Seven autumn takes

Time for an update, isn't it?

1

The pandemic stretches on. A lot of people seem to have gotten bored and gone back to usual activities. We mostly have not. Luckily, our state is keeping r<1, which means it's not spiking. Probably due to mask wearing, which people are actually doing pretty faithfully.

The schools gave us two choices, virtual or in person. The in-person classes are socially distanced, and the students are supposed to be wearing masks all day. In order to spread out the amount they need to, different cohorts are there different days: elementary kids four days a week, middle schoolers two (I think), and high schoolers one.

Virtual kids got a loaner chromebook and have two video calls a day. The rest is video lectures they can watch at any time, and assignments they can finish on their own. That's a lot less burdensome than many long video calls, which sounds like a nightmare when I hear other kids are doing that.

It was a huge struggle deciding what to do. On the one hand, I'm home all day, so theoretically I should be able to keep everyone with me. And that would be safer, and save the school resources. But on the other, Jackie is intense enough to make it virtually impossible for me to teach anyone. I struggled last spring because of that. The best case was that she'd watch TV and distract everyone. The worst case was her directly interfering or freaking out when I attempted to help anyone. Even before the pandemic, because of her difficulty in social situations in the past, I really wanted to get her into preschool this year. The school agreed she needed it and let her in, which wasn't a guarantee. The thought of losing that--an actual, extended break from this extremely difficult child, plus maybe help for whatever the heck is going on with her--was one of my major pandemic-related stresses.

So, when it turned out in-person preschool was an option, I signed her up. Even though I know she might not be great at wearing her mask, and there is risk involved. My thought is that, because we have very few contacts of any kind outside of school, it's more of a risk to us than to the teachers. And we really do have a legitimate need.

I also signed up Miriam, because she did very little work in the spring. She'll do anything for her teachers, but when it's me asking, suddenly she resists. She also has a strong need for social interactions with other kids, since her brothers often exclude her and Jackie is too young. I felt that she could be relied on to wear her mask and follow the rules. And this way she will learn to read this year. I really don't know whether she would if it was just me and some video calls.

Michael and Marko are learning virtually. They are old enough to read their assignment lists and get them done fairly independently, and if they do get stuck, I'm there to help. Michael wanted to stay home, because he doesn't like school and didn't miss his friends. Marko would have preferred to go in person, but given his habit of putting everything into his mouth, I felt he would be a worse risk even than Jackie. I also kind of appreciate the chance to separate him from the bullies he dealt with last year, and to supervise what he's doing myself so that I know he actually understands what he's being taught. He's getting very little in special ed assistance now, so having me on hand is probably more useful than getting twenty minutes with a professional once a week.

2

So how's that going?

Jackie adores school. Just loves every minute. The second she finds out it's a school day, she jumps for joy. I can't say I was expecting that at all; even the days she liked daycare last year, she didn't like actually getting dropped off for it. But preschool is just super fun, apparently. People not getting within six feet of her is a plus.

It does seem to exhaust her. We've had a lot of hard afternoons. Two-hour meltdowns over her favorite towel being in the wash have made a comeback. Her teachers say she's as good as gold while she's there, but when I mention some of her at-home behavior, they seem incredulous. Like .... this is the child who clawed my arm this morning because there were no raisins in her cereal. This is the child who pretty much won't walk anywhere some days. It's really hard for me to deal with this disparity. Like, am I just a garbage parent that she acts so differently there than here? The teacher says it's common for kids to save their worst behavior for home, where they feel safest. But it still makes me feel like I'll never get any kind of diagnosis or help for her, because she's only like this at home.

Miriam loves school and seems to be doing great in it. Like last year, she has one best friend that she is obsessed with and tells us all about. They don't have proper recess, but they have "chat time" at their six-feet-apart desks, and also directed activities outside. She's being a trooper about all the extra safety procedures. Except the one day she had a slight fever at dropoff, and had to come home again. She was furious about it. Luckily, she turned out to have no other symptoms. Maybe she was just warm.

Michael is doing just great with virtual school. His teacher has everything very well organized. And it's nice that I'm home and can look over his work and figure out what he's having trouble with before he turns it in. Last year at school, he'd sometimes come home with whole worksheets marked wrong and have no idea why.

Marko resists some work and dives into other assignments. Everything having to do with ecosystems has been thrilling to him. Math, not so much. If I homeschool him any other year, I think I'll have to put together my own curriculum, because he really needs to be excited about a subject to pay any attention to it at all.

3

A plan of mine for a long time has been to get an exercise bike so I can improve my health without having to wait till somebody can watch the kids while I go for a walk or something. I finally got one off Craigslist.

It's been great, because I can put my phone up and watch The Late Show or put on some tunes and distract myself from the fact that I'm doing exercise.

I am pretty sure it's helping; I have had less dizziness and shortness of breath lately. Though taking vitamins seems to also be essential.

While the kids are at school, I finally have some time to myself. Most of that is getting taken up on self-care (like exercising and showering) and on chores, but I've had some time to write also. I'm trying to turn last year's book into a trilogy, but it's hard. I usually do one-offs for a reason.

I also have been writing some web content for a friend's business. Which means I have been getting paid to write. It's about finance, which isn't exciting to me, but honestly as long as I'm writing, I'm never bored. And I'm getting PAID. To WRITE. 

4

The pandemic isn't hindering us from having fun, because this time of year all the fun is outdoors anyway. We've gone to a lot of parks lately, and haven't found them crowded. Playgrounds sometimes are, but not creeks and hiking trails.

I love Virginia this time of year. Winter is bitter and summer is like being slowly steamed and eaten alive, but fall is perfect.

5

Which makes it a really bad time to think about possibly moving. Not far--the idea is to move closer to John's work, so that he doesn't have to spend over three hours commuting every day. But . . . the DC area is kind of terrible, even if you can afford to live in the nicer suburbs, which we couldn't.

There are a lot of good arguments in favor: greater population density means better odds for each of us to find activities or hobby groups. John could find a gaming group. I could find a writing group. The schools are better rated, and there are more autism groups and resources. We'd have an easier time getting to DC to see museums. There would just be more to do . . . at least, if this dang pandemic ever ends.

Plus, the election going on makes me feel . . . not very welcome around here. This is one of the reddest counties in the state. I've seen a lot of ugliness among the locals lately: threats to run over BLM protesters, carrying weapons to threaten ten people holding a quiet gun-violence vigil, nasty bumper stickers. I'm afraid to put up a Biden sign or sticker. I have a few friends here, but there don't seem to be any other people here I'd get along with.

But I can't shake the feeling that I need to be close to nature to be happy. Right now I can go in my backyard and not see any house but ours. There are trees on every side. I can take walks and see beautiful fall colors. A ten-minute drive brings us to the Shenandoah River, and twenty minutes takes us into a national forest.

Of course suburbs can have nature too. There are parks out there, and playgrounds, and green spaces. But there are also cruddy strip malls and used-car lots and six-lane roads. We'd probably have to live in a townhouse, with barely any yard. No matter how close a park is, a park is a trip. You can't just be in and out of the house all day like we are here.

We don't have to decide now. The plan is to move next summer, if we decide to and John is still at his current job. He very much wants to go, and I don't think he understands at all why I'm hesitant. I think some people can just not look at a tree all day and be fine. I feel I need beauty to live.

Maybe I can train my eyes to find beauty in more places. I sure hope so. I've never been happy living in a city. But maybe a dense suburb I could still do.

6

Kitty Kitty has finally, three years after moving here, made her peace with the rest of the house. She mostly hangs out in my room, but she is sometimes spotted in the family room, even when kids are around!

Tiger remains perfectly relaxed.

7

The election is coming up soon. I know hardly anyone is undecided, but if you are, I urge you to vote for Biden. I believe that voting for a major party has the best results, and of the two main candidates, Biden is the one who seems to have a conscience and operate in reality. The pandemic has shown us just how important experience and knowledge are, as our entry-level president delayed and mismanaged us to one of the highest death rates in the world.

I'd really like someone who knows the details about how our country runs and who actually cares about doing a good job. I don't think we've had that for the past four years.

Warren was my first choice, but Biden seems at least to be a decent human being who believes in the norms of democracy and the counsel of wise people. While he isn't going to turn America into everything I'd want in four years, he will restore some of the norms of civilized society, making it easier for future elections to go better than the last one did. People who won't vote for Biden because they're holding out for something better don't seem to recognize the harm Trump can do, not just to the next four years, but for decades to come by encouraging voter suppression. We need to get our country back on some kind of reasonable track before we can steer it anywhere good.

How is October treating all of you?

7 birthday takes

1

I had a birthday on the 7th. Not much notable; it's only 34, not a red-letter birthday. But I did get some nice presents, and we had cake in a friend's yard, each family on a different blanket a distance apart. Jackie has finally stopped crying about the birthday song and participated happily, but then melted down because there were no candles for me to blow out. Sorry, kid, expectorating aerosols all over something we're all gonna eat just doesn't appeal anymore. I wonder if that tradition is gone for good.

2

Black lives matter, right?

I about had steam coming out my ears today when I read a blog post where someone explained why she wasn't obligated to do an anti-racism post "just because it's in vogue right now." This is true. Nobody needs to say something right at this exact second. Hopefully, one has already said something, so that there's no doubt where they stand. You don't have to jump on the bandwagon if you were already on it.

But yeah, you do at some point, as a white person in America, have to "come out" as anti-racist. Because there are a lot of racists still in this country, and they rely on the rest of us to be quiet and not say anything, maybe get quietly flabbergasted if they're too blatant, but to look the other way so long as they're subtle about it. I want racists to notice that allll their friends have a problem with that behavior. I want them to feel uncomfortable at my parties the way I feel uncomfortable at their parties. I want them to wonder if maybe they're wrong. And if they don't get that far, I want them to realize the consensus is so far against them that they can't just spew bigotry all over the place.

I feel like nobody is in any doubt about my views, but I'm vehemently anti-racist and in favor of those protesting police brutality. The latter is a subject I've been following since my libertarian days, first because I was shocked that officers of the state would act that way, and later because I realized there is also a racial bias in who is getting targeted for this behavior. (I haven't noticed the All Lives Matter folks actually doing what I did in those early days, and vocally objecting to police brutality when it's visited on a white person. But I have seen Black Lives Matter people with pictures of white victims on their sighs. Funny, that. Reminds me, more than anything, of people who dismiss COVID with "the flu is worse" but didn't get their flu shot.)

The longer I've followed the issue, the more ugly stuff I've uncovered. Lynching, redlining, massive resistance, Tulsa massacre, MOVE bombing. The history is chilling, and there's no golden moment you can point to when racism suddenly ended. It's still with us.

I think a lot of white people grew up thinking racism was over. Just something people used to think, back in the olden days when people were inexplicably stupid, and is now gone and we are all equal and friends. I sure did. So when you notice how unequal the outcomes are -- and you'd have to be oblivious not to notice the difference in wages, net worth, rates of incarceration, etc. -- the automatic assumption is that Black people are inferior. That they're just not as smart as we are, not as virtuous, not as good at raising their kids. You don't say that out loud, because you know that's rude to say, but deep down you think there must be something about it. If, after all, the opportunities are all equal now.

Well, these days people are saying it out loud a lot more. And the rest of us have had to take a long, hard look and ask: are the opportunities as equal as I thought? And they are not; they are emphatically not. They're not equal when a Black person looks for a job, when they apply for a mortgage, when they are under suspicion by police, when they have their day in court. None of this is equal in any way. And if you take as given that a black person is your equal in every interior way, you have to admit this. Equality of opportunity was promised, but it has not arrived. And that means that the things you strove for and achieved, a Black person just like you strove for just as hard and could not achieve.

It's hard to accept that. Especially when you had such a shining vision of America, where everything was free and fair. And I see why people turn away from it and try to come up with another explanation. But the right thing to do is to open your eyes and look. Even when it hurts.

3

To that end, we went to the BLM march in our town. OUR town. You know, the itty bitty, kinda racist one? We actually had a march!

I wasn't really meaning to go, on account of coronavirus, but I figured a few spaced-out people, outdoors, in masks, should be fine.

Well, actually it was enormous. Over a thousand people came. I have never seen a crowd like that in my town, not for a fair or a concert or anything. There were Black people, there were white people, there were Republicans! There were Catholics that I knew. There were cops marching along. I just . . . I was deeply, deeply moved. So often I feel alone, living here, as if the whole town was one big redneck monolith. And it is not. Not only is it not all rednecks (there were people with purple hair! there were Episcopalian women ministers! there were people with rainbow shirts!) but the rednecks are often as anti-racist as the purple-haired ladies. Everyone was there. Everyone cared. It meant so much.

Ahead of the event, there were warnings on facebook that there would be armed counterprotesters, or that people had threatened to drive into the crowd. That did not happen. There was one suspicious truck with Confederate flags that drove around nearby, but the road was blocked by police cars, and if they had any bad intent, they didn't carry it out. Also when we marched by a diner, three bored-looking young men idly booed. I don't know if they were counterprotesters or just obnoxious.

The boys were not enthused about being there, so they just held my hand and walked along. Miriam was very excited and held her sign up high and did all the chants. The next day she was still running around the house hollering "No Justice, No Peace!"



I don't know what is so special about this moment, compared to other times a high-profile police killing sparked protests. But I do believe it's making a difference. More and more people who never said anything before are now starting to oppose racism and delve into the history of it. Towns are considering massive overhauls of their police departments. Even Congress is mulling over options. I think maybe some change is actually going to happen. But, of course, we can't let this be a one-moment thing. People are going to need to keep the pressure up, not just by marching in the streets but by every method open: voting, keeping tabs on whether our elected officials are keeping their promises, even running ourselves. People more deeply involved than I am could surely recommend a lot of ideas.

2020 has been a dumpster fire of a year, but this whole thing might be the bright spot. As horrible and terrifying as some of it has been. Peaceful protesters maced and beaten, an old man pushed over till he cracked his skull, a young woman tear-gassed to death, just now I read that cops are cutting people's wrists on purpose when they take their zip-ties off. It's sickening stuff. But I think the police are only proving the point that they can't be given unchecked authority like this. Nobody can.

4

Okay, moving on from that. Because most of my life has not been marching in protests, it's been staying at home every day with a passel of bored children.



Really, they're doing okay. Much better than previous summers, even without access to the pool and the park and their friends. We managed one outing to the national forest and waded in a creek, and we filled up the wading pool. I painted the back deck, like I've been meaning to do for about a year. We've played outside. Currently Marko is making up a collectible card game involving dinosaurs. Miriam and Jackie decided to learn sign language today. Some days Michael and Jackie pair off to build with blocks and Marko and Miriam play Star Wars in the yard. That's not a pairing that ever used to happen. That's the nice thing about having four kids, they resort themselves all the time so they're not getting annoyed with the same playmate all day.

School is over, and good riddance. I don't know what we're doing for school next year, because I don't know what the school is doing. My guess is that whatever they do will be chaotic, a compromise between not spreading germs and still educating in which both goals lose about half the time. So I may be homeschooling. I don't want to, but it may be the best of the available options. I'm also thinking that it may be a relief to the school not to have to deal with all of my kids, so they can focus on the kids whose parents aren't home to teach them all day, and the special needs kids who were actually getting something out of all that therapy. (Marko . . . has really not seemed to, lately.)

5

I started querying the novel I started last November, the solar sailing one. The last thing I did before sending it out was dive deep into the physics to figure out how fast my ship could go, how big the sails would have to be, and how exactly it all works. To my shock I found I had totally missed that sails can take you both away from and toward the sun, because you can set the sail at an angle and get enough thrust to degrade your orbit so you fall sunward. This messes with some plot details, but it also meant I got to add a lot more sailing bits to account for that.

Then I had so much fun with the math, including lots of diagrams and Excel charts and new physics formulas, that I thought, you know what I could be doing? More math!

So I'm trying to learn more math, but it's slow going. Somebody heard of teaching math on the internet and thought, what we'll do is VIDEOS. But I hate videos; they never go the speed I think. (The speed I think is 90 mph, freeze, glitch, 90 mph, wander sideways, wait, what is this video about?) Plus then the kids are like, "What is that? What's a percent? Why isn't that like the math I do?"

Someday, I think I would like to take some math and science courses. Christendom was sadly lacking in both. Science, I love for its own sake. Math, I mostly like for the sake of being able to do science with it, but algebra is pretty fun.

6

Oh, and on the topic of solar sails, I made a model. It's still not right. The sails should be bigger and shinier. Think ten feet across and shiny as a mirror. I'm not sure what materials I could use to make that happen. Heck, I'm not sure what my astronauts will use either. It's the future, let's assume they have figured some things out.

7

Things are slowly reopening, even though coronavirus is far from gone. I find this terrifying, even though I knew it was going to happen at some point. I mean, I find going out terrifying enough as it is. On any given outing, I could forget my purse, lose a kid in the store, get heckled by a stranger, burst into tears at the cash register, get lost on the way home, have to change a dirty child when I didn't bring any spare clothes, get a flat tire, get in a wreck, stammer, get pulled over, run into somebody I know and find they don't like me anymore . . . on and on. Now I get the added joy of worrying I will forget my mask, worrying I will touch my face, worrying I will cough, worrying I will forget to wash my hands when I get home, worrying the groceries are contaminated, worrying people are giving me the stink eye for wearing a mask, worrying they will think I am giving them the stink eye for not wearing one, worrying that people won't know I'm friendly if they can't see me smiling, worrying that people are mad at me because I can't see them smile, worrying people won't be able to understand me because my voice is muffled, worrying I misheard someone because their voice is muffled . . . .

Let's just say the social anxiety slash agoraphobia is worse than ever. And I don't even know if it's going to get better when all this is over, or whether this has scarred me so much I'll huddle at home for all of 2021 too.

John is back at work, and of course that worries me too. He's going to be doing hold pickups at the library, which means dealing with the public in a city that's been much harder hit by coronavirus so far than ours. He'll have a mask and precautions are being taken, but I still don't have to like it. However, I'm extremely thankful for our own local library's curbside pickups, so I can hardly begrudge the patrons John serves. I just hope they don't cough on him.

How are you all doing, in the Year of Chaos Twenty Twenty? 

New school year

1

This year Miriam is starting school.  Can you believe it?  She's in kindergarten this year.  She has the same teacher Michael had, which worried me because Michael spent the whole year complaining about how boring it was and how much work there was.

Well, Miriam loves it and comes home every day raving about how wonderful every moment is.  The teachers all say she's a delight.  Which I could have told them.

She's not so much of a delight at home lately, though.  There's been a lot of whining and melting down--really for the past six months, so I'm not going to blame school particularly.  But I wouldn't be surprised if she was very tired after all that good behavior at school.

2

Marko continues to love school.  Michael continues to whine, but I think he's having a better year than last year.  Like, if I ask, he says school is boring, but he doesn't volunteer many complaints.

I walked everyone to their classroom the first day, but by day two Miriam was ready to walk into the building herself, if Michael would walk her to her classroom.  After a week or two of this, Michael complained.  Why does he have to walk her to her classroom?  Why can't I do it?

I said, dude, I walked you to your room EVERY day of kindergarten.  It was well out of my way (because to get to the door parents can sign in at means going the whole way around the building) but I did it because you seemed to need it, and because I love you.  So you owe me one year of walking your sister to hers.  It's not even far from yours.  You can do it.

He hasn't complained anymore so I think he's learned to live with it.

3

Big news for me this year: I got a job teaching Latin two days a week.  I have a beginning Latin class of 10-12 year olds, a fun introduction to Latin for 6-8 year olds, and fifteen minutes to somehow entertain preschoolers with Latin.  Only the serious Latin class is easy for me.  Trying to figure out how to keep the attention of the younger kids while teaching them a whole foreign language is a lot harder.

The school is exactly the kind of low-budget startup Catholic school I always teach at.  It's a little uncomfortable knowing that they're all Catholic and I'm not (though they know I'm not).  Just being back in that environment is strange.  But at the same time, it's familiar and I know how to deal with it.

I was hoping it would be a fun break from being with Jackie all day.  So far I find myself sighing with relief when I wake up and it's not a teaching day.  It adds stress rather than removes it.  But on the other hand, it's early days yet and I know I'll hit my stride better later.  And it is nice knowing I'm doing something I'm good at, and that people are willing to pay me for.

4

While I'm doing that, Jackie is having her first experience with daycare.  I dreamed of sending her to one of the fancy school-like ones, but they all want fulltime kids.  So I found a little home daycare and it's actually much better for her.  She hates large numbers of kids, and this is only three other kids.

Her social anxiety at this age reminds me a lot of Marko's.  She hates when we have friends over and is always trying to drag me out of the room.  With Marko, I let him avoid social experiences for the most part.  My thought with Jackie is that carefully introducing her to social interaction in small doses might help her ease into it a little better.  That's part of why I'm going to all this trouble instead of just staying home with her all day.

The first day, she cried the entire time.  The second day, she cried most of the time and then fell asleep on the floor.  My heart broke but it was a bit late to back out, so we kept trying.  I told the daycare lady it was fine for her to watch as much TV as she wanted, and not to try to talk to her or engage just yet.  And slowly she's been getting more and more comfortable.  Yesterday she didn't cry at all!  She watched an episode of My Little Pony and then sorted pom-poms next to another kid.  Not interacting or anything, but she was two feet away and not screaming and that's PROGRESS.

5

I worry about Jackie.  She's so sensitive to so many things.  Honestly, I've worried about her since she was born, and I don't know how much of that is just the anxiety I was dealing with at the time.  But she was slow to make eye contact (I think five weeks) and smile (like eight weeks).  She gave me her first hug at about 13 months.  She had no words at 18 months.  And, I mean, there's all the screaming.

But on the other hand, she is extremely articulate now.  She can say basically whatever she wants, and it's not just parroting like Marko did at first.  She tells me she loves me many times a day and hugs me and kisses my leg.  (She doesn't like kissing faces.)  She mostly hates strangers but on rare days, when she's very comfortable, she'll go right up to someone and start talking a blue streak (which the person can't understand).  She spends a lot less time screaming since I downloaded some games on my tablet and let her play it.  Whenever she's upset, she wants the tablet and at this point I just let her have it, because it beats nursing.  A little bit of that calms her down and she's ready to get back to life.  No more hours-long meltdowns -- or almost none.  She still will if she's tired.

She doesn't really play independently.  I blame being the youngest.  She's just never had to entertain herself before.  So while the big kids are at school, she wants my attention all the time.  And suddenly, when they're not there, she has to dictate very complicated processes to do anything.  I want to leave the house?  Oh, well that's gonna take an hour while she picks out the right shoes, the right clothes, whoops different clothes, stuff for a bag she's going to bring, and a stuffy.  Then she's going to want to get in the car BY HERSELF, by the opposite door to her seat, and buckle in the stuffy WITHOUT HELP, and swing on the pilot seats for awhile, and play with the vent.  And if I deviate from her demands (which vary every time) she'll pitch a fit.  She's getting a little better about this; I wonder if it was just the novelty of being without the big kids and getting to decide more things.

She never wants to go anywhere.  The first couple of weeks of school, she kept asking to go places, but suddenly (after teaching and daycare started) she just wants to be at home.  I feel that: we're busy and being at home is restful.  But we do sometimes have to go shopping, and the library is supposed to be fun.  But she'd rather watch the same episode of Chip and Potato seventy billion times.

She still nurses many times a day and goes bananas if I don't let her.  While she nurses, she picks intently at my belly button.  She honestly seems more interested in the belly button than the milk.  When she's mad, she bends over backward like she's doing yoga, or she rips out handfuls of her own hair.  She refuses to play in the back yard if the neighbor's A/C unit is making noise.  She finally eats food with some regularity, but if she's in a mood she won't touch anything.

Anyway, what all this is coming down to is me wondering whether I should try to get her assessed for autism.  She is a lot like Marko was in some ways.  But according to the screening charts she's pretty much fine.  She engages; she makes eye contact; she points; she follows directions (when she wants to).  And I do remember worrying to a mental health professional that I had failed Marko by not getting him assessed sooner, and she said not to feel bad, because Marko's struggles wouldn't have been apparent any younger.  He doesn't have the kind of challenges (with speech, for instance) that present at two.

So I'm holding off for now, waiting to see how she does with daycare and how many of her issues are just two-year-old things.  But I think after three, the school district will assess her for free, and she can get into the head start preschool if they think she qualifies.  So that might be a good time to at least look into it.

6

As part of this new "me doing adult things without Jackie" phase, I finally went to the doctor about my frequent fatigue and dizziness.  And this time she actually took me seriously!  She told me we'll keep doing tests till we find out what it is.

Well, three tests later, I'm exhausted of this nonsense and would like to just give up and deal with it.  It's not anemia.  It's not thyroid.  It's not POTS.  It's not anything with my heart or lungs.

Tests cost a lot of money and can be a big hassle.  For the tilt-table test, I had to skip breakfast and drive all the way to [large town] by seven in the morning, while John missed an entire day of work in order to get the kids off to school without me.  (Once he misses his bus it becomes impractical for him to go in at all.)  Then I have this stupid heart monitor I have to wear for two weeks.  I hate having things on me.  And Jackie pulls on the wires and unsticks the stickers.

Next time I see the doctor, I'm going to say: is there anything we haven't ruled out that is actually dangerous?  Am I gonna die?  No?  Well then GOODBYE I'm going to just BE DIZZY because it's less trouble than testing all the dadgum things that could possibly go wrong in the human body.

7

I'm almost done querying my science fiction novel from last year.  It really hurts.  I don't know if the novel's not good enough, or if my real problem is I started too soon.  Because several months in, I came up with some great edits, adding a whole other point of view, and I really wish I could give that version to the agents who requested the full manuscript earlier in the year.  Alas.  You get only so many chances.  And it seems that the best ideas for editing only come after you've read half a dozen rejections.

I'm a little stuck right now on what to do next.  I wrote myself into a corner on my space colony story, and taking the entire summer off didn't help.  But I really want to finish it, because it started so strong and the characters are so good.  I feel like I owe it to them to pay off all the stuff I set up.

On the other hand, I have a cool new idea that I really want to run with.  It could be my National Novel Writing Month project . . . if I finish the other one first.  And with all the stress in my life I just don't know if I can do that.  So then what do I do?  Finish the one, or start the other?  TOO MANY IDEAS!


How are you this fall?

Fall takes

1

Well, it's fall now!  And the weather fairies seem to have gotten the message, because on the Equinox it was clear and breezy, and since then it's been cold and drizzly.

Fall gives me weird feelings.  I don't know whether to cheer for the changing weather or dig in my heels ... because for a short time, it's getting better and better, and then suddenly it's too cold and going too fast and all the leaves fall off and then it's winter.  I really hate winter.  I hate not being able to go outside, but I'm very intolerant of cold so I sit inside staring out the window feeling trapped.  It doesn't help that our house has mostly small windows, and isn't very warm.

But we're far from that day just yet.  Last night we got to sleep with the window open and the fan off, which was lovely.  I'm not used to all that silence though.  The window units are like a jet engine.  When we turn them on in the spring, they're way too loud, but my ears got used to them and now expect them.  At least the crickets are still going strong!  I love the way summer nights in Virgina sound like we live in the middle of the jungle.

2

I'm still submitting my novel.  So far I've sent out 72 queries (meaning, a query letter and some number of sample pages) to literary agents.  I've gotten four manuscript requests, and most of the rest were either non-responses or form rejections.  All four of the people who read the manuscript turned it down.  But I did get a few encouraging responses saying the story was good, just not quite what they were looking for, and one actual piece of constructive criticism saying the ending was a little anticlimactic.  So I put the querying on hold for a while so I could rework the beginning a bit (since that's the part most people are seeing and not being interested in) and redo the entire ending.

I've gotten that done, and I think it's a huge improvement.  I blew some stuff up, that's always good, right?  So I'm ready to go back to querying, hopefully with better luck this time.

3

NaNoWriMo is coming soon and I am not sure what to do!  I feel overwhelmed with my life now, and what's going to change before November?  How will I have time to write anything?  But I remember I felt the same last time and I got it done.  So I'm not backing down just yet.

I think I've chosen a story.  I had like seven ideas to choose from, and a big part of me has been saying what I need to write is the memoir, the one about my experience in RC, but I just . . . really don't want to dig all that stuff up again.  So I'm thinking of the interstellar triller with the love story in it.  I came up with the idea when I was twelve or thirteen and reworked it many times without actually writing anything like a novel out of it.  It's hard because my main character is actually two people living in the same body.  How does one narrate a thing like that?  I'm planning on focusing on one of the two people, but they talk to each other and it's going to be a little difficult making all the inner dialog clear.  I tried a few pages in third person and they suck so I'm going to experiment with first person.  Not sure.  Third person is more the thing for adult sci-fi, but of course the right thing is the thing that works for this particular story.

4

So much political stuff going on right now.  I have been getting way too sucked in, and arguing with way too many strangers.  The one bright side is, a lot of the more-liberal Catholic facebookers keep friend-requesting me.  I never know whether or not to accept those.  Like, they seem like nice people and I'd probably like them.  But would they be super disappointed to find out I'm not actually in their tribe?

I have a smartphone now, which is mostly great because I can take good photos and the school can reach me when I'm at the park.  But it just makes my facebook addiction even worse.  I'm thinking of going back to screen-free Fridays.  Or at the very least, facebook-free.  My messenger conversations with friends really get me through the day, and of course there's writing and reading the news ..... BUT, on the other hand, it's one day a week and I have a pile of books to read.

5  

I got the results from Marko's psychological assessment.  Did I mention we did that, back in August?  It took like five months to even get the appointment, and we had to drive an hour away, but insurance covered it so I really wanted to get it done while we've got it.  (Not expecting to lose it but in this climate who can say what's going to happen?)  Marko was luckily very cooperative.  It was really nice having a day out with him, without any of the other kids.  We even got burgers and milkshakes together.  His behavior lately has frustrated me to no end, so I really needed that chance to see his better side.

Well, he has autism.  Which obviously came as no surprise, but this diagnosis is official unlike the previous one.  We got a big packet full of resources to look into, which I stuck on top of the piano to look at later and really need to go through.

The big thing I need to look into is some kind of counseling for his emotions.  The occupational therapy he gets at school is focused on school stuff, like his (in)ability to write.  But his behavior at home has started to be really dreadful in the past six months or so, and a lot of that is because he is having interpersonal issues with his siblings.  He takes everything as a personal affront (them playing games that don't interest him; them playing pretend; anyone who is not him being first at everything) and, since he's learned to control his temper a lot better, he often doesn't melt down but instead passive-aggressively teases and annoys them.  It's like regular sibling rivalry, but on steroids because even when they're trying to be nice, he often interprets it as being mean.  

It doesn't help that Michael has a big chip on his shoulder lately and Miriam has tended to jump straight to banshee shrieking at the slightest offense.  Maybe they're hyper-defensive because of Marko's bad behavior.  Or maybe Marko's behaving badly because they're being so mean.  I don't know, but it's a big cycle and I keep trying and trying to break it, but the only thing that works is separating Marko from the others.  I keep begging him to please, PLEASE, read a book or type a story or play with your cards or ANYTHING that is not interacting with your siblings!  But that's not a long-term solution because he has to learn to interact with peers someday.  I had hoped he'd learn that at school, and he's made some small progress, but not nearly as much as I would like.  So that's what the counseling would be for.

6

Jackie is still so hard.  If she naps, she's up till ten or eleven at night.  If she doesn't nap .... she's still often up late because she took a 30-second doze at the dinner table, or because she was up late the previous night, or whatever.  But if she's up late once, she's tired and cranky and there's no way she's getting through the day without a nap.  It's a cycle I'm constantly battling.  And then I hear about 20-month-olds that both nap, even in the afternoon, and also go to bed at seven and I get sour about it.  Did you know that some children, you can deliberately mess up their nap schedule or take them to an evening activity, and the very next day they resume a normal sleep routine as if nothing ever happened?  SO UNFAIR.

In the daytime her hobbies including nursing for what feels like hours while humming Twinkle Twinkle, pinching my belly, and trying to flip upside-down; biting for no reason; demanding food purely for smashing purposes, and coloring on the walls with marker.  I mean, standard toddler stuff.

Her verbal skills have really exploded though.  From just a couple words, in a month or two suddenly she had dozens.  Other. Me. Blue. Purple. Yellow. Apple. Egg. My. Come on. Man. Out.  Some words she won't even try, like Marko or Michael's names; others she seems to pick up after hearing them once.  I can't say it makes her easier to please -- I mean, the main problem in her life isn't that I don't understand her, it's that I do and still sometimes say no.  That's when she goes ballistic and goes for the eyeballs.

Is Jackie more difficult than the standard baby?  Or am I just so tired it seems that way?  The world will never know.

7

Oh, I do have one thing I'm very proud of!  I finally went to the dentist and got my cavities drilled.  It was both very scary to face and very expensive, so I had every motivation to put it off, but I finally got it done and that's a thing I don't have to worry about again for awhile.

Now is it me, or do dentists univerally pick the worst possible music to play in their offices?  It's always eighties music, and not the good stuff.  Somehow easy-listening eighties music makes the skin crawl up the back of my spine.  It feels like something horrible is going to happen.  And I don't know if it's legitimately terrible music, or if I got this association from how dang often I've been scared in dentists' offices and that's what was always playing.

A few worst offenders: I'm Still Standing, Fly Like an Eagle, literally anything by The Police, Your Kiss is on My List, Take On Me.  Is it the minor keys, the synth, or what?  I don't know, but a whole lot of 80's songs give me the heebie jeebies.

7 quick links

I don't have a lot to say, and my keyboard wants to type nothing but L's at the moment, so I'm going to use this post to clear out my browser tabs.  I see this stuff, think it's so good it must be shared, but don't want to harass my facebook friends who are really there to see pictures of my kids.

1

"I was part of the problem," Pope Francis tells Chilean abuse victims

When I heard Pope Francis had called abuse victims' claims that Bishop Juan Barros knew about their abuse "calumny," I was really upset.  He claimed he was going to do better, but this is the same old attitude everyone has: "Sure, I'm totally zero tolerance on sex abuse, I just never believe it actually happened or that anyone could possibly have stopped it."  So this new update, that he has apologized and promises to do better, is somewhat reassuring.  But Barros is still in his see, so .... we will just have to watch and wait.

2

Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

There are a ton of things in our culture that have taught men they have a right to women's bodies.  Obviously most men don't commit mass murder because of this entitlement, but some do.  That's  . . . well, obviously pretty scary.

3

Separating Fact from Fiction in Maternal-Fetal Medicine: Anti-D Immunoglobulin for the Prevention of Hemolytic Disease of the Fetus and Newborn

Years ago someone sent me an email saying that, as a crunchy person, they assumed I passed up the RhoGam shot, and did I have any advice for how I avoid health problems in my babies due to my negative blood type?

The answer was "get the dang RhoGam."  I was very anti-doctor at that time and the medical establishment sure did justify my dislike of them by the runaround I got trying to get RhoGam, but I did get it.  There just isn't an all-natural solution to Rh sensitization.  And I have seen the teeny tiny sick preemies born to sensitized mothers.  To me it was a real no-brainer, even while I passed up many other standard interventions from flu shots to ultrasounds.

4

"Call from God": American prolifer's role in Alfie Evans battle

I don't mean to defend the doctors who decided to remove extraordinary means of life support from Alfie Evans.  But I was disturbed by how quickly people in the US seized on his story to drive a narrative of fear of government and the evils of socialized medicine.  In reality, even when medicine is private, insurance companies can choose to stop paying, and that leaves the sick in exactly the same boat, only with less recourse.

And now it turns out that there was someone actually driving this narrative at the very outset.  I have been told lots of times that only parents should ever have a say about their child, they know best, but sadly many parents are taken advantage of by people with one agenda or another, telling them their terminal child can be cured.  Is that really the parents' love and parental instincts speaking, or manipulation from outside?

5

Everyone Has an Identity, Even Sam Harris

I think everyone should read a bit of Charles Murray's debates with his critics.  Murray believes that black people are, on average, genetically dumber than whites, and that social programs to help them are just going to encourage them to reproduce more, so we should get rid of those.  A lot of people get mad about this because, well, it's super racist, but unfortunately that type of criticism is able to be written off as "just political correctness."  That is, Murray and his defenders say, "People are just calling us names, when really it's not racism if it's true, and they're just attacking us because we're not hiding the truth like everyone else is."

The trouble is, Murray is almost certainly wrong.  If there's interest, I'll gather a bunch of the sources I've read that address the factual problems in his work -- that stuff is out there to find.  And painting himself as "the logical one" who "hasn't got a bias" is just his way of skewing the argument in his favor.  It is true that his opponents have a strong motivation to disagree with him -- because his opinions have consequences, and have had very dire results in the past.  But it's possible that Murray and his defenders have made errors in reasoning as well, and they may have their own biases driving those errors.  Maybe it is easier to think blacks are dumber than to think our country has oppressed them so badly as to drive down the IQ results of black children.  Maybe a belief that black people can't benefit from any government help meshes better with Murray's small-government beliefs.  Who knows?  The point is that you can't just assume you don't have biases.  Science, including the social sciences, is about trying to go beyond your own biases by checking and doublechecking your work with other scientists.  The rest of the scientific community almost universally agrees that Murray's work is bunk.  So perhaps we should entertain the possibility that it's just bunk.  No matter how good it feels to believe something that you think everyone else is just too biased to entertain.  It's like the endorphin rush you get from believing a conspiracy theory.

6

Antiscience and ethical concerns associated with advocacy of Lyme disease

I don't believe in chronic Lyme disease.  People who claim to have it fall into a few groups: those who had Lyme disease, have been treated for it, but have lingering symptoms though the germ itself is gone; those who are chronically ill with something else and have been told it's Lyme from a tick they never saw; and those who are not even sick but want a diagnosis that explains why they are often tired or why their child throws temper tantrums.  The really upsetting bit is that "Lyme-literate" doctors and a few specialized labs have subverted testing processes and medical treatments to make it look like they are diagnosing people accurately.  So the patient will tell you they know they have Lyme, they tested positive for it . . . but the tests used haven't been demonstrated to show the presence of Lyme bacteria.

Since these treatments can have dangerous risks, and they cost thousands of dollars, it's a horrible way to take advantage of the chronically ill.  I'm really furious about it, but every time I open my mouth about it online, someone has to say "well, I have it, and you're a terrible person for doubting me and my doctor."

7

How America Went Haywire

On that topic, here's a really long article about conspiracy theories, relativism, and Donald Trump.  Takeaway: facts actually matter and people should care about them a lot more than they do.  These days, I am less likely to trust someone based on their religion, party identification, or other belief than I used to be.  Instead, I find myself wanting to know their epistemology: do they even have a system for deciding what is true, and what is it?  Is it simply finding out what the "establishment" says, and picking the opposite?  Because, anti-authoritarian as I have been and still am, I do believe that way lies acres and acres of woo, crackpottery, and bosh.  And those ideas have consequences.


How has everyone been?  Want to talk about any of these links?  Or anything else?

7 quick NaNo takes

1

So, given that I'm always behind on blogging, you wouldn't think I would have time to turn around and write a novel.  But apparently I was not as busy as I thought I was, because not only was I able to crank out an average of 3,000 words a day, I actually have finished the 50,000 word goal already.  I may have skipped vacuuming a couple of times to make it happen, but nobody starved or ran out of clean clothes.

Now I'm having that uncomfortable feeling you have when you turn in an exam first and everyone else takes another half hour at it.  I mean, was there stuff on the back I missed?  I feel like if I wrote it this fast, it can't possibly be any good.

I wrapped up the story in another couple thousand words, so it's technically done, but I suspect it's utter garbage.  And I really wanted it to be good.  It's tough because it's YA, and so the reading level and word count are a bit below stuff I've written before, which makes me feel like it's infantile and stupid.  And it's first person.  First person is hard to pull off.  I worry it really, really sucks and will be completely unsalvageable, so when I finally decide to do a good job on it, I'll have to rewrite the whole dang thing.  But *deep breath* at least I'll have the plot and characters, I guess?

Then again, it might not suck.  I just don't know.  I wrote it too recently to be able to even think about it at the moment.

2

It's a YA dystopia about a back-to-the-land cult which winds up being the only ones to survive the apocalypse.  I made the cult more-or-less Catholic, but with a trad/sedevacantist vibe.  (Sorry Enbrethiliel.)  I wanted to mine the smells and bells of my own experience, while at the same time not having them be actually Catholic, because that would offend the Catholics.  ;)  That, and I couldn't see real Catholics being quite this extreme.  The mainstream Catholic Church has many flaws, but fanatical extremism is not one of them.  So trads it was.

I suspect non-Catholics will hate it because it's so Catholic they can't even get the references, atheists will hate it because nobody actually attacks religion in the whole book, and Catholics will hate it because there are gay characters.  Everyone, in fact, will hate it unless they are me.

I really like the parts where people defend the cult, because I used real arguments people use to defend cults, but I'm afraid people will find those bits a stretch.  People wouldn't really say that stuff!  Alas, they do.

Also the part where my heroine climbs up the outside of a gothic cathedral.  You know you've always wanted to do that.

3

This book is supposed to be the one I actually publish.  But the thought of actually doing it makes me psych myself out worse than ever.  What makes me think, of all the people in the world who want to write books and get them published, that I'd succeed where so many fail?  I've always been a bit confident because, after all, most people don't bother to write the ideas they have, or they start but don't finish.  But the NaNoWriMo website is jam packed with people merrily writing novels and finishing them.  I thought I was a prodigy finishing so fast, only to find out there are people who finish in a SINGLE DAY.  What?!  There are hundreds and thousands of people writing and finishing books all the time.  Whole forums of people specifically writing YA dystopias with cults in them.  I feel .... a bit overwhelmed.

My dream is to publish with a traditional publisher, in print.  Apparently self-publishing is a bigger thing than it used to be, and you can actually make money at it, but somehow I still feel like it wouldn't count.  I feel like I need a professional to look at my book and declare it good before I could trust that it was.  After all, I mostly do not read amateur writing myself.  So much of it is horrible that unless it comes recommended by someone I trust, why should I waste my time?  I'd as soon watch movies high school kids made with a camcorder in their basement. And if I judge other people's writing that harshly, I imagine other people would do the same to mine.

Anyway, I feel terrified by the whole submitting-to-publishers process.  I don't know anyone who's done it and can hold my hand.  And it is uncomfortably rife with stuff like self-promotion and executive function which I suck at.  In my dream world, you just send them the manuscript, but nooooo, there are all those steps which seem designed to weed out loner geniuses who are really only good at writing.  Possibly because they have this fantasy that the same person might both write a blockbuster novel AND be able to promote themselves and save the publisher the job.

But.  This is me, promising you, my mostly imaginary readership, that I'm going to edit it and actually submit it somewhere, in a reasonable amount of time.  Unlike the epic fantasy I've written, it stands on its own.  And because YA dystopias are having a "moment" right now, I'd better do it soon if I want to have much of a chance.  There is no reason to delay and every reason to be serious about it.

4

Meanwhile we continue to be prey to every sickness that comes along.  For the most part it's no big deal.  We have had a bunch of colds.  We have a full cupboard stocked with baby ibuprofen and children's mucinex and everything else that can possibly help, and Michael and Miriam get over things in just a few days.  The baby takes a bit longer, but she doesn't seem to mind being sick that much.

But Marko . . . it seems every time he gets a cold it turns into something more serious.  He had a double ear infection all last week.  We had him medicated up to his eyebrows because it was the only way to get the pain down to "not constantly sobbing" levels, and even so all he could do, the entire week, was lie on the couch and stare glassily into the middle distance.  He couldn't hear unless you shouted in his face.  He spent four days pretty much sleeping, and then once we got him on antibiotics, he spent three more days just watching YouTube videos of Legend of Zelda walkthroughs and begging us to carry him anywhere he needed to go because his legs "weren't working."  It was kind of scary, even though he had been seen by a doctor and the doctor didn't think he was dying or anything.

He's better by now, more or less.  He's still coughing.  He pulled a muscle in his back with all the coughing, which gives him a great deal of distress and anxiety.  You see, when he starts to cough, it hurts, and that makes him panic, so he starts crying and hyperventilating, and so it hurts worse . . . repeat forever.  He woke up many times the other night and it was all we could do to calm him down.  We know, from his past history, that his level of freakout about pain has very little bearing on how much it actually hurts.  He used to not mention he was hurt at all, and then when we managed to convince him that pain was an important message from your body that you need to tell your parents, he started taking it too seriously and going completely bananas about it.

Anyway, I tried several strategies that are supposed to stop panic attacks (like "find five things that are blue, name three things you can hear" which SUPPOSEDLY calms down freaking-out children in seconds) and these didn't work AT ALL, but then I started asking him questions about obscure Legend of Zelda details and it totally worked.  So now if he starts to freak out and cough and cry, I start talking Zelda and it instantly calms him.  Yet another reminder that an autistic child's special interests are a good thing which can be very powerful in helping them manage the world.

sick and clutching the Master Sword

5

So the ear infection is, for the most part, behind us.  But I am still pretty dang worried about him.  Why does he get sick so much, so badly?  He's missed something like 15 days of school already.  He eats reasonably well (given that he hates all vegetables--but we make him eat at least some) and takes a multivitamin.  He doesn't sleep as much as the other kids, but he doesn't generally seem tired.

We did find out, when we took him to the doctor last, that he's underweight.  His BMI is 13.5, well below what's healthy even for a kid with John's long and lean genes.  I can't figure out if it's just that he's been sick so much, and he doesn't eat when he's sick, or if it's something else.  I've been tracking his food intake and it seems normal when he's not sick.  He did go a week recently when he mysteriously wouldn't eat his lunch, but he's back to eating it now.  We've added dessert for every dinner (for everyone, because we can hardly give ice cream to just one kid) and I've been making snacks and lunches a bit higher-calorie, and we'll just have to see if that makes up the difference.  If not . . . well, between that and the frequent illnesses, I'm worried it might be something serious.

6

Meanwhile, he is doing great in school for the most part.  He made the A&B honor roll in the first quarter, and he's always coming home knowing new things.  Sometimes he brings home a paper with everything wrong on it, and it turns out he misunderstood the directions or wasn't paying attention, but more often than not he gets good grades and the teacher reports his behavior is good.  He seems to be doing especially well in math, though that may partly just be that it doesn't require much writing.  Writing is still a big struggle for him, but it is definitely getting better.  He doesn't write in all caps anymore.  And he reads fluently now.  This is a problem sometimes, as he loves to hang over my shoulder while I'm writing or reading and start asking questions about what is on my screen.  I've never been so thankful to be writing YA!

Michael is doing amazing.  His behavior in school, the teacher tells me, is excellent and she wishes she could have a classroom full of just Michaels.  And he's learning everything they can teach him, plus some he seems to be picking up on his own.  He's sounding out words and very enthusiastic about showing off his skills with print he sees anywhere.

It can be hard to praise each child's accomplishments without making the other one feel bad.  Both are doing really well given their abilities.  Which means Michael is, technically, doing better, but Marko is overcoming more challenges, so we just have to try to praise them out of earshot of the other.  I remember growing up hearing my brother praised for his intelligence and me for my sweetness, and I thought it meant I wasn't smart.  I want both my kids to explore all their strengths and not define themselves as not being whatever the other one is!

Miriam is being very stubborn and demanding lately.  I mean, she is three and that's standard.  It doesn't bug me like it did with previous kids, and I can't say if that's because she's not as difficult at three as they were, or if I just know three-year-olds now, so I know you don't argue with them, you just wait awhile and try again later.  Or, in some cases, you just give up and let them show up at school drop-off in a bathing suit and boots and hair that hasn't been brushed since their last haircut.

Jackie is walking a lot.  She's my earliest walker now at nine months, one week.  It's super impressive and I like to show her off to everyone.  She also waves, claps, signs "more" and "all done," and responds to her name.  Naps are still a tossup; she has been known to go through the whole day on the strength of a 20-minute nap.  She doesn't eat a whole lot besides crackers.

7

Not sure I have a seventh thing to say, so I'll just share some Halloween pictures.

We had Link, a dinosaur, a mouse, and a cat.  Marko refused to be in a picture with the other kids because there aren't any dinosaurs, mice, or cats in the Legend of Zelda.  I have to admit that this is true.  But they also don't demand candy from the neighbors, either, so I think the authenticity was a wee bit selective there.

How have y'all been, my five or so faithful readers?

7 quick school takes

1

So the kids started school last week. [Edit: more than that now.]  That's been ... exciting.

Michael has been enthusiastic from the start.  He's been all about getting to start school and finally have some fun, learning, and social time with other kids his age.  I think he's been too much in Marko's shadow and hasn't gotten enough that's really geared toward his age, so it's great for him to have a chance to branch out.

Marko has been upset about this from the start, but he's slowly gotten more and more used to the idea.  There were only a few brief tears on the first day.  He wasn't the most nervous kid in the class, anyway.

John took off work so we could be lonely and nostalgic together.  And we were.  But ohhh, it was so QUIET!  I don't think our house has been so quiet in the daytime since 2012.

2

I expected things to be a lot easier when school started.  In fact, I was counting on it, and it was a major reason we signed them up in the first place.  And it kind of is.  I mean, there's a lot less noise and overstimulation and bored children clawing each other's eyes out.

On the other hand, I'm still not relieved of enough duties to actually get anything done which I wasn't previously, because Jackie is still far and away the most challenging and she's still here.  And she's going through a rough phase -- or rather, reverting to normal after a brief actually-taking-naps phase -- which makes life unpredictable and difficult.  Her naps go from five to forty-five minutes, max, while when she's awake she is either clingy and wailing, or getting into stuff.  I can't do any job which requires running up and down stairs carrying things, because then I have to take my eyes off her and I can't do that ever.  She heads up the stairs or pulls the trash can over on herself or eats legos.  If I try to clean the kitchen with her playing at my feet, she does what all cruisers do and pulls herself up by my pant legs, so I can't walk over to the sink without knocking her over.  And if my hands are covered in raw chicken or something, I can't detach her either.  It's not the end of the world, but I'm still super unproductive.  I also can't really type while holding her, thus how long it took me to write this blog post (three weeks, not even kidding.  And I'm still only on point 2).  Aaand now she's screaming again, because I pulled her off the stairs.

I just wish, if she were going to be so doggone clingy, she wanted to nurse.  But she doesn't.  Or rather she'll act like she does, and then yank off.  She's much happier grabbing stuff or clawing my face or digging her feet into my belly.  If Miriam was the World's Happiest Baby, Jackie is the World's Most Discontented.

3

Other reasons my life hasn't gotten much easier include the extra work that school entails.  I have to make the kids get dressed every day, with socks and underwear too.  I have to pack lunches.  I have to walk them to school.

We live approximately one block from school, as the eagle flies.  That's if we cross lots and come up behind the school.  But, despite there being doors ALL OVER the school, there are only two places you can drop kids off: the side door, which is for the "kiss and ride," and the front door, which is for parents who park and walk their kids in.  Walkers are supposed to use the front door too.

This means we have to weave through a line of cars waiting at the kiss and ride, cross the parking lot, go through the playground gate, clamber down a steep grassy hill, and take the sidewalk the rest of the way around the building.  It's too steep for a stroller, which means Miriam has to walk and our whole progress is very slow, plus I have to carry Jackie in the wrap, which neither she nor I really like.

I keep saying I'm going to call the principal and ask if we can switch our drop off and pick up location to the side door, where I can just pretend I'm a car, swing by, and pick up the kids -- but I've waited too long, and now Marko is attached to the door we normally go in by, and insists that we are never allowed to change it.  Meanwhile Michael sobs if I don't walk him to his classroom and help him unpack his backpack every day.  I could fight this, but right now the weather is nice and I'm like -- what's three times the distance, anyway?  I'm sure I'll be sorry when it's rainy.  Especially as, if I choose to drive, that means buckling two kids in, driving two blocks, unbuckling them both, walking to the door, checking my kids out, walking back to the car, buckling everyone in, driving two blocks ....

On the other hand, the kiss and ride line is so long that even with all that walking, we still get home while the cars are still stacked up.  Since school doesn't even get out till 3:40, every minute of our afternoon counts.

After school, we have snack.  I put the snack on the table before leaving to pick the kids up, so when we get inside they can just run up and eat it.  Before I started doing that, it was mass chaos as everyone was taking off shoes and throwing backpacks around and demanding snacks and hitting each other while Jackie would suddenly decide it was time for nurse and nap.  While the kids eat their snack, if Jackie isn't asleep, I unpack the backpacks and see what they've brought home.

Marko always has homework.  I consider this The Worst Thing Ever.  I mean, if I wanted to fight with him for an hour to do five minutes' worth of work, wouldn't I still be homeschooling?  It's an especial shame given that he has about two hours total that he gets to spend on unstructured play with his siblings before dinner, and half of that is going to homework.  And then I have to make dinner, so that leaves zero minutes for me to spend with Michael, who has no homework.

The hour total it often takes?  That's with me doing half of it.  I do almost all the writing, because writing is still extremely difficult for him.  There are often tears, flat refusals, hyperbole ("homework is the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my whole life"), threats ("I will never be nice to you ever again") and then, somehow, the homework gets done.  Generally I remind him of future rewards (computer time on the weekend) or that his teacher will be so happy and give him one hundred percent.  He really loves his teacher, and he loves earning good grades and points for good behavior.

Basically my day is frenetically busy between the hours of 7 and 9, and 3:30 to 7:30, but all the rest is peace and quiet.  Well, mostly.  Miriam is basically no trouble ever, as long as there are no brothers to fight with.  She plays nicely with Jackie or by herself.  Jackie is trouble, but it's baby trouble ... that is, you basically just hold her.  It's mostly pretty quiet and peaceful, and while I am theoretically supposed to be getting stuff done during the day, it's mostly a time to recharge.  I also run errands.  Running errands with only two children feels like a vacation.

4

What do I like about school?

I like that the kids' teachers seem super nice and they seem to be learning a lot and mostly like it.  I like that they're no longer bored and starting fights with each other all day just because they're understimulated.  I like that when they're home, they don't nag at me to turn on the TV, they get straight into serious playing.  I like that the teachers make a real effort to communicate often.

Marko's behavior in particular has gotten better.  He can be a bit on edge; he throws a fit from time to time, but not more than before.  And he's better at completing tasks independently.  He gets dressed usually with very little guidance (so long as there is a clean green shirt to wear! Lately he will wear only green shirts) and the other day he sorted all my laundry in return for a chance to watch My Little Pony.  He goes into his classroom by himself and unpacks his backpack and turns in his homework.  He's successfully communicating with people at school about his needs, and he's able to report at least some of what he did at school back to me when he gets home.  Sometimes the details are fuzzy; other times he knows in detail when the various teachers have doctor's appointments but has no idea if he has any homework.  But I'm mostly impressed he is communicating so well.  And he's started tentatively writing a few lower-case letters!

I like getting to spend quality time with Miriam instead of just dealing with the kids as a pack.  I like knowing when Jackie wakes up five minutes after laying her down, it's not because of the noise because it's nice and quiet at home.  And I like that when everyone gets home and everything's hectic, I've been keeping my calm better because I've had a (quasi) break.

What don't I like?

I don't like being away from my kids so long.  I miss them.  I wish it were only a few hours a day, or better yet, that I had it in me to provide the amount of fun and learning they need all by myself.  They leave the house at 8:30 and don't get back till almost four.  That's almost a full workday .... for a five and a seven-year-old.

With all their time spent on school, I have no time to teach them to do chores, or have fun learning experiences, or read aloud to them, or answer all their zillion questions.  Sometimes they have a ton of questions and I think "ooh we could do a cool project to learn this" but there isn't any time to do it.  Marko asked a question about why the word "indivisible" was in the Pledge of Allegiance, and I wanted to teach him about the whole Civil War, but there was no time.  I like homeschooling and so sacrificing time learning with my kids is something I kind of resent.  I envy their teachers for getting to do that kind of thing with them, and I can't even volunteer in the classroom because I have little kids.  I miss being a teacher.

I also don't like that they have only one recess per day, or that most of the day is spent on reading and writing so science and history are basically just electives.  I bet the teachers don't love that either, but it's a result of the testing and ranking that American schools are plagued by.  Apparently our school is not ranked very high.  That doesn't matter to me at all, though, because regardless of what test scores are, I can tell the teachers are caring, the class sizes aren't that large (like 24 kids each), special needs kids are getting the help they need, and pretty much everyone we run into knows my kids' names.  That's what counts for a lot more in my book.  I just wish the teachers with my kids were the ones choosing what to spend time on, because I think they'd make better choices.

I don't like all the paperwork, the fundraisers, the pick-up routines, the socialist kindergarten snack (bring a snack for the whole class once a month instead of packing for your kid), or the germs the kids bring home.  School is not the bureaucratic nightmare I would have assumed, but it is a bit bureaucratic.

Basically, Marko and I have about the same assessment of it: not as bad as we thought, but we still like homeschooling better.  So far I'm still planning to return to homeschooling next year; I figure with a toddler and no baby, it'll be a heck of a lot easier to do co-ops and activities and stuff.  But I think I'll be a lot more official about my homeschooling, with more ready-made workbooks and more hours a day spent.  I can tell that increased time and effort spent really does result in more learned; counting on my kid to eventually want to write resulted in zero writing, while Ms. M's gentle guidance has gotten him writing a little every day.   The idea is a few hours a day on the boring math and spelling stuff, and then we can keep unschooling the history and science with books and movies and projects.

5

So we had that eclipse, of course.  Here we had about 85%.  That's code for "basically nothing but weird shadows, unless you have eclipse glasses."  On the other hand we did have eclipse glasses, so we got to see a crescent sun.

Teeny tiny little sun!

Miriam holds a colander for some crescent shadows.

All the dapples turned crescent-shaped.  Kind of cool.

The famous "diamond ring" effect, with my head playing the part of the moon.  This was right at the peak of what we had, so you can see the sun remains extremely bright -- you couldn't photograph it without just getting a bright smear, and I couldn't even try to look at it.  All that fuss about "don't look at it" and I was not tempted at all.  It was amazing to look through the glasses and see just how tiny the sun actually is.  It looks like it takes up a huge chunk of the sky, but nope, it's as small as the moon.

I was really upset, ahead of time, that the boys would be in school when it happened.  Not only would we not get this fun, educational experience together, but they were being kept inside altogether (for fear they would look at the sun and blind themselves) and weren't going to see it at all.  But since they get out at 3:40 and the eclipse wasn't completely over till 4, I brought the eclipse glasses along and we stood on the sidewalk and had a look.  The sun was down to the "cookie with a tiny bite out of it" stage but they still thought it was super cool.

But both they and I agree that what we really want is a total one.  There's one not far away in 2024, and it makes me happy imagining having kids from 7 to 14 and having really no trouble zipping up to Ohio or someplace for a little camping.

6

About a month ago I first heard that pertussis was going around the area.  This ticks me off because apparently the first cases showed up in May, and nobody said anything, so I spent all summer going to the park and the library and every playdate we could.  That, and putting off the girls' vaccines till after school started because I didn't want to haul four kids to the doctor together.  Regrets: I has them.

Well, they've now had one dose, and we're not going anywhere.  So far I don't think we've been exposed.  It seems to be centered around the parish, and we haven't been there, or to any church activities.  However we've all had a slight cold, which past in a couple days for everyone but Jackie.  Of course I am worried it's pertussis and she will die.

I am also finding my new pro-vaccine views are getting more emphatic.  After going through all that research and deciding the AAP and CDC are trustworthy sources about vaccines, I'm really frustrated to see "alternative" sources peddling misinformation.  I've become pretty good at judging a website straight off -- if you're familiar, you can easily catch the phrases quacks use -- but proving it's wrong is another matter.  For instance, someone in a local group was trying to convince everyone that the pertussis vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting the bacteria, but only prevents the symptoms.  I knew the article she shared was bunk, because the blog was obviously "alternative" and peddled some theories I know are false, but it was packed full of (probably meaningless) detail and the footnotes led back to the CDC website, so it looked like it must be by someone who knew what they were talking about.  Immediately vaccinated people started worrying they were carriers and should quarantine themselves even though they had no symptoms.

In time, I eventually managed to find a reliable source that answered the first one.  The very first comment?  "That's clearly a pro-vax source, you can't expect me to trust that!"  Well ... actually, no.  I know exactly how it is.  The science itself is too complex to pick apart, so you're stuck just testing the author on how much they agree with your other beliefs.

You know how I'm always changing my mind about what I want to do when I grow up when the kids grow up?  Right now I'm thinking biology teacher.  People are growing to adulthood with no idea how to decode scientific studies and articles, journalists write about them in a way that's downright irresponsible, and you can't possibly make good decisions if you don't know the facts.

7

Basically, life's going fine.  I'm not actively unhappy.  I think my anxiety is a little better lately too, since I've finally been able to outsource some of the worrying.  But I'm still not back to where I was before I got pregnant with Jackie.  I'm definitely in the trenches.  I haven't gotten out my spinning wheel since she was born.  I've brainstormed some story ideas, but written nothing down.  I am still barely cranking out a blog post every three or four weeks.  It's just been a really long time since I was caught up enough on my job to do anything I want to do.

I guess that sounds greedy.  Many people would love to be able to care adequately for their kids, feed them sufficient food, have a big clean(ish) house to put them in.  The recent flood really brings that home.  And I am thankful.  Even in the past year, I have been a lot worse off than I am right now.  But it's still just a wee bit demoralizing to finish the day's work, finally collapse on the couch to watch some TV or text with a friend, and get interrupted by the sound of crying and have to slog up the stairs to nurse the baby again.  It's been seven years now that I've been doing this -- seven years that I've always been on call, always had to drop what I'm doing and go nurse somebody.  I'm tired.

And I really had hoped that I would have an easy baby this time around.  Miriam was so chill, I guess when I got another girl I was hoping it meant another chill one.  And Jackie is severely unchill.  She is fun too, at last, and I'm grateful I can play with her and exchange smiles and all that.  But she is really, really demanding.  I would have thought a fourth child would shrug its little baby shoulders and say "guess I can't be high needs, with all these other kids around here," but nope, high needs babies don't care how many resources there are around.

How high needs is she?  Well, she spends probably half an hour per day on average wailing inconsolably, even in arms.  Sometimes it's a lot more than that.  Even when she's not crying, she's not contented -- she spends a lot of her time climbing up my body, digging her feet into my gut and clawing my face.  I have a scab on my nose where she took a chunk of skin off -- even though I'm pretty careful to cut her nails, obviously.  I have scratches and pinch marks on my belly and breasts and neck.  But if I put her down, usually, she howls.  Sometimes the swing helps.  Sometimes not.  It's good that she's getting more active so she can actually play -- Miriam and Jackie and I spend a lot of the time in the playroom while she crawls all over.  If you turn over the trampoline so she can't climb on it and fall off, and make sure the legos are put away, there isn't much trouble she can get into in there.  Even then, though, she spends a lot of her time using me to pull to a stand, then grabbing my face or hair.

I'm just kind of looking forward to things getting easier.  Like when she's two, or maybe three.  I've never had no kids under three.  Imagine the things I could do.

And there she goes.  Awake again.  In the time she was asleep, I wrote point 7.  I did not clean up the lunch mess in the kitchen, or use the bathroom, or carry the laundry upstairs.  I prioritized this post, and I may be sorry.

On the other hand, she has a blond curl on the top of her head.  Were my other kids this blond at this age, and was their hair so long?  It could not have been. *rubs face in baby hair*  It's not all bad.

How was your week?  Or rather, month?