Yesterday Wallace’s teachers came over to visit our house.  The drama of getting up all the dog hair, crumbs and crap before they arrived aside, it was a wonderful visit.  Wallace was positively beside himself to show them everything he’s ever owned, touched, or thought about and he talked up a storm.

At one point they turned to me with a smile and asked if he always talks this much at home.  O how i laughed. 

Basically I was able to offer cookies and drinks and we all sat around and they went through the goals and expectations for kids this year.  I was so happy with everything they told me.  While they are doing a lot more emphasis on self-responsibility, they also seem to have a very clear grasp on when it’s good to help a kid and when it’s better to toss them into the water and let them figure it out.  That’s helpful for me, because I tend to over-coddle, him being my only precious widdle boy and all.

When he checks in in the morning he finds a paper in the check-in stack that has his name on it.  To check in that day, he has to write his name below the letters.  This is brilliant, because my boy is most assuredly small-motor-skill resistant and this way we make sure that at least once a day he’s practicing his name.

Also, snacks are offered as an option, not a sit-down requirement.  At first I was all, “Really?  Three and four year olds are going to be bright enough to choose a snack if they are hungry and forgoing playing?”, but then I realized it highlights an important function.  Namely, you eat when food is offered.  If you are not hungry, then don’t eat, but know that you will then have to wait for dinner.  It’s a problem we’ve been having at mealtimes where Wallace will take two bites then run off to play and complain 45 minutes later that he’s starving.  I don’t mind telling him he has to wait until lunch or dinner, but I have a personal mental block about letting him go to bed hungry (although I did it two nights ago).

Once again, this illustrates how little kids have to learn and the way that they learn is to make mistakes, and letting them make their own mistakes and learning about the consequences is a good thing.  With the snack offering, he can learn about it in a way that means that he won’t actually be starving, but he can learn the lesson.  Once again school raises my child much better than I do.

The real triumph of this year, however, is NAP.  While Wallace was on vacation at his DCP, I made an important connection.  Wallace has accidents when he sleeps.  It doesn’t matter if he’s just gone, when he’s in dreamland his bladder lets go.  In situations where he feels safe (home - his DCP) he doesn’t worry so much about accidents and will sleep.   I even talked to the doctor about it and she confirmed that it’s beyond his control.  There is nothing he can do about it.

His teachers and I had a long discussion about the embarrassment and worry I thought he might be feeling.

The next day they promised that they would wake him up at 1:30 so that he could use the bathroom and, my darlings, WALLACE SLEPT!  That is not all!  He slept, they woke him up at 1:30, he used the potty, then he went BACK TO SLEEP.   He has had three days in a row of sleeping at naptime and NO accidents.  He is feeling so much better about himself and I really think that this is undoing all kinds of trauma from last year. 

Oh!  And this:  I was talking to one of the teachers and she mentioned that a kid and Wallace got into an argument and there was some scuffling and Wallace hit this kid lightly in the stomach.  So the teacher called him on it and Wallace fessed up immediately and apologized and said he wouldn’t do it again.

The novelty? The teachers handled it!  They had a three year old who hit another kid at school and instead of fucking writing it in a report and telling it to me in hushed tones while doing nothing at the time and giving Wallace worried glances out of the corners of their eyes, these teachers said, “Whoa!  We DO NOT HIT! Say you’re sorry!”  No drama, no dragging on.  Immediate consequences and accountability.  And it was considered so normal and so not a big deal that they only told me to demonstrate how responsive Wallace is even when he’s in the wrong. 

Get right the hell outta town. 

The ninnies would have pulled out the Geneva Convention and had a long discussion with him about spreading germs through the hitting of others.

Also, daily reports begin next week and from what it looks like, the teachers are planning on actually doing them.  No way.

And better than all this, better than everything that makes me happy, Wallace is happy with school.  This morning he told his dad, “I love going to school!” and on Wednesday afternoon he did not want to leave.

That is what I’m talking about.

The only downside is that pretty soon they will start expecting the kids to tie their own shoes.  Our house is Velcro Central.  So, we have some homework.

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So.  Let me tell you a story.

It starts out well enough.  I got up with Wallace, we had breakfast and I saw him off to school.  Then we found out that the mysterious thumping noise on my tire did not indiciate an immenant explosion, and that was good.  I took myself off to the podiatrist and they had me on file still and all was good there. 

The lovely doctor (and he is really, really nice and lovely) came in and asked about the pain.  I told him about my foot pin theory and the pain I was feeling seemed to back it up.  Then I laid out our home situation and how soon I’d be leaving my job and he said the magic words:  As long as they could get me preapproved, they’d be happy to operate tomorrow and give me three full days to recover before work on Monday.

He said it was a very small two-stitch procedure and that I’d be into a gym shoe almost immediately.  I left the office elated, because in the way that bad things happen, it went just perfectly.

An hour later I was in the pet store when I got a call from the pod’s office.  First, they had approved the surgery and gotten the paperwork started.  Hooray!  Second, they pulled out the paperwork from my past surgeries and the paperwork indicated that my left foot was the one where we’d actually already removed the pin.

GAH?

Then she asked me possibly the dumbest question anyone has ever asked me.

“Are you SURE it was the right foot?”

I paused and answered, “No!  Of course I’m not sure!  It’s not like I can look through my skin and see.  I would have said so until a minute ago, but now…”

Their instructions were to make my way to the nearest hospital that takes my insurance to get an x-ray.  This was a good idea, but it was noon and Wallace’s teachers were coming for a home visit at 4:30.  And the house was a pit.  Suddenly, time was tight.

So I book it to the hospital and go to check in with the outpatient services and they tell me that they aren’t going to do anything for me until they have paperwork.  So, I call the pod’s office.  The office is closed for lunch.  GREAT!

I sit in the waiting room watching the time tick away.

Finally, we have it!  I rush down to radiology and I’m put up on the table ASAP, mostly because it’s an easy picture.  I don’t even need to take my pants off.  She takes three quick shots and then runs to check them. 

I am an idiot.  An idiot.  At this point I still expect her to come back in and say, “Oh yeah, there’s a pin in there.”  Also, maybe, “It looks like a really horribly painful pin.  You should have it taken out.  Thank God you were so on top of this.”

Instead, she walks in and says, “I saw no metal at all in that foot.”

Fuuuhuuuuck.

So, I leave.  I call the doctor’s office and let them know that there will be no surgery needed and that the Radiologist will send them the films.  The poor receptionist had just finished all the paperwork. 

Dammit.  They were so damned accomodating.  They were so nice about it.  I was so sure it was the pin, and all the pain seemed to support the idea.  Now all their energy was wasted, my day was wasted, and my foot still hurts like a mofo, now for reasons unknown.

I want to be very, very clear that it’s very YAY for no surgery!

Just boo for an exhausting day, knowing that there won’t be a quick fix coming soon, and a lot of embarassment.  Of course, it would have been a LOT more embarassing if they’d done the sugery only to find no pin.

I did manage to make the house nice before the teacher visit.  And that went well.  Really, everything today is fine, but tonight I stubbed my foot and it felt like it was on fire.  I hate being wrong, and I’m embarassed.  Ugh.

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In 2002 I had a very painful set of surgeries.  My years of swing dancing on spike heeled shoes had left me with killer gams, but seriously ruined feet.  I have (as in all things) a genetic predisposition to messed up feet.  The dancing didn’t improve matters.  By 2002 my big toes were headed East and West respectively and were beginning to go dead due to pinched nerves.

I had a limited amount of paid time off available to me (Thanks, IC!) so I had to arrange to have both feet worked on at the same time. Only, they didn’t do them at the same time.  They did them in two separate surgeries a few days apart.  I recovered slowly, beginning in a wheelchair, after they broke and reset my feet.  To try and keep the toes from moving again (I will probably need these surgeries a few times over my lifetime), pins were placed anchoring my big toes to my feet bones.

Shortly after beginning to recover I overballanced on the way out of the car and came down on my right foot, popping the pin out of place.  I was sure that I’d go in for some valium, they’d numb the foot and just pull the pin out.  Alas, it appears that it was anchored with more than some spit and a prayer, so it was back for surgery number three in two weeks.  FUN!

Honestly, that was a time in our lives that TT and I would both very much like to forget.

Except that at some point in the last 48 hours it appears that my left foot has popped the pin.  When I walk or step I get a *SPROINGGGGG* feeling; nerves are being triggered in my foot and occasionally pain shoots up my leg; and also I can feel it pressing up against the underside of the gorgeous keloid scar on my foot. MMMMMMmmmmmmmm.

I am not certain the universe knows how really, really unfortunate this timing is.  So I’ll tell it.  UNIVERSE, THE TIMING ON THIS ONE REALLY, REALLY SUCKS.

My last day of work is September 5th.  Since I quit my job, not only am I working two desks but I’m training my replacement.  My work load has skyrocketed.  I have a day and a half left of paid time off.    I also have an appointment on Thursday to see the podiatrist and to do something for Wallace’s school.  This means that IF I manage to get into surgery to remove the pin before we lose our current insurance on September 5 (PLEASE, GOD), I have to take a day off of work.  I will owe my company for that time when I leave.  I will leave work and have to pay the company.

I am apoplectic over this. 

If I cannot get surgery before the 5th, then I’m going to have to pay for it out of the new insurance setup and I’m feeling mighty distrustfully squinty about it.  I don’t know enough about it, yet.  It looks like good insurance, but what if it sucks in the end? 

Meanwhile, the plan was that I’d quit work and spend the ten days until the start of classes getting my seven hours of observation, my CPR training, and cleaning and rearranging the house so that everything is at least tidy before we blow it all to hell.  This plan is pretty much dependent on me NOT having to put my feet up, and the whole school thing makes it pretty important that I don’t wind up having to actually return some money to my former employer.

The timing is horrible.  I was okay about school until yesterday.  I had nerves, but I was pretty excited.  Now I’m just back to blind panic.

Goddamn it.  Goddamn fucking shit.

That’s all I have to say.

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Day 1 was good.  The teachers were in control, responsive and the kids seemed happy.

Wallace napped for 10 minutes and had an accident, which opened the door to the nap/accident discussion.  I was able to point out why I think that Wallace does not want to nap at school (because he has an accident and is embarassed).  I was also able to point out that we asked the doctor last week about it and she very firmly told us that it is not within his control, period.  I also mentioned that I had a bladder disease and that may be affecting Wallace as well.

Basically we were able to have a nice chat and I was able to introduce the idea now that if he’s not napping this does not mean he is spitting in the faces of his teacher overlords and trying to start a Pre-K revolt.  Maybe they should cut him some slack.  He’s three.  NOT HIS FAULT, PEOPLE.

We also got his book from last year, which is an absolute treasure.  This is the book that the ninny teachers used as an excuse for why they didn’t have time to do the daily reports.   As much as I would have absolutely preferred daily reports, I must admit that the book they put together is marvelous.  It highlights his changes over the year in sections, like we have his storytelling from September of 07 through to last spring, the same thing for his cutting with scissors samples and letter/number recognition.  There are a ton of photos of him and reports of things he said or did.

At one point they asked him to tell them what he saw during the field trip to the farm and his response was:

Cows, fences, sheep, blue, I don’t know.

“I was dead at the time!”

I will scan some of the pages, because they are awesome and I think that his grandparents should have a copy.

IN SUMMARY:  Wallace was strung-out and ill behaved at home from the stress of a new school year, but apparently he did pretty well on the first day and the teachers reported that he seemed to have a good time.  There was an accident, but it was caused by actual napping (yay napping!) and the teachers and I were able to get on the same page vis-a-vis his napping/accident problem that was such an issue last year.

It’s only been one day, but it seems like having folks in control who are ready to be in control of littles and really understand what they can and cannot do, as well as an environment without teacher bullying, seems to be making all the difference.  Fingers crossed we continue to go like this and that the nap/accident issue is either reframed for Wallace so that he’s less anxious, or almost over because he’s reaching the age of no naps anyway.

Oh, and last night, he tried mashed potatoes UNPROMPTED.  Three times!  He hated them, but he tried them, on his own.

God bless the people who raise my child.

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Mayhem asked:

Good luck, Wallace!

How long do you think it will be until you know for sure that this classroom and teacher will “fit” Wallace?

My response:

I think we’ll give it a good two weeks. There’s bound to be some adjustment time, but this time last year it took two weeks and then he was doing well.

It didn’t all go wrong until Feb or March of this year when the long-term teacher left and the two mindless ninnies took her place.

And, I mean, he was never being abused or anything dramatic like that. However, if he’s still having problems after two weeks, or if the drama rachets up, TT and I will have to start looking into alternative places.

So far, though, TT said that the dropoff was great. He got this one photo and that was it. Wallace was totally uninterested in Dad and ran over and sat down on the rug.

Miss R is never going to be his (or anybody’s) best friend. She’s too crotchety. At the same time, she’s been doing this a LOOOONG time and is much more than competant, which the ninnies were not. Fingers crossed that it’s all just fine.

Also, on the bike this morning Wallace told TT that he was glad to be going back to school.  Here’s hoping!  I’ll let you know how it all goes after I pick him up today.

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A new room, a new teacher, old friends.

We’re all a little apprehensive.  Please, please let it go well.

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Wallace had his four year checkup yesterday (even though we’re still at 3.9 years old thankyewverymuch).  He weighs 40lbs on the button and is 40.5 inches tall.  He’s in the 69th percentile for height and 86th for weight, which is funny because when you look at him he looks a LOT taller than he is heavy.  You can see his ribs and his backbone, for goodness sake.

I’m the same way.  I look about 30 to 40lbs thinner than I really am.  Even when I was really fit I was pretty darned heavy.  Apparently my family has bones made out of Osmium*.  Also, we are the big heads.  Our brains are heavy.  BRAAIIIIIIINS.

Happy, healthy, growing kid!  YAY!

We did get instructions to up the veggies, and so I pureed some broccoli last night and stuck it into his cheesburger.  It went down undetected.  Go go gadget veggies!

*many thanks to Lizzie T for the element suggestion.

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On the up-side, tonight’s TV movie is one of the two best movies ever to have on television.  One is Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The second is JAWS.

There is something about the TV format that makes the marathon into a series of sprints and suddenly I can stand to look at that great, big, fake shark.

Awesome.

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To the jackass who just made my lunch:  If I am repeating myself, it is because you do not appear to be listening to my order.  If you give me some sign that you have heard me, I will stop saying “With walnuts”.  If you continue to look at the floor as if imagining my face under your shoe, I will keep saying it because I want the fucking walnuts and when you look like that I can’t tell if you’re irritable, deaf, preoccupied, or a dumbass.  I’m at a fast food joint ordering food.  While I appreciate that you may not like your job, or having to serve us assholes all day, I am not actually the one out of place, here.

To my fellow fat chick on the train:  Get your fucking elbow out of my side.  Yes, we are both fat (as you so kindly pointed out).  I am not going to say anything about our thighs squishing together, because we are fat and that is a function of sitting down.  However, I am managing to sit on the train without digging people next to me in the ribs.  My fatness has not somehow given way to the total loss of elbow control.  I appreciate that you’re oh so tired, but my fat is not your pillow any more than your fat is my fucking punching bag.  OR IS IT?

Also, the next time you scoot around behind me to jump in front of me at the doors of the train I will happily boot your fat backside in front of it.  Make a note of it, fucker.

To the crazy bitch raising money in the lobby:  I do not want to give you $5.  I do not want to win an afghan.  I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt and figure that it’s been a long day and you have someone close to you with Alzheimer’s and you’re feeling desperate, but I’m not going to because you got all up in my face and started talking over me, waving tickets at me, and yelling about the damned afghans.

We actually give ridiculous amounts of money to various charities.  We participate in events and sponsor others who do so.  We are not charity slackers who think that we owe nothing to society.  We give to society and its causes, I’m just not giving to your obnoxious ass, ass.  I said NO.  If you don’t understand it, buy a fucking dictionary.

To the lady who blew the stop sign and almost ran me over, only pausing momentarily to flip me off:  I hope you have herpes.

To the small group of teenagers at the train station:  I said that my husband was saying “Watch out! Watch out!” to our three-year-old who was careening off of people because, apparently, you thought he was saying it to you.  When you hear someone say “Watch out!” or “Don’t eat that rock!” or “We say ‘excuse me!’ when we fart!” and they have a small child in tow, before you get all put out that the white man is disrespecting your right to congregate in front of the EL, maybe you should think that perhaps he wasn’t speaking to oh-so-important you.

Then, when you loudly complain that he disrespected you, and his wife overhears and turns around and explains that he was speaking to the small pinball-like child at his side, the best thing to do then is to disbelieve her, glare and yell things.  Because everyone is a liar and is out to get your ass.  Because that is what we do all day.  We wake up and make plans to oppress others as often as possible.

 END RANT

On a side note: I could be just noticing more things these days, but the hostilities between races here in the city seem to be picking up in virulence and occurance.  I don’t know why, but it makes me nervous.  For the record, any African Americans out there, if I bump into you it’s because my ass is clumsy as hell, not because of the color of your skin.  You don’t have to forgive me, of course, but I’m genuinely sorry that I did and would have been just as likely to bump into you if you had been white. 

The author of Peter’s Cross Station and her wife are moving to Chicago.  They are the parents of two adopted AA girls.  I’m a little baffled by this decision.  While I think that Chicago will be better off with fine, upstanding folks like them in it, I’m not sure what Chicago has to offer them.  I predict that they will run into many more problems being an interracial family than they will due to their adoption or same-sex status, and that those problems will come both from the white and AA communities. 

We live in an ethnically diverse neighborhood right out side of the city, but most of this city is still pretty clearly divided.  People keep pretty firmly to their own camps.  This does not make for a happy, harmonious society.  I could be wrong, but right now things appear awfully tense.

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Wallace this weekend, to a Daddy who was tickling him:

Daddy, I will always love you, but what you are doing is silly to me.

Also:

Daddy, now tell me the truth….                 How are you? 

Indeed.

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