Five More Things About Me

I have been tagged! By Meredith! Yea! I feel special! Okay, five things you don't know about me. Um. Hm. This is the place I come to talk about things I don't talk about with my friends and family. So you already know the deep dark secrets that people in "real life" don't know. But I'll try to make it interesting anyway.

1) I almost majored in music. I was a clarinet player back in the day and loved marching band in high school. (Insert obligatory joke about one time at band camp.) I even played in the concert band in college my first two semesters Not having majored in music is not one of my life's great regrets, though. I don't have the discipline to practice long hours, and although I was talented for my piddly little high school, I was not talented enough to pursue a career in music.

2) I had a hemangioma removed from my neck when I was four. It was only about the size of a strawberry, but it kept bleeding because the necklines of my shirts would rub on it. I can still remember being taken in for the surgery to have my "mole" removed. I called the plastic surgeon "the mole doctor" and used to answer every question he asked me with a robust shake of the head so I could feel my long ponytails whip around and hit my face.

3) I used to write poetry and even gave several (slow and stuttered) readings in college. I've written nothing but prose for a while now, though. I'm not sure why.

4) When I was a kid, I had a pony. My dad raises horses, and we lived out in the country, so it wasn't that out of the ordinary. I rode all the time until I was seven or eight when I was thrown. I wasn't hurt badly, but it scared me, and I never felt comfortable on a horse after that.

5) In the seventh grade, I wrote numerous shameless love letters (all G-rated, mind you) to a high school senior. Sheesh. My face still burns when I think about how bold and stupid I was. It was as close to stalking as one could come in paper form. That was my first real crush. I was sure it was true love, even though I had never actually met the boy face to face. And, hey, I just realized how funny it is that I never truly gave up the art of wooing men with writing. I did meet my husband online, after all.

Anyone who wants to be tagged and hasn't already been, I invite you to tag yourselves! Be bold! Don't sit around and wait! Just grab the bull by the horns! Shout, "Carpe diem!" Take charge! Go forth -- okay, you get the picture.

And the Verdict Is . . .

Mold. The wee one is allergic to mold. You'll excuse me if I fail to swoon from the shock. After all, I believe I've been bitching about our wet basement for nearly a year now. I had narrowed her problem down to allergies or enlarged adenoids. The allergist has confirmed the former with the scratch test (which looked more like a poke test to me) and is sending L. for an X-ray to see about the latter.

The doctor recommended many things in addition to the two medications he put her on. He said we need to scrub the basement walls with anti-mold stuff or a bleach and water solution. He recommended an air cleaner and additional dehumidifiers and a hygrometer to monitor the humidity in the house. He recommended an exhaust fan be added to our bathroom. Oh, yeah, and he said we really need to try to get the basement guys to come fix our basement sooner if possible. I spent the afternoon researching air cleaners, bathroom fans, and mold cleaners.

My mom called later to ask about the appointment. I relayed the saga of our 2 1/2 hour visit to the allergist, including a detailed description of the two, count them two, poops my daughter made during the visit, my son's pre-appointment screaming fit, and his subsequent kind and loving brotherly behavior during the "scratch test" that sent L. into screaming fits despite the thirty-dollar numbing cream for which we had sprung. And then I told my mother at length about the two medicines the doctor prescribed and about all of his recommendations for decreasing the mold in the house.

"So I suppose you're going to try the medicines and that's all?" my mother said.

Well, actually, Mom, my first order of business is to knit her a scarf of mold. And I shall cover her bed with the moldy dust from under the oak leaves in the woods behind the house. And I'm working on mold earmuffs, and even a little mold pillow sprinkled with soft and dainty spores upon which she may rest her wee head. Oh, and we're moving her bedroom to the basement.

Furrowing my brow in confusion, I told her no, of course we are planning to get the air filter and the fan, and we are going to scrub scrub scrub. She sounded surprised -- you know, as if we were too cheap and lazy for such efforts. Because she's just our kid, after all.

My mom makes me laugh. Sort of. Nervously, sometimes.

But anyway, L. was still nursing all the little needle pricks on her arm and especially the giant welt that the mold scratch left near her right wrist. She refused to get in the bathtub tonight, pointing out her booboos as an obvious defense. Because clearly, what kind of monster would ask her to bathe with such terrible wounds? I am no such monster, as it turns out, and instead I let her sit on my lap while I washed her as best I could, stopping to kiss the giant mold booboo whenever she held it up to me. Which was often.

Since the scratch test and the bath had already proven traumatic today, I decided to enlist my husband's help in giving her her first dose of the new nasal spray the doctor prescribed. I mean, really, anything stuck up a toddler's nose is just not going to be easy. And here's how it went:

Me: "Okay, this medicine goes in your nose. It might feel a little weird. Ready?"

L: "Yeah."

Me: Squirt.

L: Blink blink.

Me: "Ready for the other side?"

L: "Yeah."

Me: Squirt.

L: Blink blink.

Hm. So she's a huffer. Forget the mold earmuffs. I'm making a tiny little mold inhaler so the spores can go directly up her wee nose. Because I'm cheap and lazy like that.

December Dilemma

My son goes to a preschool that's run by a church. We chose the school because some other families at the synagogue had sent their children there -- there's no Jewish preschool in the area -- and had good things to say about it. The school receives state funding for at least one of its programs, so they keep the proselytizing out of the classroom. Christmas, however, at least in its secular form, is, of course, explored and celebrated extensively. This is my son's first time really dealing with the Christmas season and being an outsider to it all. While we do go to my parents' house for Christmas and "help them celebrate," we observe only the Jewish holidays in our home.

Because I'm not Jewish myself and have no childhood memories of Hanukkah, I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to dealing with all of S.'s questions. He wants to know why the clerks at the store keep asking him about Santa. He wants to know more about Santa. He wants to know why his grandma and grandpa don't give him gifts at Hanukkah but give him gifts on Christmas instead. It's all so complicated. I think I've done pretty well with most of his questions, but the last one, about gifts on Christmas, is more tricky. I would really like it if my folks gave the kids at least one of their gifts on Hanukkah and wrapped the others in Hanukkah or generic paper. However, it's not so simple when we haven't been doing it that way all along. Three weeks before Christmas might not be the time to change the rules on them. And besides, it's not just my parents. There's my extended family, too, and I have a problem with telling other people how to wrap or refer to gifts that they choose to buy for my children. I always thought it wouldn't be a big deal. I mean, gifts are gifts. But now that we're getting these questions, I'm thinking maybe we've been doing this wrong.

I have to admit it makes me feel uncomfortable and a little guilty when I hear him sing Christmas songs. He's learning (and the emphasis should be on the ing, for clearly that learning is incomplete) some Christmas songs at school. Last week he was singing, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, all a sudden way." I have no idea what that meant in his little head. His lyrics were so weird and so totally him that I couldn't bring myself to correct them, though. After school today, he sang it again, his earlier error now corrected, and yet, it was oh-so-far from accurate. Now it sounds something like, "Jingle bells, jingle bells. Jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride -- one whore, us, and sleigh!" That one we might have to correct, but not until after my husband gets home and hears it. I'm not messing with it until then!

I guess, as a non-Jewish mom, I'm always worrying that my kids will be "less Jewish" than the other kids at synagogue. It's one thing if a child of two Jewish parents, or even the child of a Jewish mother and a gentile father, sings a Christmas carol. But it seems somehow more noticeable when my kids do it. I'm always afraid they won't be "Jewish enough."

And yet my son, after watching my husband light his father's yahrzeit candle recently, today pretended to light a candle and began to recite his own made-up Kaddish. It sounded distinctly Hebrew and even had a few real Hebrew words thrown in, along with an occasional English word like died. The rhythm of the language is in him. And clearly, when he does things like this, I see that he is part of something much bigger, much older, than this family.

I'm hoping a few Christmas carols and a little Santa wrapping paper can't take that away.

Evaluation, Take Two

The early intervention speech therapist, whom I will call P., came this morning for L.'s informal speech evaluation. She happens to work with the woman who conducted the formal (expensive) evaluation, and she had gotten some basic information from her last week. After that, P. called me and said that from what the original evaluator said, L. probably would not qualify for early intervention services. She went on to tell me about normal speech disfluencies and how they are different from genuine stuttering. The call upset me, partly because I felt they thought I was crazy or stupid, and partly because it worried me to think that L. would be denied professional help when her father and I knew that her speech was not normal. Fortunately, P. has since changed her mind and believes L. will qualify after all.

When P. arrived today, she said she just this morning had spoken with the initial evaluator, who told her that she had (finally) viewed the speech sample tape I gave her. L.'s speech on the tape was "significantly different" from her speech in the clinical setting. I could've told her that, and in fact, I did when I gave it to her. Gee, I'm glad she finally decided to watch it. Anyway, after doing whatever fluency-counting test they do on the clinical sample and the video tape samples, she told P. that L.'s stuttering was mild in the clinical setting and moderate to severe on the videotape. Finally. Confirmation of what we already knew. P. listened to her speak some today and noted several disfluencies herself, including some occurring in the middles of sentences rather than just on the initial sounds. That, she says, concerned her. The secondary behaviors also were a "red flag," she said.

It sounds awful to say this, but I am so relieved -- relieved that someone else has seen the problem and can shoulder some of the responsibility with us. I knew L.'s disfluencies were significant. Now that we have that out of the way, we can get on with the business of helping her improve her speech and/or become comfortable enough with speaking the way she does that it does not interfere with her life.

Although I liked the initial evaluator pretty well, I like P. even better. She has a son who stutters and -- I didn't know this until our meeting this morning -- a father who stutters severely. When I answered the door this morning, she said, "I'm P. You must be M." It's the little things like that. The little things like gracefully taking away the pressure of introducing myself. She didn't do it in a condescending way, either, just in a natural way. The way someone would if she had lived with stutterers her whole life.

She also was able to detect L.'s disfluencies when she was across the room playing with her brother and P. and I were conversing. I was impressed that P. would stop what she was saying and listen attentively to the kids' conversation in order to pick up some of L.'s disfluencies. She has a good ear for this kind of thing. In the initial evaluation, I was repeatedly frustrated that I could hear L. stuttering while the evaluator was talking to me and seemed absolutely oblivious to the "evidence" right there before her. I hadn't wanted to interrupt her to say, "Listen! She's doing it now!" Today, with P., I didn't have to.

When P. left, she seemed absolutely sure that L. would qualify for early intervention. She seems to think that while L. is too young to start the Lidcombe program, there are aspects of it we could do. She didn't elaborate too much but will do so in our first meeting after the L.'s eligibility/IFSP meeting next week, I am sure.

Finally, one of the best things P. told me was a story about her son, who is in elementary school. He was in speech therapy for his stuttering for several years, and now that he is old enough to really express his opinions and talk about speech, he is saying that his stuttering, his blocks, don't bother him. He stutters fairly severely but doesn't let it get in his way. They eventually dropped the speech therapy because he just wasn't interested. She was afraid the story would be a downer for me since it didn't have a fluent happy ending. It was quite the opposite. Her son's story reminds me that even though blocks and severe stuttering episodes were very upsetting to me when I was young, they might not be to every person who experiences them. Her son has an attitude that I didn't begin to have until I was in my twenties. Perhaps the influence of a grandfather who stutters and a mother who respects and understands stutterers is part of what made his attitude so different from mine. I can't fix L.'s speech for her, but I think I can influence her attitude about it. And attitude is more important than fluency anyway.