For those of you who've just tuned in, everyone here is a crazy person.

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If you ever want to freak out your boss, wear a dress and heels to your place of work when all they've ever seen you in is jeans. And then mention you have to leave early ... When I was getting dressed I knew there would be commentary; business casual means that dressing up is out of the norm. Poor guy was sleep-deprived from staying up for hockey playoffs and didn't get that I was joking about leaving early ...

So, the results are back from the neurologist and the neuropsychologist, and I'm just ... hell, I don't know what I am. I can see glimmers of Bean in the results, but the negatives are just too negative.

Neuropsych: ADHD and "mood disorder, not otherwise specified (NOS)".
Neurologist: basically just that she's a very smart kid

Now, if I had my druthers, I'd just go with the neurologist's diagnosis and put my fingers in my ears to "la-la-la" my way out of the neuropsych's diagnosis. Because, honestly, I don't want to hear that crap. And I truly don't believe that at her age it has a *ton* of validity ... I mean, yeah, we all have a little crazy that we lovingly nurture and show to the rest of the world from time to time. We're all a little tetched; it's what makes us interesting.

It's so hard to know what to accept, what to believe, what to challenge, what to throw out altogether ... and so much of the diagnostic criteria overlap. How do you know that a single assessment is valid? Just because someone's a professional, does that mean their four-hour view of your kiddo is accurate?

Going forward, there will be a psychologist and a month of 6-hours-a-week OT camp, as well as a switch back to a "regular" preschool, in the hope of better preparing her for Kindergarten. The psychologist thing has been a long time coming, I know. Between the time off work for OT, life in general, denial, hoping it will get better, pursuing diagnoses ... I've got a lot of good excuses. But no more - this summer begins the full-court press.

Wish us luck.
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So here's the part where you make a choice

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I had the pleasure of a stolen hour with Bean today; one of her OT appointments got moved to 10:00 Monday mornings, and I took that shift and gave up the Thursday afternoon one. So now we can drop Miss O off and hit Barnes and Noble or Rudy's and steal a snack and an hour together. This morning I got coffee, she had a cookie and we read books at B&N before heading over for her OT visit.

Her OT, besides noting how tired Bean was (and she was .. the kid just doesn't sleep well), remarked on how much she's improved. I agreed with her; the restraint Bean shows at school when she's getting roughed up by the bigger kid is remarkable in itself. But she's more reasonable and easygoing at home, too. I hate putting things in writing ... it's kinda like the old days when I'd be dumb enough to put something like "Miss O fell asleep in under 20 minutes!" in my blog, only to have the next night take two hours.

But I'll risk the jinx to brag on her for a minute: her behavior has been a lot more stable. Yes, she can still get upset about things, but the nonlinear freakouts are few and far between.

On the way to school this morning, after her OT, she and I were talking about how she has to give this kid at her school a clean slate every day, and how I know that's hard when he's not showing her any change in behavior. We talked a little about that and that he was making mean choices and she said the most amazing things to me about how she closed the door on mean choices and instead opened the door to crying, basically saying that she no longer made mean choices, but instead cried if she got upset. She said "I locked the mean choices in a cage and I won't open the door."

I was blown away by what she was saying - it was in 4.5 year old words, but the wisdom and restraint behind it seems well beyond her years, doesn't it?
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You can't go around hitting people. What, were you born in a barn?

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Well, we're in full-on "new school" search for Bean; she hasn't been kicked out, but they do want to cut her back to part-time at her current school. She simply will not nap, and they aren't staffed to accomodate one-on-one levels of care. I know it's not their job to cater to one child, but I also think they've put up barriers to Bean's success by not allowing her a lovey at nap time and by some of the word choices teachers have used with her.

Yesterday Dave again got the call to go pick her up; he got her and took her to his work, and I came and picked her up from him as soon as I could. Today, Dave missed a call and the message said "call me back", so he did and left a message - by the time they had things in hand, but the original intent of the call had been for him to pick her up.

There are two schools that we're most interested in: Sammy's House and The Emerson Academy. Both have indicated an ability to work with SPD kids, so we'll try to knock out visits to both this week.

It's so difficult for me to know my kid isn't happy at school; it totally alters my ability to give 100% at work, as I have to peel her off me in the morning, then get that sick feeling in my stomach once 1:00 or so rolls around, just waiting for the call to get her. Even if Dave picks her up and can keep her for the afternoon, I still have the guilt/anguish/resentment thing going on over all of it.

I get frustrated with Bean, but it's transient. In her heart, she wants to be a "good" kid. She's not doing this stuff just to be a turd. I get more frustrated with her school, but logically understand that they are not a private care facility - they have a bunch of other kids to look after and can't provide 1:1 care.

But they also do things like pretend to call her parents and then tell Bean (directly or indirectly), that we won't come get her unless she naps. When I was driving Bean home Monday, she was all upset saying "Miss Sarah said I didn't know her but I do!" Turns out Miss Sarah threatened to spank Bean, Bean said she wouldn't do it, and Miss Sarah said "you don't know me". Was that a verbatim play-by-play? Not sure, but that's the gist of it from Bean's perspective. When I told the assistant director, she basically dismissed it "that doesn't sound like Miss Sarah". Maybe not, but Bean didn't pull that "you don't know me" verbiage out of thin air - Miss Sarah said it to her. I just don't have exact context.

When Dave was picking her up one day last week, he also heard a teacher (the one that Bean says always talks to her in a mean voice) say to another child "Stop crying; you're four years old, you're too old to cry." Seriously? And she said that in front of a parent, so obviously she thought it was perfectly okay. Now, it's no Miss A from the last school, calling the kid a baby and having all the other kids stare at him when he cried, but it's not *that* far off.

So I don't want Miss O at this school, either. I do, however, either want her in a distinctly different class and area from where Bean is, or in her own school. Bean has become pretty mean, intermittently, to Miss O - she'll hit or kick her if O is bothering her, and hit her in the mouth the other day, hard enough to cut O's lip against her teeth. Bean needs a break from O and, more importantly, O needs a break from Bean.

But even that stuff, I'm not sure how much she intends as mean behavior and how much is just reactive and almost out of her control. I seriously hadn't driven a mile from their school this evening and Bean had already kicked O a few times, been hollered at, and dissolved into self-loathing sobs of "I'm the baddest kid ever! I'm bad 20-hundred. I'm a horrible big sister - I don't take care of my baby sister at all! Mommy doesn't love me!"

My life is such a melodrama sometimes. I feel terrible for Bean, but I sometimes lose my ability to sympathize with her because she can act so horribly toward people. Especially her sister and I.

When your morning starts with her kicking you and screaming at you, then waking her sister, at 5:00 ...

And then proceeds in a fashion you'd expect after a wake-up like that ...

Then you get the call that she is being disruptive at nap ...

Then you pick her up and she screams at you when she gets in the car because she can't have a cookie ...

Then she kicks her sister two or three times ...

It's hard to maintain any level of sympathy for her, and instead I feel the frustration and resentment rise. My reset button is pretty easy to find, and her heart is solid and pure, so we can reestablish good rapport pretty easily, but sometimes I lose sight of the fact that I want to be her advocate and her ally, and not just another one of her detractors.
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I see you working here today. You're not special. You're extraordinary.

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As I was cleaning up tonight (such an exciting life, I know. Gotta take advantage of nights off to get stuff done!), I was thinking a lot about the Bean. She saw her pediatrician yesterday, as her dad and I are looking to get her a neuropsych evaluation to determine whether there's something more going on than "just" sensory stuff.

I've wondered, sometimes aloud, whether her having sensory issues put her on the very mild end of the autism spectrum. She actually exhibits a lot of characteristics of Asperger's Syndrome, and while I'm not trying to diagnose or pigeonhole her, getting the full picture of what's going on, even if it means labeling her with more stuff, seems crucial at this point.

So we'll push ahead and try to get her in to see someone soon; I'll keep y'all posted. If anyone in the area has a neurospych or any other related professional or program they recommend, comment away :)

As I've navigated the divorce landscape and struggled with sharing my children with strangers, I've wondered if the kids will ever realize that some days it was damn near heroic of me to keep a smile on my face and stay engaged with them, when all I wanted to do was yell and scream about how it sucked and how unfair it was.

But it occurred to me tonight that Bean is the real hero. And she's a hero pretty much every day. Given that every interaction she has is a challenge for her, and right now she's going to a preschool that does the bare minimum to feed her sensory needs, her good days are even more remarkable. That she starts to lose control when they make her lay down without talking or moving, well, I have a hard time faulting her - she can't, physically / mentally / emotionally handle that. But she tries. Every day, she knows it's going to happen, she knows she's going to go to school even when she doesn't want to, and she still tries. She always tries.

(Quote from "Potential".)

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I could see your heart. You held it before you for everyone to see.

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Still trying to figure out a good work routine; 9:30 - 4:30 is looking to be my normal schedule, tho, to accomodate the girls' school being a 9-5:30 thing. That 5:30 part stresses me a bit, since I have to drive from Kyle to Waco in rush hour traffic. Eh, I exaggerate a bit, but the drive from SW Austin to way N Austin at 4:30 is not a fast-moving one. I'll need every minute of that hour to make it on time.

I need to start looking at alternate routes. And at getting a shload of books on CD to pass the time. It's hard to not feel like an ass singing along to music while you inch down the road with the same few cars around you for an hour.

I started listening to the 5-CD Parenting set from Celebrate Calm yesterday. I attended one of this dude's 2-hour workshop's and I like a lot of what he has to say about raising sensory kids. It drives home the message that they are simply wired differently - it's not a discipline thing, it's not a sucky parenting thing - they. are. different.

I think that's hard for people to grasp, because they see a "normal" kid acting "badly" and feel it's something a parent is doing wrong. I've heard things like "maybe you should call Super Nanny" and "maybe if you just took all her My Little Ponies away ..." They mean well, but they're missing the point. And annoying me a bit.

Could I be a better parent? Hells yeah. But I'm guessing that you could too. We all could be *better*, but we all do the best we can and that means a LOT. And we certainly don't need our choices and methods second-guessed.

If you’ve not had the pleasure of parenting - or spending a decent chunk of time with - a sensory kid, it’s hard to grasp what’s going on. In Bean’s case, you see what appears to be a “normal”, relatively bright 4.5-year old. She talks like the other kids, walks like the other kids, plays like the other kids … you get the picture. Part of what makes sensory stuff such a challenge is the outer appearance of ‘normalcy’. It’s not something that’s outwardly obvious, like a physical challenge or autism. So it’s not only a challenge for the parent who loves the child to see past “bad” behavior and cut slack, it’s also a (huge) challenge for an outsider to do so.

What’s really hard to understand is that for my kid to do what a “normal” kid does, she’s using a lot of energy, thought and emotion just keeping pace. At 4.5, she’s already had to develop and master coping skills that sensory-normal kids don’t. So for her to play seamlessly with a bunch of other kids is already requiring a Herculean effort – when something happens that she doesn’t like, she reacts in a seemingly over-the-top way.

I've come to realize that just the act of playing with the other kids has tapped all of her reserves. She’s had to struggle with all the mis-wired areas of her brain just to maintain what we consider ‘normal’. She doesn’t have anything left to draw on when she’s disappointed.

I can empathize with her, as I tap into my reserves most of my working days. It takes a lot of effort for me to maintain an outgoing persona and meet new people all day long, so when I get home, I physically and mentally shift gears to jammies and couch potato mode. If someone suddenly throws an after-work outing at me, though, it’s hard for me to muster up what I need to make it through that event. Even with advance notice, I have a hard time rallying myself to do something after work. And I'm a grown-up who can (usually) manage my emotions and reset my expectations on the fly (sometimes). I've got 30-something years of experience managing my responses. She's got, what 2 or 3?

Another quirk of the sensory kid is how very much heart they have, and how sensitive they are. It's quite the juxtaposition, having this kid that just seems to barrel through life, full-on, but whose heart is as soft and tender as any you could imagine. Her capacity to love is just amazing to me, and such a stark contrast to some of her surface behaviors.

Parenting a SPD kid is tough enough; you need a solid support network around you - hopefully one or two other folks who are in your boat, and a handful of friends/family who at least try to understand that your kid is wired just a bit differently. I consider myself very fortunate to have both.

(Quote from "Helpless".)

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That's my girl. Always doing the over-the-top thing.

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Another day, another humiliation.

Took Bean and Miss O to breakfast this a.m., thinking I'd spring the little one for a day of hooky before they start at the new school tomorrow. We were supposed to meet Julia and her kiddos.

We got there and Bean wanted to sit outside. It was 50-ish degrees this a.m., and her friend didn't want to sit outside. Commence full-on meltdown. Complete with screaming, running away, yelling and histrionics of epic proportions. Seriously. Epic.

After 5 minutes of trying to talk/calm her down (which, I've finally realized, only ramps the whole production up in scope and scale) I had to make good on my "if you can't calm down, we have to leave" promise and drag her out. All while holding Miss O. And in front of a cop, who thankfully gave me a knowing smile.

Or maybe that's the smile they give all whack jobs before running plates and starting a file. Who knows.

Of course, there was more freaking out in the parking lot, and when I got her strapped in, she was screaming and flailing and kicking the tar out of the seat in front of her. Got out of my seat, walked around the van, punched a side panel to let a little pressure off, then moved the seat so she couldn't kick it. As we drove home, I eventually went down the rabbit hole too and engaged in a screaming match with her.

(The awesomeness of my parenting truly knows no bounds. Don't hate. We can't all be this good.)

So by 9:00 my day was crap and I was offering to Miss O "do you want to go to school?" and she was responding with her new "yeah. yeah-yeah-yeah" reply that I took to mean: "Does the pope wear a funny hat? You two nutjobs or eight 18-24 month olds? Bring on the relative Zen of biters and naps on mats, please."

I dropped O off, let them know it was her last day there, then came back out to the car. Where I was greeted by a tranquil Bean who just wanted to chat peacefully, and with a smile, about how she knows she need to make better choices and that she just needs a nap.

And in my head I'm backing away slowly, smiling, and making non-threatening eye-contact with the psycho who is now sucking her fingers and asking for classical music so she can sleep. And from that point forward, we had a damn good day.

Within the span of an hour we went from absolutely fine, to the lowest of lows, and then back up to mellow and Zen. If anyone wonders why I get a little twitchy sometimes, now you know. I'm an unwilling passenger on the emotional rollercoaster that is life with the Bean.

I'm reading "The Sensory-Sensitive Child: Practical Solutions for Out-of-Bounds Behavior" and it's so dead-on balls accurate for Bean it's kinda spooky at times. And I'm totally kicking myself for not listening to the people who flagged sensory issues as long as two years ago. I have got to call her PT for an OT recc, and also circle back around with the child psychologists I touched base with last weekend. I'm not sure how much help a psychologist will provide, because until Bean's able to integrate and accommodate her sensory stuff, we can give her all the tools and all the words in the world, and I don't think it will make a difference.

To my local friends, I'm trying to convince her to stop confronting kids and to go to their parent or a teacher if the kid's behavior is bothering her. So she may come off as a tattletale or a nut, and for that I'll apologize in advance. But if you could just help me out a little and try to help Bean with her issue, I'd appreciate it. If she needs more space, or thinks someone took something or she doesn't want to talk to your kid, I'm trying to get her to tell me, you or a teacher instead of screaming at the kid and lashing out.

After that horrific start to the day, she and I had a fabulous time. We shopped (window shopped, mostly, as I'm all cheap these days. But she did get a $1 doll from the Dollar Tree store at the mall), had lunch at Boston Market (where up to two kids eat free with one adult, which rocks for single parents!), got her to clean up the playroom here and then went to the park and had a great adventure walk. Her listening was amazing, and we talked about all kinds of stuff. And even though I haven't had a break in 8 days, and have had some truly awful moments in that time, I was sad to see her leave with her dad this evening and miss her already.
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What part of punching you in the face do you not understand?

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Ack.

A whole *week* without an update?

And what a week it's been. Long story short, both girls start at a new school on Wednesday. It's one of those eeeaaassseee into it deals, where on Wed they will be there like 9-11 or so, Thurs 9-12, etc. Annoying as *hell* for those of us who have to work for a living, but it is what it is, I guess. Dave and I checked out 5 places, and this was the only one we felt good about. I was prepared not to like it, and to have warmer fuzzies for a few other places, but this place just felt good.

I'm not sure what to expect from Bean, though, and if I can be brutally honest, I'm not holding out high hopes that this will be all that much different. We had a hellacious day yesterday, and sometimes I wouldn't be surprised to find her in a corner pulling the legs off bugs or throwing stones at baby birds. I swear that she sometimes seems like a total sociopath. She spit on a kid at the playground yesterday because he was following her everywhere, even after she screamed at him to stop seceral times.

Now, granted, because I am under an obscene amount of stress right now, my responses and patience have been less than stellar. So I've been feeding into the vicious cycle with really high-caliber parenting moments, but still.

I think that until we fully understand and start "fixing" the sensory and emotional components of her behavior, it's going to be a very rough road. Filled with moments/hours/days that put parents and teachers alike on edge. She's just *not* like other kids, and switching schools isn't going to change that, I don't think. Her dad and I are each going to have to reach deep, deep into our reserves to parent her, and keep reading and implementing new mindsets and approaches. And it's going to be frustrating. Because I've found that the higher the high, the lower the low.

She's capable of such greatness, so much love and such humor and fun. So while I'm describing the weekend, be aware that there is a lot of good thrown in, much more than the "bad". And 99% of the time, I see her as a magical, loving kid that happens to require a lot more skill to parent than a kid who doesn't have her unique makeup. That is, I cut her the slack, I cut myself the slack, and we have a great time.

The 1% of the time where we're both mired in "the suck", well, weekends like I'm experiencing happen.

All weekend has seemed like an exercise in "no good deed goes unpunished" for me. Take her to Sportfun and lunch, she freaks out at Ikea. Get more food in her and try to help her understand the choices she makes, be rewarded with a screaming freakout in the car, complete with throwing things at me. Because Miss O has had a great day and is begging "park!" over and over, reward a good choice of Beans' with a stop at a playground, have her scream at a kid and spit on him for following her around. Bring her home and resist throttling her and lecture instead, listen to her tell me she doesn't love me, that she hates being at my house and wants to go to her daddy's. Forever.

At some point recover (myself) from all that, talk gently about how bad the day was for both of us, shake on both of us making good choices the next day, then have her wake up and refuse to quiet down when I ask her not to wake her sister. Take a do-over and get a few good hours in.

Then have her violate the deal we agreed on, that if I ask her to do/not to do something twice and she doesn't do/not do it she has to go to her room, and have her screaming or laughing at me as I try to calmly enforce the rule. Take yet another step in her direction and talk with her and soothe her as she is in there, then indulge in 5-10 minutes of the rough play she loves, where we can roll around and be silly. As I wrap that up, she lick me. I ask her to stop. She licks me again. I ask again, and reiterate that the game is over. She licks me again. I explain how she can't do that, that people think it's gross/freaky. She licks me again. I remind her of our deal, and how I have given a little extra latitude but that this is my last request. She licks me again.

I tell her she'll need to stay in her room for a little while to think about what I asked and why she couldn't do it. She screams bloody murder and starts kicking the walls. I ask her to stop, she screams more. I take Miss O and leave, Bean commences histrionics. I wait a little, then go in and try to explain to her that she really just needs a nap - that I want to be able to take her places this afternoon, but I can't unless she sleeps. She keeps screaming at me. I leave again, trying to calm O down so *she* can nap. Bean's still screaming, so I try again to talk to her, and explain that I'd be happy to hug/rock/hold her if she can calm down, but that O needs to nap, and I can't bring her in the room if Bean's freaking out.

Finally, *finally* get Bean to settle herself down, then go in and try to lay with/snuggle with both girls. Herding cats would be a more satisfying task at this point. Then Bean freaks out again, because in the course of the 15-20 minutes of histrionics, I have threatened that if she can't calm down, we won't go anywhere, and now I have to stick to it. I then threaten that she will stay in her room all freakin' day if she doesn't nap, and we get into a very mature discussion, culminating in her laughing in my face as I threaten, me swatting her tush and her laughing at me again.

I'm fairly certain my head did at least one 360 at that point, and I may have thrown up a little pea soup in my mouth.

So finally, they're asleep, I'm blogging and pretending my house doesn't look like a tornado hit it and trying to get my heart and my head to a "clean slate" place for her and I to start over from. I'm also trying to decide if I have to stick with the "we're not going anywhere!" ultimatum I threw out, or if I can gracefully back down because she napped ...

Oh yeah. I'm *that* good a parent.
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Tomorrow's the day

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Thanks for all the outrage on Bean's behalf. I feel terrible dropping her off there, but Dave won't be back until today, so I'll meet him at the school in the morning. Hopefully the talk will go well and this will be Bean's last week with the devil woman.

I got an incident report yesterday that she deliberately shut another girl's arm in a door. And then I had to listen to Miss B start in on me about how Bean's becoming more aggressive. Now Bean's always been much more, ahhh, *tactile* than her friends. I think it's part of her sensory-seeking tendencies - we've talked about this before, haven't we? - and a friend pointed out recently that I really need to be more mindful of her sensory needs, as this shapes behavior.

So anyways, Miss B's comment and subtle criticism made something gel in my brain that I'd been working on, distractedly, all day - I wanted to know what the effects of shaming were on behavior.

What I found was consensus that a percentage of shamed kids become more hostile, that they act out their hurts in an aggressive way, in large part because they're being shamed about more appropriate ways of expressing their emotions. If Bean's feeling shortchanged and can't cry, that's a lot of emotion and energy to hold in, so it comes out somewhere else. She's definitely my daughter in that she really doesn't hold things in, so if she's getting beaten down for crying, that emotion is going to come out somewhere else.

I need to touch base with Dave again, as he has concerns that we don't have a Plan B in place if we give an ultimatum, but we could figure something out. The bottom line is that I am unwilling to have Bean in that class beyond this week. They can move her back or forward, but she is not staying there.

I am also going to be very clear that this teacher has been in consistent violation of their "no shaming" policy for a minimum of 6 months, and that I believe she's damaging to children and has no place in education. I'm loosely, loosely considering notes in the other two kids' folders to make the parents aware of the treatment their kids are experiencing ...

Yeah, it's "only" three kids out of maybe 18-20 that are experiencing this treatment, but there are another 15-17 who are being taught that belittling and humiliating people is fine and dandy.

I sent a note to Dave saying that if he didn't want to be involved in the "no Miss A" portion, I could tangent that to a separate discussion, one I'd do alone. I'm not sure if he feels as strongly about it as I do; frankly, I don't really care. He's on board for the Bean portion, and I appreciate that. But I feel like I really need to advocate for all the kids, and not just my own on this one.

I'll close with something a bit more lighthearted - a Beanism in potty humor:

Mommy! Look! It's a loooong poopie.
(One minute later)
Look! A whole family of poopie!!
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