Half Changed World

Last week, I discovered BackpackIt, a nifty web utility that lets you share lists, files, and notes.  The lists include check-off boxes, which means that this might be a solution to the endless problem of how do two (or more) people share a to-do list.  T. and I are giving it a try, and we’ll see how it goes.  I think the free level is plenty for us, but if someone would develop a way to sync the lists with HandyShopper, I’d be willing to pay for it. 

For sharing calendars, we use the low-tech solution of a whiteboard hanging in the kitchen, which we try to update every Sunday night.  It’s not perfect — T. totally forgot about a dentist appointment a few weeks ago, in spite of the fact that it was written in clear letters — but it serves the main purpose of making sure that we don’t both plan on doing kid-free activities at the same time.

For such a basic set of issues, faced by pretty much every family, you’d think there would be a better solution.  But we haven’t found it yet.  Recommendations are welcome.

From Jo(e), via Phantom Scribbler:

We showed Star Wars to D this week.  He’s still a bit young for it, but T has been waiting for this since he was born.  If you asked T what he was most looking forward to as a father, watching Star Wars with his child was pretty high up on the list.

It’s not exactly a subtle movie, so D quickly caught on that the guys in the white armor were bad (except for when the good guys are pretending to be bad), and the guy in the black suit was really bad.  He loved the lightsaber duels and the x-wing fighters and only really got scared during the trash compactor scene.  So now his fantasy games include such crossovers as the Powerpuff Girls v. Darth Vader.

We haven’t seen Episode III yet.  T isn’t sure he wants to see it, having been so badly burned by Episode I.  I’m willing to give it a shot, based on the reviews I’ve been hearing, and if I’m going to see it at all, I want to see it on a big screen.  (Neither of us saw Episode II.)  Maybe when the lines die down at the Uptown…

Our house doesn’t have a porch, and the front step is just high enough to be a nuisance for strollers and wheelchairs, not high enough to really sit on.  But it turns out to be the perfect height for two small boys to sit on.

No real post tonight, because I’ve been futzing around figuring out how to use my new Palm as a MP3 player.  (My old one was about 7 years old, and had taken to draining its batteries and losing all of its data without warning, making it worse than useless.)

Now, if I can only convince the _____s who are in charge of our tech support to install the upgraded Palm software on my work computer.  (They’ve imposed a policy under which no users are given the permissions to install any software on our own machines.)

My in-laws are visiting, and we took advantage of the extra hands to do some long-overdue home maintenance.  Today we fixed the kitchen light fixture, moved the fridge so we could clean behind and under it (for the first time since we moved in almost 8 years ago), and disconnected and moved the washer/dryer so we could attempt to clean the dryer vent (it’s going to need professional help).  I’m too zonked to write a thoughtful post.  Instead, I’m going to get into bed and read Jaran, which I got out of the library following Jody’s recommendation.

Home from New York.  We had a good time — ate some wonderful matzoh ball soup, caught up with some old friends, ran along the great new riverfront path on the West Side, visited the dinosaurs, and attended the Blog Sheroes meetup.

Nichelle liveblogged the event, including links to all of the attendees’ blogs.  I see that Lindsay (Majikthise), Elayne (Pen-Elayne), and Carolyn (Instructions to the Double) have already posted about it as well.  I was a little intimidated walking into the place, but soon felt very welcome.  (And the place wasn’t as terminally hip as I had feared.)  Topics of conversation included how we got into blogging, shoes, how many of us were high school or college debaters, animation, mutilated Barbies, our freaking cute kids, academia, and birth stories. 

Back, tired and happy, from a terrific overnight camping trip with D, courtesy of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club.  D is totally obsessed with tents, loves nothing more than to climb in and out of the display models at REI, and has been begging to sleep overnight in one since last year.  We did it, and he even slept reasonably well — much better than his mother.

But the highlight of the weekend, however, turned out to be just hanging out with the other kids, especially the older ones.  For the first four years of his life, his father and I — or the other adults to whom we entrusted his care — mediated all of his interactions with the world.  I’m just loving watching him learn to make his own way.

In her comments on Friday’s post, Jody points out some of the dangers of the peer culture for children.  I’m sure there will be days when I miss my malleable preschooler.  Even in less than 24 hours of hanging out with the big kids, D learned that such a thing as a "gameboy" exists and started calling me "mom" as well as "mommy."  But I’m still feeling a bit like the mommy bird watching my fledgling start to catch the current.

D. has a bad case of the "I wants." 

We don’t let him watch commercials (thank you TiVo), but he still manages to come up with a long list of toys he wants, drawn from things he’s seen at his friends’ houses, the catalogs included in every toy he gets, and his imagination.

A few of the things he wants are more expensive than I think any toy for a 4-year-old should cost, but most of them are quite cheap, well within what we could afford.  But we don’t want him to learn that he gets everything he wants just by asking (and asking and asking and asking) for it.  And our little townhouse is already being overrun by stuff, which builds up faster than we can get rid of it.

We let him write everything down on a list, but that doesn’t satisfy him for long.  (It doesn’t help that his birthday is in January, so there’s a long dry period between gift-giving opportunities.)  He’s starting to say "I don’t want to put it on the list.  I just want to order it."  We do a lot of our shopping online, so he thinks that’s how to get goodies to come.

We’re actually pretty frugal, and don’t buy all that much, but I realized that he doesn’t see all the fun toys that I drool over but don’t buy.  I’m struggling with how to make this process more visible to him.  It may be time to start him on an allowance, but I really think he ought to be able to count coins first.

Any suggestions?

The general consensus now is that children with any sort of learning disability or special needs generally benefit from services as early as possible.  But, there’s a lot of variation among "neuro-typical" kids, so it’s not always easy to tell when you should worry.  Under federal law, all states are required to identify and evaluate kids who might be in need of special education or early intervention services. But some areas do it better than others.

Two bloggers that I read are going through this process right now:

• Laura at 11d is writing about her frustration with the process of qualifying for public services in New Jersey.
• TinyCoconut is writing about her ambivalence about getting her son assessed.

We went through the process here in Virginia with our older son, D, who had a speech delay, and had a generally good experience.  Yes, there were an awful lot of meetings — which would have been more than a nuisance if we were both working in inflexible jobs.  But we always felt like the school staff were on our side, and that all the paperwork was because of the law.  (I think we got 6 copies of the 10 page summary of parents’ rights under IDEA.)

D got speech therapy for a year, and progressed so fast that he no longer qualified when reassessed.  I’m still not sure how much credit to give to the therapy, and how much he was just on his own schedule, but he enjoyed the sessions, so I don’t worry about it.  It boggles my mind to listen to our little chatterbox and remember that close to his 3rd birthday, he spoke in monosyllables and grunts.

That said, I actually think that D has low-level sensory integration issues, which didn’t show up on his evaluation.  A lot of The Out of Sync Child sounded familiar to me.  He used to refuse to walk on grass, and still hates sand.  He refuses to fingerpaint.  He’s a ludicrously picky eater, and I think it’s driven more by texture than taste.  (Who ever heard of a 4-year-old who wouldn’t eat plain spaghetti?)  And, at the same time, he will swing longer than any other kid on the playground, and adores to be spun around in circles until I’m ready to puke.

But it doesn’t affect his life or ours in any significant way (as long as we don’t try to go on a beach vacation), so I’m not going to push for a diagnosis.  We keep encouraging him to push his limits, and give him lots of opportunity to run and swing and spin, and I’m not convinced that an OT could do anything more.