding that his parents might be right and his teachers might be wrong about certain things.

So then I decided that it was time to talk to daycare about the vegan thing. In the past a few weird things have come up - like painting with marshmallows (gelatin) and they sent home an egg he had decorated for Easter. Gross, like I want that stuff in my home. As far as I am concerned my home is my sanctuary from animal products. I will not allow that stuff in here. I don't care what people eat when we're out away from my house, but here I get to feel safe and comfortable. Anyway, Ethan and I decided that it was time to write a little statement about what veganism means to us. I wanted them to know that it was more than food, because I really think they have missed the boat on that one. I have brought it up several times, but the teachers don't get it. So since Dermot has a relatively new teacher, I wrote up the following statement.

I wanted to write something about our family’s veganism because it extends beyond diet, and I don’t know if that’s been made clear among Dermot’s teachers. He’s also been bringing home some incorrect information about our food choices. I don’t know if that’s his imagination or if he’s been told wrong things. Either way I want to address this. Veganism is a way of life that affects more than our dietary choices. Not only do we not eat anything that contains animal ingredients (such as meat, dairy – including whey, casein, etc., eggs, gelatin, and honey), we don’t use anything that contains animal ingredients. For example, there is no leather, silk, or wool in our house. We also don’t use personal products that contain lanolin or animal derived glycerin. There are more things included in this, but I wanted you to understand how broad these choices are in our lives.

Basically, we have decided that if we can live our lives without exploiting animals, then we will live our lives this way. We are raising Dermot with this same value system until he’s old enough to make his own choices (probably high school). What this means to his teachers is that not only do we not want him to eat anything provided by the school, but we don’t want him doing school projects that include animal products, such as eggs, real feathers, leather, marshmallows, other kids’ foods, and other things that we are probably not aware of.

This year for Easter brought home a dyed Easter egg, and we didn’t even know what to say. Yesterday he told us that he is lunch helper for the week and that this duty includes bringing in the other kids’ food. We are not comfortable with him doing that. Finally, Dermot has been mentioning that he was told that he was allergic to non-vegan food. I do not want him growing up thinking this is true. We have been talking to him about how our family does not hurt animals and that is why we make the dietary choices that we make. He is starting to understand that, but I think it’s easier for him to think he’s allergic to certain foods. I want him to learn more about our family’s choices and I think the allergy analogy just gets in the way of that. That isn’t to say that you need to teach him any of this. I think just a simple “your parents (Mommy and Daddy) don’t want you to eat that or play with that” is all that we would request.

On a more positive note, here is a list of common foods that he can eat if provided by the center and he asks for them. Otherwise, all of his food is provided by us. It is labeled with his name, the meal the food is for, and the date. We also tell Dermot each morning what his meal and snacks are- so if he doesn’t think the food is his, it isn’t. He is also very aware of things that he eats.

OKAY FOODS

Nabisco Oreo – regular, double stuff, the golden ones, and special colored holiday ones

Ritz crackers – regular and whole wheat

Wheat thins – regular and reduced fat

Saltines – Nabisco – regular, low sodium, fat free, whole grain

Fruit by the Foot – fruit flavors

Canned fruit – as long as just fruit, water, and/or sugar

Plain potato chips – just potatoes, oil, and salt

Raw fruits and vegetables – but he doesn’t really like them

Please let us know if you have any questions, because we do not want this to be a burden, but we want everyone to be fully informed. If there is ever any doubt about something, just let us know.

I also spent some time trying to find kids' books that explain our choices. Unfortunately, most of the books focus on how hard it is to be different. Dermot's not really finding that it is hard to be different. It doesn't phase him at all. I think he likes that his meals are tailored to his tastes. The other kids are stuck with whatever is served that day. Dermot always likes what he gets. So I think he likes that. I bought him two books. My favorite is Benji Bean Sprout Doesn't Eat Meat. It's about a vegan kid and his family explains to him why they are vegan. They also take him to a farm animal sanctuary to show him how animals can live if they are not farmed. I like this aspect because we are trying to plan a trip to the Farm Sanctuary in NY some time soon. They offer a vegan B&B as well as seeing all of the rescued animals. The second one is Herb the Vegetarian Dragon. I don't like this one as much, which of course, means that it's Dermot's favorite of the two. All of the other dragons eat people except for Herb. He's also vegetarian and not vegan, which was a concern of mine. Fortunately, at this point, it's only one word I change and Dermot can't read so he doesn't know I'm changing it. The book doesn't talk about why Herb is the way he is. The main point of the story is that he somehow causes peace to happen between the people and the dragons. There are other books out there, but I have to find them online, and it's been hard getting the kind of information I want about them before I spend the money. It's not like Borders and Barnes and Noble are stocking up the veggie kids books.

So, so far so good, with raising a vegan kid. I have read horror stories online, and we haven't really had any trouble. That was true in Iowa as well as NJ. I think it's had to do with finding good daycare. Daycare is so expensive and you really do get what you pay for, but that's a whole 'nother post.

Firsts

2008-06-01T21:39:00.004-04:00

We don't get too many firsts with Dermot any more, and he had a few come his way last week. He went to his first carnival and loved it. One of our local churches was having their annual carnival and Dermot really wanted to go. So we went Friday night before Ethan went out of town. Dermot went straight for the super slide and didn't want to see anything else. After one trip with Mama and one trip with Daddy, we convinced to look around. Well that took us as far as the next ride. I can't find a good picture, but it was very slightly modeled on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Basically it was a super slide with a more interesting climb. Only Daddy went with Dermot on this ride. Eventually we convinced Dermot to check out the rest of the carnival. So we lost some money on games, and then we walked all the way to the little kid area. Here there were tons of simple games and you won a cheap prize regardless of performance. So, of course, Dermot loved this after not getting any prizes in the adult game area. Then, unfortunately, it was time to go home. Dermot really loved the carnival and wants to go to others. Wait until he finds out that the Shore has places like this all of the time. He'll be a beach bum and never want to stay at home.

Then on Saturday Dermot watched his first entire movie in a movie theater. Two years ago we took him to see Happy Feet with the understanding that as soon as he wanted to go we would be out of there. We saw about 30 minutes of Happy Feet and to this day, Dermot is convinced that we saw the whole movie. Nothing really intrigued him until the new Indiana Jones movie. So with Ethan out of town and two whole days of nothing ahead of me, I was glad to have two hours planned for me. Ethan told me that on the drive home from daycare that Dermot kept mentioning that he wanted to see the movie at the theater they drive by. So Saturday morning at 11AM Dermot, I, and a birthday party full of kids saw the new Indy adventure. I have to say that it was really nice to see a movie in a theater again. It's been ages since I've seen an entire movie in the theater. It was probably March of the Penguins when Dermot was a baby. Ethan and I took off work to go see it while Dermot was at daycare. Anyway, back to Indiana Jones. Dermot loved it. He had some trouble understanding why it was so dark and loud, but he seemed to accept my explanation that it just is. He also had trouble sitting the whole time. That's part of why I went early. I was hoping that the theater would be almost empty, and it was. So he sat on my lap, he sat on the aisle carpeting (I know), and he stood by his seat for a while. He did stay focused on the movie the whole time, however, which was certainly great progress for him.

Our third first happened today. For the first time he asked to go to a children's museum. Usually I'm dragging him to all of the educational events, even though he does enjoy them once we get there. Today out of the blue he asked where the Please Touch Museum is. I told him "far away in Philadelphia, but there are two nearby places that are like it." He's been to both a couple of times before. So I showed him pictures on the web and he got to choose. So we went to Imagine That. He actually lasted there over 2 hours. Again, that's the longest we've ever stayed at any event like that. In fact, I'm the one that brought up coming home because I was hungry. I was smart enough to bring food for him, but I forgot about me. We didn't get home until after 2, and I was starving. He had crackers to tide him over.

So now that this weekend is over, the hardest part of Ethan being gone is over. I still have the hassle of driving Dermot 20 minutes out of my way to daycare each morning and then about 45 minutes to work from there, but that's a small price to pay. It will be nice to be picking him up and being able to talk to his teachers. Dermot, not surprisingly, is not the best source of information about what goes on each day at daycare.

Memorial Day

2008-05-30T13:36:00.000-04:00

Has summer officially started now that Memorial Day has passed? The weather has finally decided to be summer like. I don't remember much about Memorial Day weekend except for Sunday. That was when we had all our events scheduled. We went to the local zoo with some friends of ours who have a ten month old. It was so hot that I got sun burned on my scalp where my part is. That was pleasant. I also ran into one of my favorite colleagues when we were done with the zoo and in the gift shop. I finally got to meet his wife and almost 2 year old little girl. What a strange coincidence. Dermot added to his zoo animal collection with a stuffed bat.

After the zoo our friends came back to our house to break out the grill for summer '08. The men went out and bought tons of veggies. Ethan had even made homemade seitan the day before. So we had a feast. We had broccoli and carrots (my personal favorites), asparagus, small tomatoes, the seitan, and corn on the cob. I had also made a fat free chocolate cake that tastes really good. Most of my fat free desserts are not exactly company material, but this one is.

It was fun being around a baby again. Landon has started crawling, and is that kid fast. I don't remember Dermot ever being a fast crawler. Landon was also already pulling himself up and cruising from our ottoman to our couch. Dermot had some trouble remembering that Landon was so tiny. He also had some trouble realizing that he had to watch his step really carefully because you never know where Landon may end up once he starts moving. Landon had a great time with some of Dermot's old toys. In fact his parents went out the next day to buy Landon some older baby toys and they were inspired by what Landon liked at our house.

All I remember about Memorial Day is that we accomplished nothing. Dermot threw a big fit early in the day and that put a negative mood over the whole day. We did play outside in little bits to try to keep him happy, but even that didn't really help. That night he actually told me that he had only been a little bit bad. So I asked him what he did that was bad. He said that he broke a new toy that Daddy had bought for him. I said, "yes, and what else did you do?" Finally, he remembered that he had hurt me. So I told him that even though he only did two bad things, they were really bad. I told him that he needs to remember that these are bad and try not to do them again. He has a habit of breaking plastic toys. He gets mad and then throws them. Dermot has absolutely no anger/frustration skills. Actually, he is getting a little better, but if he gets really mad, he's throwing things. Boy do I have no patience for that. Also, earlier in the day he threw a baseball hat at me. The hard brim had nailed me right between the eyes. Dermot could have broken my glasses. So he got a time out for that and he was grumpy for the rest of the day. Sigh.

I do want to point out, however, that Dermot has been a really good, sweet kid since we all went back to work/school. Ethan is leaving for a business trip tomorrow and I am not looking forward to being a single parent this week. He'll be gone from Saturday morning until Friday afternoon. Oh boy.

Since Ethan is going to be gone all week and Dermot will want my undivided attention, I am spending the day cooking ahead for the week. I just made a big batch of rice in our fantastic rice cooker. I am also cooking a new recipe I made last week which is red lentil soup. I found it at the New York Times of all places, but it's simple and good: onions, garlic, broth, water, red lentils, carrots, lemon juice, chili powder, salt, cumin, and tomato paste. Yum. I made it fat free and it was so good. Later I'm going to make tofu burgers. I may also make savory lentils. We'll see how much energy I have as the day goes by. I've got laundry to do too. So much for having Friday's off, huh? Actually I should be writing my summer class's first exam, but I think not.

Speaking of summer school, I only have 6 students. Wow. I've never taught a class that small. In fact since this is Intro to Psychology, I'm used to teaching large lectures. Although, large at my current school is only 50. That still makes it hard to do some demonstrations and group discussions. So I'm trying to come up with new things for this summer class. Hopefully, some things will work and I can try to incorporate them into my bigger classes. We'll see. These students already seem miserable. I hope that doesn't stay the case. Of course, two of them have failed this course with me before. So they probably are miserable. Only one is from a four year school is "slumming" at the community college while he's home on break.

Next week I'll try to remember to blog about Dermot and veganism. I haven't addressed raising a vegan kid much in this blog because there's not much to write about, but that's been changing a little bit.

Pictures

2008-05-22T10:33:00.001-04:00

I just added a bunch of pictures to Dermot's photo website. There are pictures from his trip to my parents' house, Philly, and NYC.

Again, Again

2008-05-21T21:01:00.002-04:00

This time I am not going to blame work and busy-ness for my lack of posting. I am actually processing a lot of things about parenting, discipline, "spirited child", and the role of co-parenting in our lives. Unfortunately I don't feel that I can blog about all of this "stuff". I am censoring myself because many of Ethan's family members read this blog, and I don't want them to read stuff that I may not actually mean, but that I would be writing about in order to process for myself. I'm sorry to be so vague, but that' all I really feel comfortable saying at this point.

A lot of this started around Mother's Day. Mother's Day was awful at my house. Tears, not talking, and not eating were involved on my part. That's all I'm going to say. I kept reading all these wonderful blog posts about how privileged other moms feel to have their children and to be creating their lovely families, and I just did not see my reality reflected. That's really been the catalyst for a lot of my thinking lately. I'm trying to figure out if 4 year olds are hard to raise, or if Dermot is especially hard to raise, or if it's just that Ethan and I don't know how to be the best parents for Dermot. Anyway, enough on that subject and on to good stuff.

We took a three day weekend at the BeanSpot house and we accomplished quite a lot. Saturday we took Dermot to the New Jersey Children's Museum in Paramus, and we had a lot of fun. As usual, Dermot didn't want to go, and he was more interested in the gift shop, but once he bought his first water snake, his interest was recaptured by the rest of the museum. That night I got the Mother's Day dinner I was supposed to have at our favorite Japanese restaurant. We had a really wonderful day. Sunday, I came down with a very fast and short cold. So the boys went to the park, and I took a 3 hour nap.

Monday was the big event. We had planned on taking Dermot to the ocean and the beach (the shore in New Jersey speak), but the weather was too windy, cold, and just plain crappy. So we changed plans to take Dermot to Manhattan for the first time. What a wonderful time we had. Dermot took his first train and subway to and in the city. We started out at the Central Park Zoo, which he loved. It had penguins (chinstrap and gentoos - cold living penguins - not just the usual jackass (African) penguins), snow monkeys, sea lions, and bats. It's a small zoo, so it's easy to see everything. They also have a small children's zoo. Dermot wasn't interested in the animals there, other than the bunnies, but he loved the hands on stuff. He got to climb in a rope spider's web, pose a bunny, and pretend he was hatching out of a turtle egg. Then we took a taxi to an all vegan restaurant. Dermot is fascinated with restaurants that serve no "ewie" (ooey? I don't know how you would spell it). He has asked to go back every day since, and this is a kid who hates restaurants. All he had was yellow rice, baked french fries, and soy ice cream, but that was apparently enough. Mom and Dad had a feast and we will gladly take him back. Then another taxi to the big Toys 'R' Us in Times Square. Dermot was so thrilled. They had a big Star Wars section and a big Lego section. He got two more Lego toys - in the secret agent line, which hasn't been released in some places yet, an R2-D2 figure, a Snow White pez dispenser, and some other candy. I introduced him to his first candy necklace and a unicorn pop. I was hoping for an astro pop. I loved those, but they didn't have them. Then it was a quick walk to Penn Station and back home before we had to pay extra for using the train during rush hour. It's hard to get a whole lot accomplished with a preschooler in Manhattan when you are avoiding rush hour, but it was wonderful. This also means that we have a ton of exploring left to do. NYC is amazing for kids. I have a whole book of things to do with him, and it will only get better as he gets older. He was amazingly well behaved on our trip. He followed directions and he never left our sides. He was really ready for his big trip. He was even tuckered out. He fell asleep on the taxi ride to TRU and he fell asleep on the train back home.

A ton is going on work wise right now, and most of it is exciting. I am on a search committee trying to hire a new professor, and we had six interviews today. Wow. That's a long day. Tomorrow is graduation. So few of our students graduate - and that is true of most community colleges - that it's such a joy to see those who get there. My program graduates either the most or second most students each year, and a lot of our students go on to four year schools. It's so nice to see students who are either the first in the family to go to college and get a degree or to see people who are returning to school to get their degree, and even to see the "traditional" students complete their first higher educational goal. Tomorrow is all about them and that makes it very special. We also have an all faculty dinner before graduation where we seem to all let our hair down. Last year, we all had a blast. I hope tomorrow is just as fun.

Sorry I Left You Hanging

2008-05-06T12:59:00.002-04:00

Work, Work, Work. Oh interweb how I have missed ye. Finals start tomorrow and there is always so much to do before they start. Anyway, here's a report on our trip to Philadelphia. Before I go into the obnoxious details, I want to start off with the good stuff. First, Dermot was really well behaved. We had worked on him all week, and he really pulled it off. I feel like I complain about him a lot here, and deservedly so, but he really was wonderful for the most part. Okay, here's the obnoxious part. We had made a reservation at a hotel that was supposed to have package deals for the Star Wars exhibit. Through them we could get VIP tickets, which meant that we could go at any time on a certain day and we wouldn't have to wait in line. I called three different times to confirm that we could get these tickets. So of course, once we show up they tell us they have no tickets. I don't want to go into the whole story, but the hotel never came through for us. So we ended up being able to get regular tickets for Saturday night at 6:30 instead of hoping to go Sunday morning at 9 when they opened. We waited in line for about half an hour and the place was packed. Dermot only stayed there for about 25 minutes before he wanted to go. We had also hoped to pay extra to sit in the Millennium Falcon cockpit, but by the time we go to the front of the line there was a 2 hour wait and the museum was closing in 2 hours. So Dermot keeps talking about how he didn't get to see the Millennium Falcon. I have written a letter to the hotel and the corporate office of the hotel, but I haven't sent them out yet. Maybe tomorrow. Ethan and I were just furious. How dare they crush a little 4-year-old boy's dreams?

Before the Star Wars event, we made it to the Please Touch Museum for about an hour, and the Natural Sciences Museum (or whatever it's officially called). There Dermot got to see his first dinosaur skeleton and he got to dig out fake fossils in a realistic dig. Cool stuff. We bought tickets to see their butterfly display, but Dermot was way too freaked out to be among real butterflies. I think he was afraid they would swarm him or something. He has a new found fear/disgust of bugs that he picked up at preschool when insects was the weekly topic. They also had a display about the poles, which focused on polar bears and, of course, PENGUINS! So went there mainly for Mama. They made a big deal about the fact that the two live nowhere near each other and they never get to interact, which is my biggest complaint about the media and snow creatures.

We also got to eat Maoz falafel, which is amazing. We had them in London and now they have some stores in the states. Yummy. We also had Chinese food from this great all vegan restaurant which was right by city hall. I put on a couple of pounds, but so it goes. Sunday we ended up just driving home. Dermot was so drained from the day before. We never expected to hit three events in one day. I really thought that the third event might put Dermot over the edge, but he was a real trooper.

This weekend, we didn't do too much. Dermot came down with a mild spring cold, and he was pretty much a cranky, whiny jerk all day on Saturday. In fact at the end of the day, he just broke down into tears, telling me how sad he was. I had just finally broken down and given him a well deserved time out, and he just fell completely apart. So I told him that sometimes we all just need a good cry and that he should just do it. I just held the poor guy and rocked him. I told him that none of us had a good day on Saturday and that we were all doing to start from scratch on Sunday. I told him that all of us needed to work hard to have a good day, and we did. He was very pleasant on Sunday. Yay us. In fact, he wanted to do puzzles and play games on Sunday. Sometimes I feel like he never wants to do normal kid stuff. That all he wants to do is play video games and watch TV, which is actually probably normal kid stuff. I want him to use his fantastic brain and to really be a kid. We all grow up so fast it seems.

The weather has been so beautiful that I kept Dermot outside all last night after dinner. We played tee ball, I pulled him in his wagon, we played with light sabers (until he hurt me, of course), and we played "powers". Powers is derived from Ben 10, whom he still loves. He loves to pretend that he has different super powers. He'll scream "love power" and then he'll come up and hug me. Then he'll scream "liquid sand power" and he'll do all sorts of great face and body contortions to show me he's changing. Cool, creative stuff. Ethan and I like to joke with him and have mushroom or potato power, since he hates those two foods. He really just loves any excuse to run around, and it's so good for him since he's been a couch potato all winter.

Well that's my update for now. I have 12 papers to grade before I can focus on final exams starting tomorrow.

Busy Week

2008-04-25T21:20:00.002-04:00

I had planned on blogging on Monday night about my wonderful afternoon, but then time slipped away. I took off early from work, since I'm done with office hours at 1:00. I went shopping just for me. I had intended on buying summer stuff for Dermot too, but I ran out of time. So it was all about me and my new smaller sizes. I actually had no idea what sizes to try on. It's different at every store and that always drives me nuts. It's also different depending upon the style. Why can't it be constant like the term "size" implies? Anyway, I now own a ton of cute shorts and skirts for work. I still need to get some capris and some more shirts, but those I can order easily on line. It's the stuff for the bottom and work related stuff that can be harder to find.

The rest of the week has been kind of a blur. I got up at 5:30 today to ride the bike before I had to leave for a conference in central/south Jersey. There are 19 community colleges in the state of New Jersey and this conference was a chance for faculty, staff, and administration from all 19 to get together for presentations on "best practices". I was hoping to do a lot of networking and no one was interested in getting to know someone they did not already know. I was the only faculty member from college and it seemed like a lot of the attendees were older than me and/or administration. That's okay, I got to talk to some of our administration and I learned some things at some of the talks I attended. I guess that I just wish it had been more somehow. I'm used to big research conferences and this was a small, informal "pass on what's worked for us" type of a thing. The conference was at Ocean Community College in Tom's River. So now I have at least been near the shore. We'll check out the real shore later this summer.

Our summer jaunts are beginning. Tomorrow morning we are heading out to Philadelphia for a Dermot extravaganza. First, on Saturday we will return to the Please Touch Museum at Dermot's request. Then we will be staying at a Residence Inn, which is all suites. Dermot will be able to build a huge pile of pillows, also at his request. Then on Sunday is the big day. We are going to the Franklin Institute for Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination. It's only going to be in Philly for two more weekends. We chose to go this weekend because a group of people who dress up as stormtroopers will be there. I kid you not. So hopefully Dermot can control himself. He's been really whiny all week because he wants to go out and play every single evening and Ethan and I just want to relax and get things done. I hope this is a fun weekend for all three of us.

Can't Talk About It

2008-04-18T12:51:00.002-04:00

So, as usual, it's been a while. Sorry. Work really has been nuts. Finals are just around the corner, so it's been paper grading and test writing time. I've also really been stressed out by some work stuff I just can't talk about. I don't ever want to write about my students, but that's been part of the situation over here. It's okay, May 13 is the last day of finals week, which of course means that I am giving a final exam at 7:05 PM on May 13. Then I'm off for 2 weeks before summer school starts.

I had been meaning to write a wonderful post about Dermot's new teacher on Monday, but the time slipped away. We had spoken to her about how Dermot felt bad that he still had to start the day at his old classroom. So after 1 day, she said that Dermot had fit into the new classroom very well, and that he's in that classroom full time. He wasn't supposed to be full time until May 1. I know my boy and I told the administrators that it wasn't going to go down like that and I was write. The part I loved was that Dermot's new teacher didn't ask anyone. She just did what was right for Dermot. I was so happy to have a strong teacher with a spine for Dermot. Well, the Dermot came home on Monday night and said that his new teacher was no longer working at his daycare center. So, Ethan had to email a bunch of people to find out what happened. His new teacher left for a higher up position at a KinderCare. So now, there is only one teacher in his class until they fill the other position. The ratio is legal, but it's not ideal. I feel so bad for the teacher who is left there. There are officially 12 kids in Dermot's class. Several of them are part time, and I know that at least two of them never over lap, but still that could mean 11 kids to one teacher, and they have upped the curriculum a great deal from where he was. I'm more angry that no one told us and they didn't think that losing a teacher would be something to prepare the kids for. Especially for a kid who was transitioning in to the class himself. Dermot, of course, has just rolled with the punches, but it could be a big deal for some kids.

Dermot is still in love with his new classroom. I got to bring him to school and pick him up yesterday since Ethan had some dental work done. Dermot was so excited to show me the seedlings that he planted, his spaceship play outfit, the computer, the fish, his new cubby, Emily's coat hook (his newest girlfriend), the art area, the science area, the kindergarten room, etc. He really loves it. Every day he comes home and talks about what they are doing. They have started on Whole Language as a specific time of day in his new class room and it's exactly what he needs. Today they had to bring in a show and tell item for the letter P. So I sent Dermot with a Pink Penguin Beanie Baby from my obnoxious penguin collection.

In other great news, it's supposed to hit 86 today. The nice weather is finally here. Dermot's already been able to play baseball outside twice this week. In weight news, I'm down 65.6 pounds as of today. I had put on some weight (around 2 pounds) with my period and a night out for Ethiopian food and wine, and it's finally off plus some. I think the bike is really helping, but it took a little time to do its magic. Also, Ethan and I are both having to wear our wedding rings on our middle fingers so that we do not lose them. Ethan has had to buy new clothes too.

Well off to grade even more papers.

Bleech

2008-04-07T12:58:00.002-04:00

I just wanted everyone out there to know that I feel crappy. Not physically - that's easier to deal with, but mentally. I'm too tuned to my insides a lot of the time and that makes me feel bad and it makes me wallow in the stressful crap around me. I'm sorry to be so vague, but I can't talk about the many things that are making me feel lousy. There's a lot of stress at work right now, and I think that's contributing to my lack of sleep, which is making me feel lousy. Time will get me over this, but now I need to play the waiting game.

In happier news, Dermot is loving his new classroom. I told you that Dermot had been going back to his other class after 90 minutes. We asked Dermot about this and he said that no one had asked him about staying. So Ethan took the time at work to find out his new teacher's last name and then he emailed her. He told her that we had been told that Dermot had been told he would be asked if he wanted to stay. So finally on Friday, they asked Dermot if he wanted to stay and he said yes. He was so happy when he came home. In fact, I think he was a little upset that Saturday wasn't a school day. I think that he wanted to play with his new friends and better toys.

So of course, when Ethan dropped Dermot off today he had to take him to the old classroom. Dermot has to stay at the old classroom until 9:30 for 3 weeks. Dermot was really upset because he thinks he's being punished by not being able to go to the new room. I told the staff that that's how he was last time. Dermot wants bigger and better and he does not hold onto the old and comfortable if it's beneath him. So Ethan sent off another email today to see about making the transition much faster. It's been so good to see Dermot happy about daycare again.

Back to me - here's some bad planning on my part that is also affecting my mood. Note to self - don't have all six classes have written assignments due during the same week. Especially when your four non-online courses all have tests during the next week. There are not enough hours in the day to do all of this grading!!!

Good Morning

2008-04-03T05:38:00.002-04:00

Good morning everyone. It is 5:30 as I am starting to write this post. But even worse! I have been awake since 1:30, and I just could not get back to sleep. I even moved beds, hoping that maybe without Dermot snoring in my ear and without him kicking and head butting me I might get some sleep. But no, it was not meant to be. Chana was sleeping in Dermot's room and he can snore with the best of people. I am tired, but not sleepy. I guess it's time to admit that this is more than just because Dermot sleeps with us. I am pretty sure that I am officially falling into insomnia territory. Yeah for me. I know that I already have one sleeping disorder, and I certainly do not need another. I don't know what is driving this, but boy, do I wish I could sleep for 8 hours straight. That seems like a dream.

Before all of this sleeping stuff, I was planning on writing about my weight loss. April 1 was my six month mark. I started taking my weight and health seriously after getting back some iffy blood tests on October 1. I already know that within 2 months my blood work was fine. But how am I doing? As of April 2 I have lost 63.4 pounds. I was hoping to have hit my half way mark of 65 pounds by now, but I'm pretty damn close to that, and I am certainly planning on focusing on the positive. That negative stuff will kill ya. Anyway, I had started out great, but for the last 3-4 weeks I had only been losing one pound a week, which is great and healthy, but I knew that it was up to me to up the ante. So as of Monday (3-31) I have been riding my bike. I knew that exercise was going to need to be a part of this plan, but I waiting until I had lost a lot of weight so that exercising would be easier on my body. Apparently that time has come. To get ready for this, I had been getting up a half hour earlier to get my body ready for that part of the deal. So I had been getting up at 6 and then taking my shower and using my extra morning time to finish minor business. Now I am using 6-6:30 to ride the bike and watch the news or read the Nation. I never thought I would become that person. But they say that if you don't make the time to exercise it doesn't happen, and they are totally right. I don't have any time in my day to fit it in, so I had to make time. My legs and hips are sore, but I know that will go away in time. The best part is that exercise really doesn't make me feel as bad as it did when I was heavier. That's the biggest problem when you're overweight. You need to work out, but it's really hard on your body. There was a lot of me to carry through space before. There still is, but since there's less of me, it's not as bad.

And just so people don't think that we are deprived at our house, for dinner last night we had French toast, "fried" potatoes, and smashed tofu with broccoli. All of it was fat free and vegan and it was rich and decadent and fantastic!

In Dermot news, he started transitioning to the big kids' room on Monday. Just as I suspected, after his 90 minutes was up, they took him back to his class. Ethan asked him at pick up why he didn't stay and he said that no one asked him if he wanted to stay. This after I had spent a whole week talking to him about staying if he wanted. The teacher, not his of course, who was there when Ethan picked him up had a little talk with him about staying if he wanted to. Now he says that he misses his friends and doesn't want to stay any longer. Then he also says that his teacher says that he's not officially in the big kids' room until May 1 - which is technically true in terms of tuition and class rosters. But multiple people told us that he can stay if he wants to. So now I don't know if he's not staying because he really does want to go back to his old class or if he's feeling pressure not to stay. His face just beams when he's talking about the new classroom and all of the cool toys and that it has two rooms. He says that he plays with all of his new friends. He really loves it, so I don't know why he doesn't want to stay. But I don't want to push staying, if he's still a little bit not ready to jump right in. Ah parenting.

I'm Going to the Big Kids' Room!

2008-03-28T12:23:00.002-04:00

Where does the time go? Anyway, we've had two meetings now with Dermot's daycare since I last wrote about it. Thursday of last week, we met to discuss Dermot's progress. That meeting was a complete disaster. A lot of the meeting consisted of the director telling the teacher what she was doing wrong in front of us. She certainly deserved to get an earful, but not in front of parents. I'm also more sensitive to this than Ethan is, but I also got several subtle messages about how we are bad parents. Apparently we are very bad parents because we think it's okay if Dermot says that another child is a jerk, when the other child is being a jerk. I see their point on that one, but the director really blew it out of proportion. What really irked me, though, is that we are horrible parents because we let our already aggressive child watch Star Wars, which is making him more aggressive. It hasn't changed his behavior at all. It has just framed his aggression. Now it's all about light sabers instead of just about random hitting. They are apparently going to see if they can focus on the "good" parts of Star Wars. I told them that we do that. Dermot is in love with space, robots, and technology. I would argue that an early interest in science and technology is a good thing. I was really upset after the meeting, but I'm over it now. The big thing was that at the conclusion of the meeting everyone agreed that Dermot is ready to move up. Finally.

We got to take a tour of the room and it's so much better for him. There are more advanced and varied toys for him and a lot more space. Even better, Dermot is so excited. The next day when he went to daycare he ran up to his little friend Noah and yelled that he's going to the big kids' room. He kept asking us when. That lead to yesterday's meeting to set up the official transition. So Monday he will spend 1.5 hours in the new class. At the end of that time they will ask him if he wants to stay. If he does than he can. When he transitioned from the baby room to the toddler room, he was very sad with transitioning. He wanted to move up and stay right away. He told us that he felt he was being punished by being sent to the baby room. So I told Dermot that he can say whatever he really feels. If he misses his friends, he can go back. If he wants to stay, I want him to stay. He told me yesterday that he's going to stay the whole time. We'll see. They are going to give him 4.5 weeks to transition. I think that's a little nuts. But as of May 1, he will officially be in the other classroom full time. I'm so excited for him.

Spring Break

2008-03-19T13:02:00.002-04:00

Since it's Spring Break here, that means that last week was full of "getting stuff done". So sorry about no posting last week. Crazy times. We went to Woodridge, IL to visit my parents last weekend. We flew from Newark to O'Hare on Saturday and we flew back yesterday. We had a good time, but it's good to back. Dermot was tired the whole time we were there. He just never slept enough. The poor kid would go to bed on Central time (about 8:30) and wake up on Eastern time (about 6:00). He never got caught up. He did, however, sleep the whole flight home and that was a wonderful thing for him. Now that we're home, hopefully he'll get back into the swing of things.

Saturday we spent getting things ready at the hotel and then we went to see my parents. Dermot was not himself the whole time we were there. When we finally got him back to the hotel, he did not want to sleep. Finally, he laid down, we left him alone, and then he threw up a little bit. I think that the traveling and all of the junk food on the plane just did not agree with him. Dermot hardly every throws up. Every time he has it's been because of penicillin. Luckily it was a mild case, and not the horrible stuff it usually is for most kids.

Sunday morning we woke up early (thanks to Dermot). Since we stayed at a suite with a kitchen, I made pancakes and vegan mac 'n' cheeze for Dermot. Then we went to see my parents. My mom had bought Dermot a Star Wars Clone Wars sticker book, and he was thrilled. But mostly he just wanted to watch the Star Wars movies with his grandparents. It kept him out of trouble. We had scheduled time to see some of my friends from 1-5 and that was wonderful. My friends Rich and Kathleen have a very smart, creative, active daughter who is 5.5 months older than Dermot. The two of them had a blast. At first they were just running around the house together. Then they were pretending to be Dora and Diego. It was so wonderful to see Dermot play with someone who is so on his level. The funny thing, though, was that he kept calling her Brynna, which is his cousin's name. Brynna and Anne are both petite and blonde, so I guess that was enough for Dermot. Plus we talk about Brynna more since they're cousins. My college roommate Adlin and her husband came over to Rich and Kathleen's house too. It was so nice to catch up with the four adults and to see the kids having such a good time. That's what real adult life is supposed to be like, right? Ah, to only have some local friends. Actually we do have one pair of friends with an 8 month old, but it will be more like what I envisioned once their son is older.

On Monday we went to the DuPage Children's Museum, which was easily the best kids' museum we've been to, even better than the Please Touch Me Museum. It was so hands on and so educational. It was less about acting out real world situations and more about learning about things. We had a blast doing all sorts of things with bubbles and air. They have a wind tunnel and they have all sorts of pipes that you can build to see how the air goes. It was great fun and Grandpa went with us. My mother had to work, but my dad had a great time watching Dermot play and doing some of the things with him.

Then Tuesday we left. We had a two hour delay, which sucks when you're alone, but boy does it really suck when you have a bored 4 year old on your hands. Poor Dermot was such a trooper.

Today, which is the middle of my spring break, I am doing laundry, grading tests, and reading the next chapters in my psych of aging textbook. Doesn't that sound relaxing? I should be going to the grocery store, but I very much see that not happening. That's what staples in the pantry are for. I'm sure that I can scrounge up something for dinner.

By the way, I managed to keep my weight level or lose a little bit while we were away. As of this morning, I have lost 60 pounds. I seem to be slowing down, but that's okay. Sometimes your body needs to readjust and then it starts losing again. We'll see what happens. Of course, I should start doing some sort of exercise, but like everyone else, when am I supposed to fit it in?

The Doctor

2008-03-06T11:50:00.002-05:00

Nicole asked some questions about our doctor. I told our doctor that we were all vegan and I don't think that it even phased her. She's young, definitely younger than I am, so it may not seem that out of place to her. It's basically a non-issue. I told her that I wanted to test Dermot's iron and she didn't even flinch. Our doctor's office is also open until 8:00 4 nights a week, and Saturday mornings if you make an appointment with them earlier in the week. They are surprisingly accessible, and they probably don't need to me. It seems to me that the bulk of their clientele are retired adults. They are a family practice, and I bet that a lot of the kids around us go to a pediatrician. I like going to someone who takes care of all of us. She's been really good to me. She lets me asks all sorts of questions.

We did get Dermot's results back, after I had to call. I guess they don't call if the results are fine, but I think that's stupid, because I don't know when the tests will come back to know when I should look for a "non-call". They left a message and said that all of his tests were normal. I hate when they don't give me numbers. The newest research on low iron (done by one of my former Purdue professors) suggests that we see negative effects on kids even if the iron levels aren't low enough to officially be labeled as anemia. I know that whenever I don't have anemia, I am at almost anemia. I never get into a medium range. I want to know how close Dermot is to the line. He's probably fine, but still, I need to know the numbers. We'll see the doctor on the 13th for his next two shots, and she'll tell me then.

I also wanted to follow up on my post about all of my meetings for work. The funny thing is I don't really mind the meetings. I like my colleagues and sometimes these meetings are the only time I get to see them. My only problem is that I am at a branch campus, and all of my meetings are at the main campus. There are only four full time faculty at my tiny little campus, so we always have to travel. I don't mind the meetings, I hate having to drive half an hour to get to meetings. If I just had to go down the hallway that would be wonderful. But even having said that, I like my little campus. I like my students. These two campuses are night and day. The main campus is in the inner city. The majority of the students are extremely poor ethnic minorities and recent immigrants. My little campus is out in the boonies. Some of these areas are practically rural. So these kids are White, a little better off, and very suburban or between suburban and rural. Many of these students also can't afford to pay for a four year school for all four years, and they make too much money to qualify for any kind of financial aid. They need us just as badly, but it can make for a different dynamic within the classrooms of the two different campuses. Personally, I find them to be way more similar than a lot of my colleagues do. But I'm willing to believe that it depends upon what course you are teaching. The students up here are better prepared in high school (although not much) than the inner city kids are, and that matters a lot in math, English, and science.

Enough about work. I am actually off to a meeting now.

Making Dermot Unhappy

2008-02-29T14:16:00.002-05:00

In contrast to yesterday's post, I present to you Dermot's well child check up. We had to reschedule it because Dermot was no well on the day we had originally scheduled this check up - neither was his doctor. So last night at 7:30 all three of us went down the street to the doctor's office. Here's the good news. Dermot is healthy, 38.5 inches tall, and 38 pounds.

Here's the bad news. I wanted to have Dermot's iron and lead levels tested. The doctor said they usually do that at 2 in NJ, but he has never had his lead tested and the last iron test was at 12 months. His soy milk is iron fortified, but he eats such a small range of foods, that I want to know how he's doing. Iron levels that are low, but not low enough to be labeled as anemia are still damaging to brain development in 4 year olds, so I want to be on top of this. It also turned out that Dermot needed 4 shots. So last night we had the pleasure of helping two nurses hold down his entire body while they took blood out of his arm. Fun times. He was screaming as soon as he saw the needle and test tube. Then after that fun time, we had to hold him down again to get two of the shots into his legs - one in each leg. This required a third nurse. Three adults to hold him down and two nurses to inject him at the same time. The best part???? We get to do the shot part again in two weeks. I didn't want him to have all four shots at the same time. So last night he got his last DTaP and MMR shots. In two weeks he'll get polio and varicella. Good times. There's nothing like telling your little baby that the pain will help keep him well while you're holding him down against his will. He was really pissed about the situation last night.

But of course, this morning, he was showing me how there's no mark on his arm. The nurse said that he would bruise, and it doesn't look like he did. Now I have to wait to see the results of his tests.

Keeping Dermot Happy

2008-02-28T14:53:00.001-05:00

Starwars at the Franklin Institute

PLUS

Nintendo DS

PLUS

Lego Star Wars Game for DS

EQUALS

Happy Dermot

The Star Wars meets science thing at the Franklin Institute in Philly looks great. Dermot is very excited. Now we need to figure out when to go see it.

The DS was bought as entertainment for the trip to Grandma and Grandpa's house. We're spending the Saturday through Tuesday of my Spring Break outside of Chicago visiting my parents. We haven't been then there since we moved to NJ in June 2006, and then we only spent the night on our long drive from Iowa to New Jersey. Ethan and I were very anxious about keeping Dermot out of trouble while waiting at the airport and being on the plane, so we figured we'd try out the DS. If it didn't work, I would get it since I have had my eye on one for a while. They offer tons of little brain games for DS. Well DS and Dermot are a match made in heaven. Dermot immediately picked it up and knew exactly what to do. It's almost creepy to see how mechanical and technological Dermot is. He's going to be a tinkerer like his parents. I don't have an outlet for it now, but as a kid I was always tearing stuff apart. Ethan gets paid to figure out sensitive equipment. So apparently Dermot might have some of that in his future.

Dermot is also 100% back to normal. Being sick hardly knocks him down at all. He just loves being home with his parents. He was not happy when he had to go back to daycare on Monday. He kept telling us he was still sick.

What A Week

2008-02-23T20:36:00.003-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, but things have been completely nuts around here. First, Dermot got sent home from daycare Tuesday afternoon with a fever of 101. I had to teach that night until 9:35, so Ethan and Dermot were on their own. I couldn't even cut my class short, because I had canceled the class the week before because we had a horrible snow/ice storm. Night classes only meet once a week. So a missed class is like missing a week. Boy, are we way behind already. Anyway, Dermot was sick for the rest of the week. Wednesday, I canceled my morning class and stayed home with him. Dermot is full of energy when he's sick and it drives me crazy. Why can't he slow down? Ethan came home after lunch to take the afternoon shift while I went to teach my afternoon class. Again, I had already canceled that class once due to an ice storm, so I didn't want to cancel it again. Thursday I don't teach any classes, but that's my "prep" day, which means that it's my day to write new lectures, grade papers, and get other things done. This week I had so many meetings that Thursday was really my only day to get anything done, and I spent it taking care of a boy who can't stand to be alone. I needed to write 2 lectures and 3 tests and grade two written assignments (20 students) on that day. Luckily I got some things done Tuesday night before class, but I got little done during the day. Fortunately, Dermot did crash and he took a nap. I worked like mad during those 2 hours, but I still had work to do that night and last night, but I'm in okay shape.

I also took Dermot to the doctor's office on Thursday. He was supposed to have a well child visit that day since he just turned four, but the doctor's office called and said that our doctor was canceling all of her appointments because she was sick. So then I told the office that I needed a "sick" child visit. So we say a physician's assistant, who has seen us a lot before. She checked Dermot out and gave him a strep test. Fortunately, it turned up negative. Dermot has a really congested chest and he's wheezing. So she gave him an antibiotic which has already helped. He really needs a daily dose of albuterol, which we have in syrup form for him, but he gets so hyper that I avoid it when I can. I did give him some Thursday afternoon and it helped.

Friday morning we woke up to several inches of snow. I never saw a final report, but we were supposed to get 3-7 inches and it looks like more than that to me. My school was canceled and Ethan's huge company even closed. So all three of us were home for another day. The roads were such a mess that we all just stayed home and watched movies, played video games, and I even made a cake at Dermot's request. This also means that two more of my classes were canceled, and I am way behind in all of my classes. Sigh.

Today we woke to everything being totally clear. It's so nice to live somewhere that takes care of snow again. Growing up snow was always handled well, but Champaign, IL, Indiana, and Iowa didn't do much for the snow. It was just as dangerous for days after a snow fall. Here everything is cleaned up within hours. Heck, they salt my dead end street. So today I took my car in for a "checkup" and I had to shell out for new tires. It was time, but it never feels good to spend that much money. But my old tires were on their way to baldness.

Tonight we were all up in each other's grills, as the kids say. I think that tomorrow we all need to go to our own corners for several hours. It won't happen, but wouldn't it be nice? Dermot always needs someone around. I'm trying to break him of that, but our down stairs is so small that it's hard to not be near him.

I can't even tell you all how swamped I am at work. This should probably be a separate post, but I'm too tired to set it up separately. I don't know how much people know about college professors' lives. I think probably not too much. Our lives are immensely different depending upon where we teach. At big, research schools (like Purdue, Penn State, U of Texas, Stanford, Princeton, etc.) psychology professors only teach one or two classes a semester because the bulk of their work is research. They get paid to think, run studies, and write. Teaching is kind of an after thought. In fact, professors can use grant money to pay for the privilege of not teaching in this setting. They also tend to fight for teaching graduate courses because they are more intellectually stimulating and you have very few students.

At liberal arts schools (like Clark University, Wooster, Pomona, Rice, Muhlenberg, etc.) most psychology professors teach four classes a semester. Some schools are going to three a semester, but then they are pushing more research for their professors. These schools are considered "teaching" schools. The majority of teaching is good, important, and aimed at undergraduates. These faculty often have research responsibilities too, but they are not as severe or strict as people at the research universities. Much of this research is being performed in order to demonstrate good research to undergraduates and to give them research experience in order to apply to graduate schools.

At community colleges we are expected to teach a minimum of five classes a semester, and the majority of us teach 6 or 7. I am teaching 4 face to face and 2 online. My teaching is expected to be excellent, and I only get to teach freshman and sophomore level courses. That's life at a two-year college. Research is really not possible in my field. I don't have the time, and I don't have an ethics board to give me the okay to work with human subjects. After tenure, I might be able to collaborate with someone at a four year school, but I doubt that I will want to. We'll see. I love teaching and my research was so frustrating that I wanted to focus on the professional area that best served my talents and my family life, and that is teaching.

The unspoken part of being a professor is all of the committee work. This also varies greatly depending upon the type and size of the institution. At big, research schools most faculty are expected to be on one or two departmental committees (like choosing the curriculum, taking care of the graduate students, getting outside speakers, etc.) and one university wide committee, and possibly one college level (like liberal arts or science) committee, but there usually aren't that many committees at the level. Most of these committees meet at most once a month, sometimes even only once a semester. Also, it seems to me that a lot of people are on the committee, but they do very little work. Like most groups, it seems that one or two people do the bulk of the work and everyone else rides their coat tails.

At smaller schools, faculty are expected to be on more committees because there are fewer faculty to go around. At Purdue there are departments with over 80 faculty members. At my entire college we have 94 professors who are full time tenure track and not adjuncts. So all 94 of us make decisions for the whole college. In fact, we have a meeting once a month for all faculty, administrators, and staff who are interested. Bigger schools get to have rule by representation like an academic senate or a faculty senate. At my school we all make all decisions and I think that's typical at two year schools. I think that at four year teaching schools, it depends upon the faculty size how these things work out. But what this means is that I am teaching 6 classes, but I also have about 4 meetings a week. Last week I had a meeting with one of our vice presidents about the future of our online program because I am co-chair of a committee who is writing a report for our accrediting agency about our online courses. I also had two other meetings regarding the report for the accrediting agency because I am on 5 committees just regarding this report. I also had a meeting about how we can assess what our students have learned in our classes. This is a huge deal for most colleges, but it's hitting the community colleges earlier and harder right now. Next week I have a meeting with a book rep about using portable "clickers" in the class room. I can ask multiple choice questions and my students can hit A, B, C, or D on this device and I can see how well they know something or I can see how many have experienced something. I also have a meeting for our faculty union where we will be discussing the forms that other people use to critique our teaching. In fact, I had my teaching observation last week by one of the deans. I am also having a meeting with my co-chair for the online report and a personal meeting with the chair of my department so that I can ask him a bunch of questions.

It's amazing that I am able to get anything done for my classroom, but of course, my students come first, and I do get everything done. Fortunately, I have taught 5 of my 6 courses before, and for my sixth course I can borrow heavily from one of my other courses. So I'm not starting anything from scratch this semester, but I am using a new and very different book for one class. So I am having to do some revamping of my power points and lectures for that class. The crazy thing, to me, is that if I were at a big, research university I would actually have more work to do. It's just the type of work that has no official deadlines and is all self driven. A lot of work involved in research and writing up research is work that no one really sees except for the professor and maybe his or her grad students. It's not uncommon to work 80 hours a week for 6 years until one gets tenure. Publish or perish is absolutely true in that world. I honestly do not need to work that much. I do have time for my family and that was very important to me when I was making decisions about what kind of teaching career I wanted.

I should also point that there are schools that are in-between the research school, liberal arts school, and community college systems. Many of my friends seem to have landed in places that are between the research school and the liberal arts school. In those systems it seems that there are still strong research requirements, but it's not to the death like it can be at the big research schools. Teaching also still matters, much more than it does at the research schools. The truth is that tenure at research schools is almost entirely earned by your research. If you don't have enough papers or enough grant money, you're out. The other schools it's more a mixed bag, and you may never know what goes into the tenure decision. Hopefully people end up in a department or under a dean who lets you know what mixture of research, teaching, and service matters. At a community college my tenure will be granted based only on teaching and service, but it seems like service (committee work) is really all that matters. If I was not a good teacher, I wouldn't have gotten my job, and I wouldn't still be here. If you can't teach they don't usually keep you around for more than two years. That means since we're all good teachers by the time they decide tenure (at the middle of your fifth year) that they have to look at something else and that something else is service work. So all of these meetings are extremely important for me in order to keep my job. Obviously many of my committees are important to the school and I like doing the work. I don't want to make it sound like I'm only doing this type of work in order to get tenure. I like working on how to make our students better writers by working on the college writing committee. I like trying to make our technology work better for us in the classroom and for our students by working on the educational technology committee. Even these reports for our accrediting agency are important. I have already learned a lot about the history and background of my college since I am new here. We are in a much better place than we were even five years ago when the last reports were written. It's just that some days I'm overwhelmed by how much is on my plate. This is why many professors take some time off after they get tenure in order to live life a little again.

Enough rambling. I just needed to get some things off of my chest and I tend to do it in a teaching way when I write here about anything other than Dermot.

Four

2008-02-14T08:10:00.004-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day blogland. Today's post is all about my boy. Dermot turned four years old on Sunday. Can you believe that? Wow. He's so different than he was at three. He's more confident, more unique, more verbal, way more funny, and much more loving. I can't even wait to see what this year brings for us. I feel like I see many of his behavioral problems starting to disappear. That's what I've been looking forward to for about 2 1/2 years. I get so sick of having to correct his behavior all of the time. His transgressions seem so much less severe when they aren't happening as often.

Dermot didn't want to do much for his birthday. He wanted it to just be the three of us. We offered to throw him a party at some cool place around here, which many of his friends have done, but he said no. We even asked about the rest of the family and he said no. He's at an age where he really misses us during the work week, and not in the baby separation anxiety way. I am pretty sure that he misses us as people, not as security. It's very sweet. So he always wants to make the most of his time with us during the weekends. His only birthday requests were Star Wars legos (of course), that we did NOT go to a restaurant (which Ethan and I get for our birthdays), and that I make him a cake. No problem on all three accounts. What a sweet kid.

We ended up having an all Lego weekend. Ethan went to Target on Saturday and bought 3 lego packages for Dermot. One Dermot got that day, the other two we hid. Dermot's great aunt Paula and his Nana and PopPop actually bought these gifts. They sent him money in the mail and we spent it on exactly what he wanted. Ethan had also bought a Mission to Mars lego set for Dermot, since we're running out of Star Wars legos to buy. So on Sunday when Dermot woke up, we sent him down stairs to find his presents. He opened the smaller Star Wars lego packages first and then the Mission to Mars one. He was a little iffy about the Mission to Mars gift until we built it. Now he loves it and wants more. But Dermot's big surprise gift was opened last. We went online and found a Star Wars lego ship that is no longer made. We got Dermot Slave I, which is Boba Fett's cool space ship. Dermot's head almost exploded he was so surprised. He had been talking about it for a long time and we kept telling him that we couldn't get it for him because they no longer made it. He loves it and plays with it every day.

On Monday we got another Mission to Mars set and a little lego robot from Dermot's Uncle Tim. This spaceship transforms from an all terrain vehicle thing to a space ship and Dermot is in love with that too. It's so wonderful to see him play with all of this stuff every single day. Apparently he finally found what really interests him.

I also made Dermot his cake. Here's where Dermot is so unusual. He didn't want a decorated cake. He didn't want any cake that was not vanilla. He also didn't want any frosting. He wanted my fat free vegan cake. He calls it the brown cake. This cake contains tofu and oat flour, but it is easy to make and it tastes really good. The hardest thing for other people is the texture. It's a little rubbery because there's no fat in the cake. Dermot ended up eating about half of the cake by the end of the night.

That night I asked Dermot if he had a good birthday. I asked him if he had wished that we had done something else and he said that he had a great birthday and he's glad that we didn't do anything differently than we had. What a sweet kid.

Here's a picture of Dermot and his gazillion Lego star ships. This actually isn't all of them. These are just the ones he put in the living room. He's probably missing about 5 or more Star Wars ships that were in his play room.

Sorry I Left Everything Hanging

2008-02-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

Busy, busy week here, but we did meet with Dermot's teacher and the assistant director of his daycare center. We were there for 1.5 hours, which was probably 1 hour more than they had expected. We used the time to get everything off of our chests. Some of what we were bringing up in the meeting should have been said before. It was a very useful communication. Maybe nothing will change, but I honestly feel better that at least the air is clear. I don't want to go in to a lot of details, but I did tell them that gifted kids quite often are a little bit delayed socially. I also mentioned that the peers of gifted kids are not necessarily their age mates. They really seemed to have a problem with this idea. Dermot gets along better with older kids and he can find other three year olds beneath him. I had the same problem and I became a horribly arrogant little first grader who had no friends. So I need to work on this with Dermot, but at the same time, he should be with his peers not his age mates. I also mentioned the fact that we don't get positive feed back about Dermot and that Dermot himself is always wallowing in the negative. If he's punished at daycare all night we hear about how he's a bad kid. He's got a little of his dad's perfectionism in him, I think. I also mentioned that they need to correct him sooner when he's aggressive or disruptive. I told them that I have a zero tolerance policy at home for aggression. He is immediately in time out when he does anything aggressive. Most other things he'll get a couple of chances, but this is the one behavior I most want to change and so I am strict. Hopefully they'll be more strict too.

By the end of the meeting we were told that they don't think Dermot is ready, but that they think he probably will be ready to move soon. The assistant director said that she would observe Dermot in his class this week to get a second opinion about his behavior and development. Part of me wants that to be a good thing, but the more cynical part of me thinks that they were just trying to placate us. We'll see on Monday. The director was also subtly directing the teacher towards some better disciplinary techniques for Dermot. I don't think that she knows that Dermot is smart enough to talk to about some of this stuff. If you ask him open ended questions about his behavior, he will stop and think and truthfully answer you.

In other Dermot news, we took him to the dentist on Saturday and he has great teeth. The dentists and their assistants were just in awe of Dermot. Here he is, not quite 4, and he's walking to the room where he'll have his exam like he owns the place. He gets to the back room and climbs right into the chair and opens his mouth. It made me laugh. Then we was really good while he got a flossing, cleaning, and fluoride treatment. He was out of there in about 7 minutes. I had such lousy teeth at such a young age, that I'm so happy for him. We, however, were given the task of flossing his teeth now that he's almost 4. That is really hard to do, but if I have lay down with his head in my lap it works.

Here's an even more interesting thing that happened at the dentist's office. The waiting room as an old GameCube. They had a NickToons game in the system that we also have at home. Dermot and Ethan won the whole game a while ago. We made Dermot wait until a bunch of other kids left, but when there was only one kid playing we told Dermot that he could go over there to play the game. Dermot asked if he could please play with this kid - who was probably 7 or 8. The kid said yes so Dermot jumped right in. The best part, though, was that Dermot was telling this kid how to play and how they had to work together to solve parts of the adventure. Dermot was so appropriate and so wonderful and the other kid was really nice to him too. I was afraid that the older kid might be a little irritated at some little kid telling him what to do. They played really nicely for about 10 or more minutes until Dermot's name got called. How's that for socially inappropriate?

In Mama news, I have now lost 52 pounds and I have very few clothes that fit. In fact the funny thing is that now that there is less of me, the big clothes actually make me look fatter. I have a few sweaters that I can wear, but yesterday it was in the 60s here, and I didn't have a single thing with short sleeves that fit me appropriately. So tonight I just ordered a bunch of stuff online. I don't even really know what size I am and the plus sized stores all make their sizes different. I hate that. A specific size in one place is too small, it's perfect somewhere else, and giant somewhere else. That makes it hard to buy at more than one store. I also need smaller bras, but I have no idea what size they should be. Also, can I mention a clothing pet peeve? I just hate 3/4 sleeves. They feel incomplete to me, and all of the cute work dresses I'm looking at are 3/4 sleeves and I refuse to buy them. Maybe that's a little OCD, I don't know. I know that I'm constantly trying to pull them down. I also want to mention that I just made a delicious fat-free bread pudding and I just ate about 1/4 of it. Yum yum yum. It's just bread, soy milk, brown sugar, real maple syrup, cinnamon, and vanilla. Good stuff. I had soup and salad for dinner, but only because we had so many leftovers and neither of us were in the mood to cook. Hopefully I can post about yummy fat free vegan food some other time. Tomorrow we're looking at roasted turnips and rutabagas. Yummy.

All Grumpy All The Time

2008-01-31T12:29:00.000-05:00

My house has been hit by a hopefully short-lived wave of grumpiness. Chana went to the vet yesterday to have his teeth cleaned. I knew that he was going to lose at least one tooth, but they ended up having to take three of his teeth. The vet called me after the process and told me that she could tell that all three teeth were sensitive to him. Maybe he's been grumpy because he was in pain. I know that I can't handle tooth pain. Well now that's had the work done, I know why he's grumpy. Who wouldn't be. He had to spend the whole day at the vet's office, probably in a cage or his carrier. Then he was knocked out and had his teeth pulled. They also gave him his annual shot and did his all over exam since they couldn't last time (he was too angry). Then they gave him the first bath in his life. Then to make it worse - eating (his favorite thing on the planet) hurts and I have to give him medicine twice a day. What's a cat to do? He has chosen to hide under the bed until he feels better. Poor guy. When he's out, he's really loving. He just wants to keep rubbing his cheeks against me and Ethan. And purrs if you just look at him, but he's so easily irritated and then he's off to his place under the bed. He'll bounce back, but I feel bad for poor Chana.

Even worse is Dermot's grumpiness. He came home yesterday looking really sad. We kept asking him about it, and he wouldn't let us in at all. Then after being home for about 45 minutes he became his normal crazy self. Then this morning when we were trying to get him ready for daycare, he just lost it. He kept saying that he didn't want to go and then he started crying. I thought that maybe the daycare situation was worse than we thought. Well after forcing him to go against his will, he opened up to Ethan in the car. Dermot was hit by two hard things yesterday and he didn't tell us about either of them. It turns out that yesterday was the last day for one of his little girlfriends. Her family is moving. He told Ethan that he's going to miss her. I don't think he wanted to go to school because he knew it would make him even more sad. What a sweet, sensitive child. I wish that the daycare center had worked more with the kids to prepare them for this. They knew at least a month in advance.

Then he told Ethan that another girl, who is very close to age, told him that the leaving girl wouldn't let him come over to her house. This bitchy girl has been telling Dermot all sorts of crazy stuff for the last six months. She has told him that he does not like girls, that he does not like purple, that he's not allowed to visit girls at their houses, and all sorts of mean, weird stuff. Dermot takes this to heart. We have told him to ignore her and leave her alone. We have told him that she can't hurt him if he's not near her, but I think she seeks him out. I think she knows that if she pushes Dermot's buttons he will react. I think that this might be tied to some of the negative behavior they are seeing from Dermot in the classroom. How do you avoid an obnoxious little girl, when you are in a small class room and she follows you around? I think that Dermot's in a bit of a bind with this situation and, again, this will disappear when he moves up. So hopefully Ethan's talk with Dermot will help him work through his feelings. We were so disappointed that Dermot couldn't talk to us about this before he melted down, but I think he's still a little bit too young to really understand how events can make us feel. Unfortunately, this may be a good example from which he can learn. Boys (and men) are always, on average, less good at the emotional stuff than girls are.

Vague Daycare Update

2008-01-28T19:54:00.000-05:00

I know that Patrice and probably others are wondering what happened with our teacher meeting. I don't want to go into details because I know that a lot of family reads this blog. Let's just say that things did not go super well, and also that things are not over. It turns out that the meeting was for all parents. We were given our child's observations and IEPs (education plans). I spoke to the director and the teacher at the end of the meeting, but we didn't have the time or the materials or the privacy to have the conversation we really need to have. So that's our next step. I also didn't sleep Wednesday night because I couldn't stop thinking about how poorly the meeting went. I don't handle frustration or confrontation well AT ALL. It's probably one (or two) of my greatest weaknesses. Obviously I will need to get over it for Dermot's sake.

In unrelated news, Dermot is super gross-out preschooler kid. Today he decided that his name is burp. Ethan's name is Fart, and I am stinky head. And because I am such a horrible parent I laughed and went along with it. I have much bigger fish to fry with this kid than his interest in bodily functions. Might I add, his developmentally appropriate interest in gross stuff and bodily functions. I, instead, am working on important things like following directions, numbers, and letters. Silly me.

Does It Ever Get Any Easier?

2008-01-18T16:08:00.000-05:00

Well we now have a new daycare issue. Apparently Dermot has cursed twice at school. Some time last week Dermot swore at daycare and his teacher spoke to Ethan about it. We thought that was the end of it. Well Dermot swore again yesterday and his teacher called me about it. I think that she was concerned that Ethan wasn't taking it seriously enough. She was very weird on the phone to me. I told her that I thought it was weird that Dermot wasn't swearing at home, but was swearing at school. I said "he" instead of "Dermot" and for some reason Dermot's teacher thought I meant Ethan. So she jumped right in and said that Ethan had "admitted" that Dermot had heard the "f word" because Ethan had used it in front of him. I told her, yes, but Dermot doesn't use that language here. I told her that I would talk to him again.

I find this whole situation so frustrating on so many levels. I think what gets me most is that Dermot's teacher was really worried and upset about this situation. Hello! Little kids swear. They love to see what kind of rise they can get out of you, and boy, did Dermot get a rise out of her. She told me that "she was really upset" by his language. Well then get a thicker skin. I worked with kids and I was called all sorts of things. They don't mean what they say. They just like to see the power of words. Dermot has no idea what he said even meant. Secondly, I teach future daycare teachers, and I tell them bad words are going to pop up and they disappear if you ignore them. Normally I teach that the method of extinction is not a good method. Most bad behaviors get stronger before they disappear, but for swearing I think that's okay, and I know it works.

But a bigger issue this is bringing up is that this teacher never, ever tells us anything good about Dermot. She's always picking on him and telling us all the bad things he does. Well, if he never gets praise, he's not going to do good things. Again, Psychology 101 - positive reinforcement always works better than punishment. End of story. We've known this since the 1930s. And Skinner was a fanatic about it in the 50s and 60s. For a while I was thinking that maybe Dermot shouldn't be at the daycare facility he is currently at, but now I'm starting to think that it's just the teacher. She's very young and she's super focused on rules and boundaries. Now, you certainly have to be with 2-4 year olds, but you can't be to rigid. Dermot isn't like the other kids in his class, and I think that's great. He's allowed to follow his passions and I will encourage that for him until my dying breath. I think that you can tell from this blog that we do not value conformity in this household, especially not conformity for conformity's sake. I want Dermot to think about what he does and to know why he does what he does. If his choices are "common or typical" that's great. If they are "off the beaten path", more power to him. He's got his parents behind him 100% either way as long as his choices are authentic to his being.

Maybe this is getting at some old baggage of mine. Growing up I was always told that I marched to the beat of a different drummer. Coming from my parents this was meant as an insult. Why couldn't I just be like everyone else? My parents hate the fact that I'm "weird". When my grandparents and aunts and uncles said it, they at first thought it was funny. But I think that as I got older there was some respect behind the phrase. I want Dermot to march to the beat of his own drummer. I think that's important. I just see that this teacher wants to make Dermot into the prototypical preschooler already. She's already told him that he's too young to see Star Wars. Well last I knew, that was the parents' call, not the teachers. We're having parent conferences next week and I'm dying to see what happens. We've already emailed the teacher once about moving Dermot up into the next class room. He's so ready to be in full out preschool. He's bored where he's at. He needs to be challenged. I never thought that I would need to say that about an almost 4 year old, but I really do think that he needs to be challenged. I would hate to have Dermot already at 4 years old think that school is dumb and beneath him. My brother was bored in school and started getting in trouble around 4th grade. I was bored in school and starting getting in trouble in about first grade, but my parents actually helped that situation by moving me to public school in 4th grade. I don't want to already have to start fighting the education system on Dermot's behalf. He's not even 4 yet, for crying out loud.

Enough of my rambling. I'm sick and I just don't make any sense. This is the fourth time since November that I have been sick. So I went to the doctor the first day I felt like garbage and she put me right onto antibiotics. Yeah. I hope they work. I do feel a little better today, and I've only been taking them since Wednesday. School starts up again on Wednesday and I haven't been able to do anything. My syllabi are done, but I still need to do a lot of work on my online course so that it basically run itself.

Star Wars - Legoville

2008-01-16T10:35:00.000-05:00

I have been wanting to write this post for a while, and the time has come. My home has been taken over by Star Wars. It started sometime last year. Ethan had Lego Star Wars episodes 1-3 for Game Cube. Dermot liked the game, but they finished the game and our Game Cube controllers have been wonky. Then for Christmas Dermot got the new Lego Star Wars - the Complete Saga for Wii. He couldn't stop talking about it even before he knew he was getting it. It was the one thing on his Christmas list that he just "had" to have. In fact, knowing of his growing love of Star Wars, we bought him a Lego Star Wars kit and a Darth Vader action figure. Once Dermot opened the game and played, his Star Wars (he calls it Legoville) obsession has exploded. Christmas was only three weeks ago and since then we have gained the following things at our house:

A box set of the original three movies (IV, V, and VI)
Individual copies of I and II - and I know that III is one it's way eventually
Two "learning to read" Star Wars books
A ton more Lego Star Wars stuff

We have the Y-wing fighter, the AT-ST, General Grievous' Starfighter, and the V Wing fighter.

The stuff he wants and we would like him to have is really expensive. I would love him to have Jango Fett's spaceship - the Slave I, but it's over 100 bucks. He's really into Jango and Boba Fett right now. He now wants a Boba Fett shirt.

Dermot is totally psycho about this stuff. As soon as he wakes up and as soon as he gets home from daycare he starts talking about the different levels in the game. He tells me about where he got the white things in certain levels, which levels are hard, and all sorts of stuff. I play with him once in a while, but the Star Wars video game is really a Daddy-Dermot bond type of thing. They play it together all the time, but that also means they fight about it all the time. They quite often have different goals as they are playing the game. Dermot is having lots of issues with 1) following directions and 2) using teamwork to accomplish an important goal. Dermot will quite often start playing a level, get frustrated, and then demand that Ethan do the hard part for him. This irritates Ethan to no end and it really seems to take the fun out of the game for him, which is sad.

The amazing thing to me is how much there is to learn about this stuff. I saw the first three movies when they came out and I saw them when they were re-released. But I never saw them a bunch of times. I saw episode I when it came out, but I never saw episode II or III. I was just never that in to Star Wars, but now I know all the minor characters' names, all of the planets, and most of the spaceships. It's amazing how quickly you can pick up on this stuff when someone you love is really into it.

I know that if my friend Ravisha is reading this, she is laughing her behind off. She and her husband, Dondi, are big into Star Wars. I was telling Dermot about a party they had that was Star Wars themed and he was fascinated. Unfortunately he hasn't had the chance to meet Ravisha and Dondi yet.

The worst part about this obsession is that Ethan and I are totally facilitating it. Both Ethan and I are collectors by nature. He has a bunch of baseball cards and comic books from his childhood, and I can't get rid of any piece of music or book that comes my way. We also had started collecting the Simpsons toys when they came out in grad school. We finally stopped because, wow, we spent a ton of money on it, and with a baby coming we had to tighten out finances. So Dermot won out over Simpsons toys. Although, some of them are on display in the living room and the rest are in the basement. We would actually like to sell them, but we can't find a way to get a decent price for the lot. We're too lazy to sell them off one by one.

Also, Dermot is still obsessed with Ben 10 toys, but they haven't had anything new out for a while. New stuff is coming in March. Actually, we couldn't find the new stuff that came out right before Christmas and Dermot keeps asking about. I was going to surprise him with all four figures for his birthday, but I don't know if he can wait the 3.5 weeks. I found them online and they should all be there by the end of the week. I guess I kind of figured that Dermot would lean toward collecting since both of his parents do, but man, I never thought it would start so early and that he would be so completely engrossed by this stuff. I also never thought that Star Wars would be such a big obsession for such a little kid. The age appropriate stuff like Dora and Diego only lasted about 6 months from 2.5 to 3. Apparently Dermot is precocious in his geekiness. Part of me is frightened of what the future might hold for him if this gets worse and stranger.

A Post About Me

2008-01-09T14:45:00.000-05:00

How did it get to be Wednesday already? Geesh, time flies when you are doing nothing. Actually, I am not doing nothing, but it still kinds of feel like it. For some reason stupid blogger is not letting me us an apostrophe. So look forward to a contraction and possessive free post!

I have been writing a lot about Dermot and I now I want to write about me. Remember me? Yeah, I do not either. Ever since I had Dermot, it seems that "Dermot" or "Ethan" is in every non-work related sentence that I speak, and that is completely my own fault. I have let me and my interests disappear. I know I am not alone and that this seems to part and parcel to having preschoolers and younger kids in your home, but I do not see dads have this issue. Oh well. Here is to a new year of me. Instead of the "Summer of George", we will have the "Year of Lonna". Probably not, but if I can at least improve some things.

For example, I have been trying to read more. I used to read non-stop. I can not even tell you how much I love to read non-fiction books. In fact our Borders is closing and everything is 25% off. We spent $260 there in two trips. Wow. 60 of that was the first three Star Wars movies - but that will be a different post. I also bought books on the history or punk and cookbooks. My two favorite topics these days. For some reason I have not been into movie books lately. Maybe I can not find any that I have not read that would be interesting. You would be amazed at what I have read.

I am also scheduling all of the appointments that I put off during the last school semester. I went to the dentist today and was told that I am taking great care of my teeth...but... the dentist wants to replace some of my really old dental work. I had horrible teeth as a kid. I do not even know how many fillings I had. Now the dentist wants to replace some of them. He also wants to give me two crowns. Before insurance the cost will be $4200. Wow, and I really have okay teeth. He just wants to me to keep them. Basically fixing them now will prevent future root canals, and I am all on board for that. My root canal was a horrible experience. If I can never go through that again, that would be great. Tomorrow I get my hair cut after about 3 months. I also need to find new glasses before schools starts again. So much to do.

In other Lonna news, my weight loss had stalled, but I think that I know why. I have now lost 46 pounds! Yeah me. I am down 2-3 sizes depending up the maker of the clothes. I have even had to buy new underwear because the old ones were so uncomfortable. I am going to need new bras, but I want to wait until I have lost more weight and then go out and get a really good fitting.

The reason I think my weight loss has stalled (just for the past week) is that now that I am no longer nursing Dermot I am back on the pill. Yeah for me. This time around going onto the pill has been different that in the past. I have gone on the pill twice before and both times I had pretty severe anxiety for the first month. It all went away after my first period came and went, but the one time I actually ended up at the doctor with chest pains. It turns out that chest pains and anxiety is an unusual, but recorded, symptom of the birth control pill. This time I have had some minor anxiety, but I have been able to keep it under control. Maybe it was not so bad this time since I was expecting. I do, however, think that the pill may have gotten in the way of my weight loss. I know that a lot of my normal-weight friends gained some weight when they went on the pill. I also know that it can be associated with water gain and bloating. So I think that I just needed to get over the hurdle. On the other hand, I am so excited about having much shorter, much lighter, and less painful periods. Yeah for the pill!

Well that's it for me. More Bean Spot family news in the next post. Not surprisingly, I have lots going on with Dermot.

Holiday Recap

2008-01-03T10:53:00.000-05:00

Hello and welcome to 2008! May this year be happier and healthier for all of us.

The holiday season at the Bean Spot was a big old blur. I had to work right up until Christmas and I didn't have any time to actually enjoy getting ready for Christmas. Oh well. I think that I need to learn to plan better. We went to Ethan's parents' house the Sunday before Christmas and we had a lovely time catching up and planning for the big day. Poor Dermot was so excited that he had trouble behaving, but that's part of Christmas for little kids, right? Sunday night some of Ethan's high school friends came over (Chris F and his new wife and Chris Z and his wife and 18 month old daughter and 4.5 year old son). It was nice to see them and see how everyone was doing. Dermot, however, did not want guests to come over and he certainly did not want to share Nana's toys with the two other kids even though there were plenty of toys.

Christmas Eve Dermot got really upset and said that he wanted to go home. I asked him why and he couldn't really say it, but I got the feeling that he thought that his presents were back at our house. I told Dermot that we brought his gifts with us, but that they were hidden. I knew that if we left them out that he would open them. That's just too much to ask of a 3 year old. This cheered Dermot up immensely. We then decided that he could open one gift. Unfortunately for Dermot, we chose the gift. He wanted us to let him open his Lego Star Wars game for the Wii, but I didn't want him to open a gift he couldn't use at his grandparents' house and they had bought it for him, not us. So Dermot had to make due with his Ghost Freak figure.

The next day Dermot was so excited that he got to open his gifts right away. He's such a funny kid. He thought that his Christmas list was like a grocery list instead of a wish list. He truly expected to get everything. So he opened everything - all toys, none of that clothing or useful stuff and then he said "Where's Dora Candyland?" So then we had to explain to him two things. One, he still had more gifts coming from his aunt and uncle and his great aunt and great uncle. Two, that he may not get everything that he asked for. So then Aunt Paula showed up and Dermot did get his Dora Candyland, which of course, he has played exactly once. He's too busy playing his three new Wii games. Dermot was also disappointed at first that he got some books for Christmas, but that's one tradition that I am going to stick by. My parents started getting me at least one book a year starting around 6th or 7th grade and I truly do value that. They bought me hard cover books from Stephen King (junior high), Kurt Vonnegut (high school and college), and Ann Rice (college). I just inhaled books when I was younger. I want Dermot to understand the value of books. So I bought him a really funny book about losing body parts (like hair, teeth, and dry skin). Dermot's entered the classic boy gross stage and I thought that he would like this book. He also got two really nice books from his aunt and uncle (the librarians:)

Then Dermot spent the rest of Christmas playing all crazy with his Uncle Derik. Dermot can really tire you out when he wants to. Poor Derik was chasing Dermot around and letting Dermot ride on his back like an elephant (Dermot's choice of animal instead of piggy back, I guess). Dermot just loves to run around and scream. I think that's his second favorite thing to do after playing video games. Finally Uncle Derik got a break when he and Aunt Lianne had to leave for Christmas Dinner at her family's house. Dermot then was so wired that anything and everything triggered screaming or crying. Oh the indignities that poor child suffered. We left for home the next morning and didn't really accomplish much before Dermot and Ethan went back to daycare/work in the 2nd.

In fact, I have a question for you beloved interweb. I've been trying to figure out a tradition for New Year's that fits our family. I don't remember my family doing much. We had an indoor grill at my parents' house, so I'm pretty sure that we had steak (ugh) for our main meal, and I know that when I was older we used to either go to a movie or we'd rent a bunch of movies, but I don't remember New Years from when I was kid. Dermot had a really hard time understanding the concept of a new year, since time is not readily grasped by little kids. I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll do First Night type of stuff, but around here it was for older kids. The fireworks were actually at midnight and there's no way that Dermot could make it that long or that we'd want him to stay up that long. What do your families do for New Year's Eve or New Year's Day? What did your families do when you were young?

Happy Belated Birthday To Me

2007-12-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

I had been hoping to write about this earlier, but finals week has been eating away at my life. Today is my first break, so here goes. Saturday, December 15th was my 38th birthday. I don't feel 38 at all. In fact the term "almost 40" just doesn't feel like it relates to me at all. And I mean that in a good way. I still feel mentally like I'm in my late 20s early 30s. Maybe it's because I'm surrounded by young adults all day. Or maybe it's because I was in school and out of the "real world" for so long. I don't know. Age is just a number and you are what you feel and all that good stuff.

Anyway, here's the best part. Ethan worked so hard to make my birthday special and everything went off without a hitch. I have a great, sneaky husband:) The first thing he did was that he bought me a PDA for my birthday, but he had it sent to a friends' house so that I didn't know about it. We had talked about PDAs early last year, but then we never brought them up again. Since I work on two different campuses it's hard for me know when to schedule meetings. My calendar is on Outlook and it's only on my office computer while most of my meetings take place at the other campus. So this way I will know when I am available, especially since the number of meetings I will be in next semester has just increased by a ton.

Secondly, Ethan secretly arranged for my best friend Daniel and his partner, Michael, to come out from Manhattan. Ethan made a big deal about how we had to leave the house by 11:15 to go out for Thai food for lunch. I knew that something was up, but not exactly what. Then we turned left instead of right on the way to the restaurant. We ended up at the train station where we met Danny and Michael. Best birthday gift ever! I never get to see Danny enough, and I hadn't seen Michael since I interviewed for my job in May of '06. Although their presence was by far enough, Danny also brought me a book that he bought in London. It's all about the making of Joy Division's first album. It should be very interesting.

Dermot also gave me what I asked for. I told Dermot that all I wanted from him for my birthday was for him to follow directions. He was a little shaky in the morning. I think that he was jealous that it wasn't his birthday, but I told him that he could share mine. Then things got better. He was actually wonderful at the restaurant. I was really very proud of him. Michael even commented on how good Dermot was for being one three year old among 4 adults at a Thai restaurant. I also told Dermot that I wanted lots of kisses and hugs and he kept that part of the deal too. What a sweet kid.

Now that I have finished all of my online course finals stuff, I am off to wrap Dermot's Christmas presents. That's what prep days are for in the life of a working mom.

In weight news. I am one pound away from losing all of the weight I put on from that damn Zoloft. I've lost 39 pounds and not a single person (other than Ethan) has said a thing about it. I actually finally went out and bought clothes the next size down. Yeah for me. I'm also just at the point where some of my bigger clothes actually hang on me and make me look even bigger. I can't wear some of the largest stuff I had. Wow. I forgot how weird it was to outgrow clothes going down instead of going up.

Nothing

2007-12-11T18:36:00.000-05:00

Hello. I feel like I have nothing to say right now, but hello. This is the last week before finals week and I am busy, busy, busy. I have had to write 5 final exams. I have been busy finishing up committee work and I have a lot of grading ahead of me. It times like this when I feel that I should take the easy way out and only give multiple choice tests. But no, I'm the idiot who makes all of my students write. Which is a great idea until I have to grade all of it:)

Anyway, enough about work. It's my mind way too much these days. Let's talk about Santa instead. 'Tis the season and all of that. Dermot told Ethan today that one of his teachers told him that Santa wasn't going to bring him any presents because he was bad. Granted, Dermot was bad, but we've stressed to him that he's getting presents no matter what. We buy the presents because we love him. Santa is made up. He's not getting the Santa as myth thing, but he's certainly getting the idea that he's getting gifts no matter what. The worse part is that this is the second teacher who told him that. WTF? This is MY kid. Don't you threaten him with your beliefs. What makes me more angry is that I taught Early Childhood Education for 3 years at Iowa State. I consistently stressed, as did my colleagues, the idea that you can't have culturally biased treatment of kids. For all they know we celebrate Hanukkah. There's no reason to assume that buy into Santa or celebrate Christmas. I would have failed these people and they do have B.S.s in Early Childhood. They should know better.

In happier news, Dermot is really getting into the spirit this Christmas. He's been watching old Christmas specials and falling in love. It started with the original Rudolph move with the misfit toys. He's already got Rudolph and Bumbles. Santa and Boss Elf are on their way later this week. He even plays with them. Quite often he wants action figures and then they just sit in box. These he's really using. Then we saw the original Frosty last Friday and he loved that. We recorded it and he has asked to see it again. I also recorded the year without a santa clause, because it's my favorite, but I haven't been able to convince him to see it yet. I just know he'll fall in love with heat miser like his mom did. The miser brothers are just so freaking cool.

Well off to teach. My work is apparently never done!

Love Fest

2007-12-03T13:19:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to blog about this for a while, but something else kept getting in the way or seemed more important to get into text. My little boy is turning into the biggest little love bug. Ethan and I have always been very verbal towards Dermot about how much we love. I probably say it a million times a day, and I say it in many different ways.

I love you my little monkey
You're the best
You're so cute I just want to eat you
Come here little sweetie
Etc.

Well Dermot has picked up on all of this and now he gives it back to us. He tells me that I'm pretty, that a cutie, that I'm a sweetie. He will hug me and yell how much he loves me. He's completely giving with the love.

The funny part of it is that for 3 years I beat myself up. Dermot was a source of such personal pain (all self-induced). I beat myself up for having a C-section, I beat myself up for having him on half mama's milk and half formula for 3 months. Then I beat myself up because I put him in daycare. Then I wasn't a good enough mother for whatever reason I chose to beat myself up with. I know that I'm not alone. Many of us do this. What I didn't expect is that Dermot himself would be the one who changed all of that. I never thought that this child would turn out to be a source of my own self-esteem. I figured that I would always be "not good enough". But when he says these incredibly sweet things to me, I find myself believing them. He's the most amazing child.

I also wanted to let everyone know that Dermot seems to have finally gotten a lot of things "together" for lack of a better word. For months this kids has been a total nut case on weekends. He wouldn't follow directions, he was aggressive, you name it. But for the last 6-8 weeks, he's been really good. Like really good. Of course, yesterday he took some steps backward, but I think it was the weather and being cooped up after the snow. Typically, he's a real fun who only occasionally needs some correction. So, based on my case study (sample of one) kids are nuts and drive you nuts until they are almost 4.

In other, psychological news, Dermot told me that he wants to marry me. It was the funniest thing I have heard in a long time. To make it better, I had just taught about Freud's phallic stage (ages 3-6) and the Oedipal complex last week in all three of my intro classes. What great timing.

Onto food news. This weekend I made split pea soup. I had been craving it and it was so good. In fact, I have some for lunch today. YUM. I used a recipe from a cook book, but basically it's just split peas, water, diced potato, diced carrot, diced sweet potato (which was new to me an worked wonderfully), and spices.

In regards to Nicole's comment about chopping veggies. Yes, we do spend a lot of time chopping veggies, but I can do it in between other things. That or sometimes I'll do some and then Ethan will do some. You can buy frozen stuff, but I just don't like it. We've gotten to the point where I don't really think about atypical it is that we chop up fresh veggies for a lot of our meals. Once you get used to it, that's just the way you do it. Plus, I don't have to worry about defrosting meat or cleaning it or cutting it up, either. I only have the veggies to worry about.

Vegan Thanksgiving

2007-11-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

Hello. How was everyone's Thanksgiving? I hope that it went well. Ours was a much more muted affair than it was originally scheduled to be. But that's okay. We had planned on staying at our house for Thanksgiving and then going to Ethan's parents' house on Friday. This way we could see Ethan's older brother, his wife, and Dermot's cousin on Friday and Uncle Derik and Aunt Lianne on Saturday. Well nature had other plans for us. I got really sick. So we stayed home the whole time. I actually canceled class Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, I had to teach Tuesday night since they have a test tonight and I only see them once a week. I should have canceled my Wednesday classes, but I gave a test in the afternoon and I had specifically told my morning class that there would be class on Wednesday (plenty of other professors canceled class). So then I woke up on Thursday with a serious head cold. And to top that off, I also got my period Thursday morning. So I had cramps all day, muscle aches, a head ache, burning eyes, and a runny/stuffy nose. I was just miserable. I even ended up going to the doctor on Friday. Of course, he told me I just had a bad cold and I would probably have symptoms for 2-3 more days. He was right, but it put me in a foul mood.

Anyway, back to food. What do vegans eat for Thanksgiving? We decided against a Tofurkey because Ethan thought they had too much fat in them. How about that? He's totally jumped on the McDougall bandwagon with me. So we had a fat free vegan holiday meal. Wow. We had tofu cubes cook in a little bit of garlic powder and soy sauce, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, gravy, and Ethan made stuffing. Yummy. We had enough for two extra meals. I could live on mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes. I swear. Since I was sick there was no dessert. Dermot, of course, wanted none of what we made and he had leftovers. Crazy kid. He's living on my version of this vegan mac 'n' cheese recipe.

I am actually going to talk about food some more. I have had the hardest time figuring out how to candy carrots and sweet potatoes without fat. I grew up with brown sugar and butter and then when I went vegan brown sugar and margarine. But that's a lot of fat when you are eating fat free. I tried just brown sugar and it ended up at the bottom on the pan. There was absolutely no sugar on the carrots I made. So then I tried something else that worked like a charm. This won't help most non-vegan people, but if any vegans stumble across this here's what I figured out. I mix equal amount of agave nectar and brown sugar. The agave nectar is fat free and it's also low on the glycemic index, but it also allows the brown sugar to stick to the carrots or sweet potatoes. I could probably use brown rice syrup or maybe even real maple syrup, but I like that the agave nectar doesn't have a real strong taste of its own. Yummy. Ethan and I could not get enough of the sweet potatoes and I made a lot.

In other food news I created a new recipe last night and it was pretty good. I'll see how well it does as a leftover later today. First I sauteed (in water) half an onion and one clove garlic. My spices were a little too light, so next time I will increase this to 2-3 cloves of garlic and maybe a little bit more onion. Once they were soft, I added in diced carrots (pretty small cubes). Probably about 1.5 cups. I don't measure anything. I added more water to this and covered it in order to cook the carrots. After about 5 minutes I added a can of chickpeas. I cooked this with a lid for 5 more minutes. Then I took the lid off and let the water boil off. In another pan I put in veggie broth, cumin, salt, turmeric, cinnamon, and nutmeg (all of these need to be increased. I brought that to a boil and then added couscous. Put on a lid, take it off the heat and let it sit for 7 minutes. Then I mixed the couscous mixture and the chickpea/carrot mixture. Yum Yum Yum. We ended up adding more salt at the table. It was also good with some extra curry powder and cumin. I was craving chickpeas and couscous.

I haven't lost much weight because of my stupid period and the water gain I get from that, but I'm at 30 over all. In fact, I when I was at the doctor's office they weighed me, and I have officially lost 26 pounds. Yeah for me. I knew that my 30 pounds (31 today) was inflated because I'm dressed at the doctor's office and it's later in the day compared to my naked, first thing in the morning home weigh-ins, so I was happy that it was so much. This is about 3 pounds a week on average. I would be doing better if I would exercise a little. Baby steps. Exercise will be coming.

Countdown to Thanksgiving

2007-11-18T20:56:00.000-05:00

I am starting off with yet another apology. I am sorry that I didn't post last week. Things have been nuts at work. Apparently everybody is trying to get everything in before Thanksgiving Break, which is way too short, by the way. I have had meetings and more meetings. Here's my schedule for tomorrow:

9:00 meet with student
9:30 give early exams
10:20 give exam
11:45 give make up exam
noon to 1 office hours
1-2 meet with student
2-3 eat lunch and get to main campus (1/2 hour minimum drive)
3:00 important meeting about courses and changes
4:00 meet with chair of my department
Hopefully I will be out of there by 4:30

Now, when am I supposed to write the three lectures I have left for this semester? Sigh. I'm so busy with meetings that I can't get the basic teacher stuff down. I have actually had to schedule when I grade things into my calendar and even when I print things out, so that I don't forget anything. Wow. Being anal means that everything will get done, but wow, am I losing time to the organization process.

To make it worse, Dermot and Ethan were both sick last week and I wasn't able to do much about it. Ethan stayed home on Tuesday since that's my 8:30AM to 9:30PM day. Ethan was also sick, but I don't know if he would have stayed home if it weren't for Dermot. Dermot ended up at the doctor because he was coughing really badly and he was scared because he was having some trouble breathing. The doctor tested him for strep (negative) and said that something serious must be going on. So Dermot got some antibiotics and they helped him right away. He had actually lost his voice for two days. It was so sad. It was also frustrating because he kept whispering. Ethan had taken Wednesday off as a vacation day to work around the house and he didn't get to do a thing with Dermot around. It felt really awful not taking care of them. Thank goodness Ethan's a great, involved dad. I know that some women don't feel that they can leave their preschoolers home with dad. I am certainly not in that camp.

Yesterday one of Ethan's college friends came over. It was nice to see him, but Dermot was a little nuts. Ethan and Jamie went out to lunch by themselves for some adult/catch up talk. This also meant that they could go to any restaurant instead of being stuck with the three that Dermot will tolerate. Dermot and I also went to CVS to get our prescriptions. Fun times for us! Then once we were all back home Dermot just couldn't leave Jamie alone. He wanted to show him all of his toys and he wanted the two of them to do all sorts of things. Dermot gets so overstimulated when we have company. In fact, I think there was a little left over today. He was mostly good, but man, did he have some crappy times today. All we accomplished today was a trip to Whole Foods.

I actually have several updates, too, now that I'm thinking about it. First, I have almost lost 30 pounds from my highest weight. My 29 pounds might be a little exaggerated, but it still feels good to me. Second, I think that Dermot is weaned. Who knew? Actually, I pushed it. He had been down to every other day for weeks. I also kept mentioning that someday he would no longer nurse. Eventually he began to agree with me. Then one day he said that he would stop on Friday. So I made him keep his word. He was not pleased with me come Sunday when it was my turn to sleep with him again. He said that he meant that he would stop just on that one Friday. I told him too bad. So he asked last night, and I said no. He whined for a while, but then he just dropped it. I actually felt bad that I weaned him the weekend before he got sick. I know that mama's milk would have helped him feel better and even get better a little bit, but I was not about to back track. Ethan says he's a little sad, but I don't feel anything at all. I was totally ready. He doesn't need it. He gets nutrition from other places, cuddling constantly, and fluids from other places. He even rubs our thumbs when he's tired to help himself fall asleep. There's nothing about nursing that he can't get in other ways. Our next task is to work on him falling asleep by himself, but I'm going to let him get used to being weaned first. Finally, the boy actually slept past 8am both mornings this weekend. It's a miracle!

Voting Day

2007-11-07T07:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was voting day in New Jersey. We voted for state assembly and state senate, but we also voted on 4 state wide initiatives. One of them would allow the state to fund stem cell research. I voted yes on it, and I had hoped that it would pass here in New Jersey, but apparently not. But here's what gets me. I read this in the New York Times this morning:

resounding 53-47

Am I crazy or is 53 percent to 47 percent (6 percentage points) not resounding? I don't think that the only close outcome is 51 to 49. I consider 53 to 47 pretty close too. Stupid media.

Oh, yeah we also voted to take the word "idiot" out of our constitution. Welcome to the 21st century. Before now we were able to prevent "idiots" from voting. Now people "who have been
adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of
voting” shall not be able to vote. That's much better.

Lousy Week in Just Two Days!

2007-11-06T22:46:00.000-05:00

Tuesdays are my bad days at work. I get up at 6 AM. I am out the door between 7:30 and 8:00 depending upon how dawdling I feel like being. Then I teach a small intro class at 8:55 and a small Child psych class at 10:20. Then I'm out of class at 11:45, but I have office hours, which are enforced and I actually do hold, from noon to 1. Then I usually have meetings in the afternoon. Today it was an educational technology meeting. We talked about online courses and distance learning and our email system, etc. Then I gave 2 make up exams at 4:30. Then I had office hours from 6-7. Then I get to end my day with a large, Intro class from 7:05PM - 9:35PM. I am wiped.

But to make it worse today, just a lot of stupid things happened that didn't need to happen. I initiated some conversations where I should have just bit my tongue. I also gave tests back and that's usually an unpleasant situation. Even worse I let students know where they stood since it's a little after midterms at our school. I told them the letter grade that I would assign to them if I had to give out grades. That, for some reason, can be a real big shocker to some students. I don't know why. I post all of my grades on the web so they can see how they are doing. But I think that seeing a letter instead of numbers just resonates more with them. So now they are begging for extra credit. Wondering what I can do for them. When really the only answer that they have is that they need to study more and better. I think that many students it's not necessarily the time they don't spend, but that is some of it. I think that it's mainly that they don't know how to get material into their head so that they can get it out later. Studying is an art, but it can be taught.

Anyway, I came home feeling lousy. Even worse I don't see things getting much better. I need some sort of Fall break like we get Spring break. All we get this semester is the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving. That's not exactly a relaxing break. I need 2-3 days by myself - alone. Then maybe I could decompress.

My semester's not even over until Friday, December 21. So that doesn't give me any down time before the holidays kick in. I think that I'm at a point where I'm just looking forward to January 2. How sad is that?

In other crappy news I only lost 1 pound last week. I'm doing everything right. Believe me I am taking in fewer calories than I am using. I am eating very healthy, low calorie, low fat foods. I'm very good at not eating bad stuff. I am lousy with moderation, but I can cut things out completely. So I've been staying on track. But I still only lost 1 pound. We'll see how things go this week. I'm sure that I need to add exercise to what I'm doing, but I was hoping to lose a little more weight before I went there. I'm heavy enough that exercising is pretty unpleasant. When there's a little less of me, it won't be so bad. Sigh. Why can't this stuff be easy. Weight is so very easy to put on for most of us and yet it's such a bitch to get rid of.

Anyway, it's finally time to put my tired feet and bones to bed.

Busy, Busy, Busy

2007-10-30T18:39:00.000-04:00

Sorry for not writing last week. There was so much to do. It seems like fall and Halloween are making a lot of us in the blog world a little crazy. I was actually able to get a little bit ahead at work. Yeah for me. I pushed myself really hard last week and I'm now a little over a week ahead. But that can always change very quickly once assignments get turned in. In fact my 7th class started today. What am I thinking? It's online, but it's also twice as fast. Anyway, enough of my complaining.

Last week we had two big events. Friday was Dermot's daycare Halloween parade. So freakin' cute. I'll post pictures when I have a chance. Probably later tonight when I get home from my night class around 10 PM. Dermot was a scary ghost. I know, I cheated and bought the costume, but he really wanted it. I was going to do the whole white sheet thing, but he really liked the costume. I also found some white paint which really helped complete the costume. His class consisted of different types of princesses, a race car driver, two pirates, Diego, a dinosaur, and a cowboy. They had the day planned so that the kids got a special lunch, got dressed, paraded, and then they had a shit load of sugar as part of a little "party". Parents were invited from the lunch through to the party. I showed up half way through the lunch and helped get Dermot dressed. Then there was a very quick parade because it was cold and drizzling. Ethan showed up right when the parade started. Then he came in and we got Dermot undressed and we stayed for the party a little bit. Then all the kids fell apart because there were no naps and their parents were leaving. Great planning. Of course the kids were a mess. Geesh. Plan things better people. But no it's the same every year. Anyway, I had the rest of the afternoon off, so I took Dermot home with me.

Dermot is very weird at these things, and I don't know if it's us, his eating habits or something else. When he has these classroom get togethers, he won't leave us. He's not clingy, but it's as if he just prefers our company. I know that Dermot is very social. He's always doing things with all of his classmates. He has his favorites, but he will play with all of them. He's more social than Ethan or I ever were. So I don't know if he feels different because he couldn't eat the donut holes, cookies, granola bars, or cupcakes. Although he doesn't really like the vegan versions of that stuff either. I really think that he just misses us. I think I'm going to not worry about it:)

The other big event was company. Ethan's parents came to visit Sunday. Dermot was a total nut case because he was so excited. I think that he showed Nana and PopPop every single toy that he owns. We went out for Thai food and that was very pleasant. With my new way of eating, however, I basically had soup. Granted, I love love love Tom Yum soup, but I wasn't prepared for that. I was going to eat what Dermot didn't eat of his meal (tofu and fried rice), but it was way too greasy for me. Dermot really wanted to go to Nana and PopPop's house instead of them coming to see us, but I think that he was happy that he got to see them. It had been longer than usual since we last saw them.

Well off to give another exam.