Badger Suburban Mommy Disguise-Clueless about the conventional
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Badger -

2005-03-30 - 10:24 p.m.

Badger:
1. Any of several carnivorous burrowing mammals of the family Mustelidae, such as Meles meles of Eurasia or Taxidea taxus of North America, having short legs, long claws on the front feet, and a heavy grizzled coat.
2. The fur or hair of this mammal.
3. Any of several similar mammals, such as the ratel.

tr.v. badg·ered, badg·er·ing, badg·ers
To harass or pester persistently. See Synonyms at harass.

Which of the previous do you suppose I loosed on my son’s Developmental Therapist this week? Rather than leaving her to the mercy of a small furry rodent in my living room, I instead attempted to work her over, and unfortunately for me, she was more than up to it.

I was trying to get the therapist, who has advanced degrees in subjects that teach you how to deal with freaked out and distraught people, to tell me that Mason will be normal some day. She didn’t. Neither could I trick the Physical Therapist into it…I haven’t tried the Occupational Therapist yet. They use words like ummm, you know, they don’t use any special words, they just ask questions, note results on their little pads and clam up. They never contradict me when I am ridiculously hopeful, but they don’t jump on my bandwagon either. Crud.

All this testing and evaluating is in honor of the upcoming, IFSP meeting. I dread it, and I am praying (which I do VERY badly) that I will hear something fantastic I will want to tell everyone about afterwards. IFSP=Individual Family Service Plan, it is your chance to meet with all the service providers in your child’s life, listen to their evaluations of said child’s progress and recommend further treatment options. It is also your chance to ask for the moon and stars and see if they can deliver. I am going to skip the moon and ask for extra speech therapy, it’s seems more realistic.

In a couple of weeks a group of relative strangers, some of whom are gradually starting to resemble friends, will sit around and give me some idea of what they see in Mason’s future… I see many of these therapists more than I see my family members at this point AND they are paid to tolerate me. So they might give glimpses into whether Mason will graduate from college or become one of the challenged grocery baggers at the local Jewel Foods. Yes, I have been having trouble looking at the baggers at the grocery store for some time now, and no, I don’t start crying in line at Jewel anymore. Usually.

There is the possibility that I will glean nothing from their observations and they will simply be along the lines of “Mason is improving in his ability to stack blocks, however, his desire to stack blocks seems to be lagging!” and from this I am supposed to learn…well, that we really don’t know what’s going on with Mason yet and we won’t for a while.

Sigh.

Next week…where Karen tells you all about how we are absolutely losing our minds over trying to figure out where we should live in two years based on Mason’s needs.

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I smell good too! -

2005-03-14 - 9:52 p.m.

Lessons from a 5 year old.

I am beautiful. Charlie said so, he looked at me across the table with a completely happy and sincere grin and said “Cassady’s mom, you are pretty”. I believe it had something to do with the chocolate buzz he had going, I snuck chocolate chips in his PB&J as a surprise. My son said, “chocolate chips again?”.

You should play every day. Cass said, “Can Charlie come over today?” I say, “He came over yesterday pal”. Cass replies with complete and obvious wisdom “So what? You need to play EVERY DAY mom…duh”. Duh indeed.

I need to set priorities. I was grumbling about my “freaking laundry”. How could there be so much of it again so soon? * Cass said, “don’t you like doing laundry mommy, you do it all the time, what would you do if you weren’t doing laundry?” “No Cass, laundry is not mommies favorite thing, I would probably be making art”…Mommy likes to make art” “Then why don’t you do that more?” he said with all sincerity. Indeed, why?.

Said to 5-year-old girl on playground, “Why are you spinning in circles like that?” She stops to give me the deadeye duh stare, “spinning is fun”. Oh yeah….

*In my house there seems to be some kind of inverse laundry rule, for example: the more laundry I wash, fold, sort and put away, the more that seems to be waiting for me the next day.

**The conversations related above are all true and factual, although no 5 year olds were hurt during any of them I have considered locking my 5 year old in a small padded room on occasion to keep us both safe.

***Charlie also told me my house smelled good. I LOVE that kid. *

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Many Pardons -

2005-03-08 - 1:23 p.m.

Many Pardons

Pretty much NOBODY reads this, well something like a dozen of you read this and I forget to post an update on what happened with Mason’s Surgery on Thursday and I get flack from unlikely sources.

It was scheduled to take an hour. It took two. Mike came close to physically pining me to my seat in the room somewhere in the middle of the second hour. Truthfully he kept stopping me from doing healthy, calorie burning, and stress relieving fidgeting type activities. Doing a staccato beat with my fingernails on the table seems a pretty small annoyance given the circumstances which were these: we were trapped in a 4’ x 7’ room with profoundly bad coffee* for two hours. We were told to wait there for the doctors and given a timetable, which the doctors did not keep. Nobody came along and said, “Hey, all those little glitches we said could happen did! All of them, what are the chances? This will take twice as long!).

Glitches included:

Mason is missing two of his tear ducts. MISSING…really it’s a minor thing in the ridiculous list of Mason’s issues but really…they tell us they could be there but completely sealed over. We could get another “doctor who specializes only in eyelids”**
“They could dig around and maybe see if there is a canal there after all and restructure it.” Yikes, dig around…in his EYELID! The decided to do an angioplasty type thing on the remaining ducts to widen them.

The fancy machine that does the sedated ABR hearing test that we won’t get the results from for 2 weeks malfunctioned and fixing it took a while. I could have sworn the goal was to test it prior to the procedure.

There was nobody around to wheel us to the car when it was time to leave. I heard the nursed talking about the “escort” shortage and how we would be there a little while because of it through the little curtain. They apparently forgot about the lack of soundproofing they provide.

There was another little kid screaming his head off who garnered most of the attention post-op. It didn’t appear to be a pain situation, but more of a freak-out scenario. Can’t say I didn’t get where he was coming from.

In the end he seems OK. He is NOT; let me repeat NOT sleeping better yet. This was going to be the magic cure and it’s NOT working. He seems to have developed some kind of sinus infection, except children his age don’t really have sinuses yet and he is on an antibiotic and this operation was supposed to reduce the constant parade of infection that has become our life.

Let me find that happy ending we all want. It’s early in the game…maybe this is a cold that will go away and this time next week we will be new and improved, sleep glutted parents! Maybe we will all go away for a fun family weekend at an indoor water park this weekend and come back refreshed and full of joy! Since we are actually doing that one and I completely forgot myself and said to Mike “this will be SO MUCH FUN” I’ll be sure to get back to you soon with what are sure to be tragic details!

Karen


*In retrospect the bad coffee was a blessing. Could you stay in a 4’ x 7’ room with a freaked out me if we added 3 cups of coffee into the mix?

**Have you ever heard a child say, “When I grow up I want to specialize in eyelids!”

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Good things gone bad -

2005-03-06 - 1:18 p.m.

Places I love that have gone BAD.

Is it maybe a by-product of my love that drives them bad? Is it simply mere chance or a general comment on the state of the world or the state of what I consider good? OK, it’s a bit much to think my failure inducing Karma is influencing the success or failure of local businesses but really, it’s painful to see. Why is it that when the very best places close down, they tend to swing to the ugly polar opposite, making a mockery of the good intentions of the place that came before them? In example I offer:

I’m a vegetarian and the best damn pancake/waffle/omelet place within miles shut down and reopened as…BEEF O’BRADY’S.

The local health food store closed and reopened as a dry-cleaners.

The fun and funky handmade art gift shop was sold and came back a store that sells personal business planners…only business planners and business planner refills. It’s like the anti-creativity store now.

The Thai Restaurant…a Denny’s. Sigh.

Where the funky sprawling brick house by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright used to sit…two, million dollar gigantathon mansions dwarfing the neighboring bungalows.

The religions retreat that was a weird, grassy breath of fresh air sitting next to the mall on the busy shopping road is now full of condos and upscale restaurant chains. To make matters worse, I like the food at a couple of them too.

This rant would be sooo much better if I hadn’t NEEDED a business planner when I found the new store and if I wasn’t delighted to find out that one of the new food chains served brown rice on request.

It’s 54 degrees out in Northern Illinois and I will take that as a sign that I am to stop writing and go outside and play.
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