The college report

Eldest took the SAT on Saturday, and has to take the PSAT tomorrow. The more exciting news is that she had her first college interview today, with an MIT alumnus. She thought it went well; she was happy and bubbly afterwards. Turns out her interviewer had gone to the same high school and planned to major in math and physics at MIT (!) He ended up majoring in political science and becoming a lawyer. Apparently there were no show-stopper questions, and Eldest felt she'd gotten to say all of the important stuff she'd wanted to say. So far, so good.

How to Learn to Like Vacuuming

My vacuum broke in July. Our budget wasn't able to accomodate getting the machine fixed, and so over the past three months I have developed an almost OCD relationship with the broom. Despite sweeping and sweeping and sweeping, the house never felt clean. It was making me nuts. Last week's mouse was the final straw. Now, as of Friday, we have a working vacuum again. Oh, but this is a wondrous thing! I am so, so happy!

This reminds me of when we lived in a 3rd floor walk-up with two small children, and had to take our laundry out to wash. I used to stand at the top of the stairs and roll the huge bag of dirty clothes down (thump! thump! thump!), while holding a newborn and trying to keep a curious toddler from racing after the bag. Then it was across the street in the rain or snow, only to spend the next couple of hours trying to prevent the toddler from bashing her head into a plethora of hard surfaces. When we moved to our current building, it was thrilling to be able to do laundry without having to go outside.Thirteen years later, I'm still happy.

Similarly, I have a fairly good stock of patience while on line at the ATM. The reason: my first job was in Puerto Rico, in the days before automatic deposit reached the island. Every other Friday I spent an entire lunch hour in line to deposit my paycheck. If I didn't bring home enough cash for the week, it meant sacrificing another lunch hour at the bank!

The only life lesson of this kind that hasn't stuck with me relates to computers. I did, in fact, use one of the very first IBM PCs. It had 10MB of memory, and two floppy disk drives. I had to type in code to run the thing, and wait forever for anything to happen. But today I still get exceedingly annoyed when the web is slow. Oh well.

Learning new things

On my list of things to do today: learn how to do a mail merge. I'd gladly exchange my mental storage bin of Sitcoms-of-the-Seventies theme songs for instant knowledge of how to do this. However, perhaps what I fear will be an exercise in futility frustration will bear fruit in humility.

David Albert, who wrote And the Skylark Sings With Me, says it's important for us to model learning new things with our children. He says that our kids need to see us struggle and persevere, since they tend to think everything comes easily to us.

I think he's probably right. Nevertheless, it's a heckuva lot easier to struggle and persevere when the kids are in bed. Maybe my concentration isn't what it used to be, but I find it challenging to learn new things while Star Wars figurines are being catapulted across the living room and I'm subjected to a perpetual "Can I have another peanut butter cookie?" mantra.  

What I've been thinking about

1) The funny tightrope we walk between the need to know 'how things should be' (so we know what to aim for) and the need to accept life as it comes (without getting demoralized that things aren't as they should be).

2) The importance of dry periods in faith. I just wrote a longish piece on this elsewhere, and it gave me some good food for thought.

3) The mouse that ran out the kitchen door and into the dining room at 5:30 a.m. Guess I need to get after the super to close up the hole in the kitchen wall...

4) How good it feels to have work done a little bit ahead of time, without the last-minute rush. This is not the norm around here!

5) How to write a Christmas carol about bipolar disorder. Really. (I need to fill space in a newsletter I edit.)

There's more, but I have another deadline looming (see #5, above) and I'm at a cliff-hanging moment in The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch. Not sure if I like the latter or not; seems like a book I'd like better in a discussion group, where others might have more of a clue than I do!

What Were You Thinking?!?

Several years ago I fell in a brief rut of saying, "What were you thinking?!?" to my kids. It took about a week of hearing myself say this (and seeing blank looks in response) to realize that it was a particularly lame question. Clearly they hadn't been thinking at all when they did whatever it was I was upset about.

Kids make a lot of mistakes because they don't think things through. There are adults who do this, too. There are Fortune 500 companies that do it. I daresay I have occasionally suffered from the same malady.

The tricky part is remembering that just because I can see that A--> B --> C, I can't assume the sequence is obvious to others (especially kids). Asking them, "If you do A, what will happen next? And then what...?" tends work better than bloviating over why they didn't think of B or C. (When I remember to do it, that is.)

However, there are times when a child progresses to point C and it's not a matter of not thinking. There's a name for when you know something is wrong and choose to do it anyway: it's sin. I have been working hard lately not to get angry at my children when they sin. Making bad choices is part of life. My job isn't to get mad, but to help my kids make better choices as they grow older.

In many senses it's easier to deal with things like a stolen candy bar (today's incident) than with dirty dishes left carelessly on the table three times a day. With a stolen candy bar I know what to do: get the child to make restitution and ask for forgiveness. There's a clear path, which I can follow in a detached way without getting angry.

But the less concrete the sin -- and perhaps the more it relates to my kids' character flaws that might reflect on me as a mother -- the harder I find it to remain neutral. Things like habitually inconsiderate behavior or meanness toward siblings put me on weedier ground. I get annoyed when my words go unheeded. I get irritated when my strategies to rectify the situation don't work. Tonight I'm wondering if this is because I feel some kind of personal investment in the outcome.

Today as I escorted my child back from the candy store I had a momentary Oh no! This is the first step on the road to prison! reaction. Fortunately I remembered my child's age, and the number of similar offenses done by other children of the same age, and blew off the tendency to extrapolate. Parenting is a lot easier when you are mindful of the future but centered on the present.

"How are you?"

A mom in my building asked me this today, and I stammered a bit before replying, "There's no one way to answer that!" This is true of my life in general:

The House: the living room and bathroom are clean, the kitchen's full of dirty dishes (will be cleaned tonight), the bedrooms need substantial improvement, but that's not happening today.

Health, physical: Eldest and I still have the bronchial dregs of last week's cold, Big Guy's only on day three, the others seem mostly mended.

Health, mental: one withdrawn and stressed, one happy, one up-and-down, the remainder pretty much normal.

It's all a mixed bag, just like each day is filled with mixed emotions, mixed motives, and mixed successes.There are times life is like an ice cream cone on a hot day: sweet and tasty, but one side is always dripping onto your new shoes.

On the drippy side of life at the moment, I'd ask your prayers for my brother (who was just laid off);  my parents, who just learned my dad's pension will be cut by 9% a year for each of the next three years (ouch!); and for a woman who was jaw-droppingly mean yesterday to some kids we know.

A new technique

A couple of days ago I read an article by a man with ADHD which suggested a way to help kids stay focused, using some of the innate strengths that come with ADHD. The basic plan is two-fold: 1) don't let the child sit, but do all work standing at a table that's chest-high. 2) Set the timer for 15 minutes. During that 15 minutes the child is to remain at the table, with work in front of her. If she does the work, great. If not, okay. When the timer goes off, there's no finishing the line you're writing, no reading to the end of the paragraph -- when it's time, it's time.

Then set the timer for 15 minutes of play. Same deal: the child can do whatever he/she wants, but as soon as the timer rings there's an immediate end to whatever's in progress. No excuses, no arguments, no delays, no saving the game being played, just back to the table. Then 15 minutes of work, etc.

The idea behind this (aside from the wisdom of not having to sit still!) is that ADHD kids can hyperfocus when it's to their advantage to do so. And because they hate being interrupted at something they like to do, they suddenly have a really good incentive to get work done so that there is uninterrupted time to play. Although the kids tend to goof off during the first 15-minute period, they generally quickly self-correct.

I mentioned the 15-minute idea to my squirmy and distractible one, and she was keen to try it. I didn't have a way to raise our table up (I figured we'd try the rest of the strategy first, to see if the effort of table-raising was even worthwhile), but I set the timer. WOW. I mean, WOW. In some senses it takes longer than our regular school strategy, because there's time off in between everything. But when she was working, she was working. And what was even better was that I didn't have to nag at all.

It amazed me that my daughter was able to shift from watching a video to doing phonics without any time to transition. I'm guessing that she simply switched from one hyperfocus to a different one. (I can't do that!) I also found that the 15-minute blocks of time helped me. When Snuggler was in her play time, I made phone calls, did chores, or worked with the other kids. It gave me a brief block of uninterrupted time, time when I knew that I didn't have to be supervising her work. She did almost everything unsupervised today, and that was a huge relief!

For Little Guy, who wanted to climb on the 15-minute bandwagon halfway through the morning, this strategy was a disaster. He has too many ideas that require a lot of time to execute, and needs long blocks of play time in order to settle in. For him, school is better done in one consolidated block of time, leaving the rest of the day free.