@ Home in the World

There's nothing wrong with my brain

Pumpkin had his neuropsych evaluation last week; two morning sessions, one on Wednesday, and one on Friday.

Seeking to explain to the boys why Tigger was going to school the next day and Pumpkin wasn't I made what I intended to sound like an offhand comment about going to play some games and figure out how Pumpkin's brain works.

Pumpkin stopped what he was doing and said, clear as day, "there's nothing wrong with my brain." 

I should say not.

I told him he was right, there was nothing wrong with his brain, that he had a very smart brain and we were going to figure out how he could best use it to learn lots of things.

I hesitated about this step for a long time, but now that's it's done, I am eager to see what it all might mean. I was in an outer room while the evaluation was being conducted but I could hear a lot of what was being asked, and I could tell by Pumpkin's responses that there were times that he clearly didn't understand what was being asked of him. On the other hand, when it came to puzzles and other visual assessments, he was doing things some 16 year olds find challenging.  No surprise there.

I'm supposed to go back in mid-February for the rundown after she scores the assessments. Then we get to talk about strategies. I've gone from being apprehensive to being more excited.

We talked a little bit about visual learners and how it he might need things modeled for him if he was having trouble understanding the directions. I'm not concerned about him acquiring facts, but I am a little worried about him with regard to conceptual information. She mentioned a great deal of fidgeting during the testing, more the second day than the first. Rather than ADD that might be related to his sensory overload. We'll see how it all shakes out.

One thing I have noticed is that memorization (which is the way I was taught) seems to work for him, and come easily for him (as it did for me). The other day he was drawing a police car. He had the word "POLICE" written across the car, but spelled incorrectly. I told him the correct spelling, he wrote it down and went on to something else. In church a week later, he had a sheet full of hand-drawn police cars and one helicopter all with the word spelled correctly.

As I was writing this, Pumpkin came up to me from where he was drawing at the table. He wanted to show me some new windows he designed for a Volkwagon, a Honda, and a Toyota. Each window had the logo of the appropriate car drawn above it and each window opened a different way, including one that resembled an airlock on a spaceship. He showed me how it was supposed to work and I said "Oh, I get it." What he said next, and the tone in which he said it, surprised me enough to take it a some kind of sign from the Universe.

"Yes, Mom. You DO get it."

Let's hope so.

A Sudden Downpour of Shoes

There aren't many commercials I appreciate, but every so often one comes along that strikes the right note. I can't remember the name of the car that it advertises, but it begins "A sudden downpour of shoes..." and goes on about the cargo room to stuff all those shoes (even though none of them appear to match). It's about the cleverest thing I've seen, including the shot of the guy shaking his head at the female shoe-driven frenzy.

Now, what do you suppose has happened here:

From Boston.com:

MIAMI—State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic. Lt. Pat Santangelo says the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes Friday morning.

Santangelo says he's not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash and no one stopped to claim them. He says he hopes someone will take them because he doesn't want to send them to the dump.

Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be removed.

Money, Money, Money

We're doing okay, for now, but, like everyone else, I'm a little nervous about this economy and what the ultimate impact might be.

The unemployment numbers around the country are bad, but the predictions of the scope of the recession vary widely. I've heard to expect improvement in the Spring; I've heard it would take a couple of years. I've heard we need a stimulus package; I've heard that no one is really sure if a stimulus package is going to work.

As I read about more and more retail empires crashing, I wonder if the change in the American relationship with consumerism is going to be long term, an impact similar to the one the Great Depression had on many of our grandparents, or will we forget about frugality when the next big boom comes along.

I'm not a budget making person. I try not to think about money too much, because my relationship to it is weird. When my father was alive, we wanted for nothing. After he died and predators who had been his friends and even family in life came after his estate, my mother was constantly anxious about money. It's hard to say how grounded in reality that anxiety was, because although she would freak out over the cost of a long distance phone call, she seemed to have no problem shopping at Saks and Bloomies for birthdays and Christmas. Things before people, I guess. Things before people.

You might say that such an experience makes me a little resentful about money. I truly don't want to have to think about it. Fortunately, moving to the town that I live in knocked some sense into me, so it's not really an issue between Piper and me (although I do tease him about being the "budget police").

You see, when we moved here in February of '92  (17 years ago!), most of the population was frugal yankees and resourceful aging hippie artists and academics. The yuppies have pretty much taken over the place, but they support the schools so I guess it's a good thing. You have to have a sticker on your car to park in certain places in town, and there are still many who accumulate the annual stickers on their rear windows as a point of pride. They are not just saying "look how long I've lived here" but also  "look how long I've kept this crappy car on the road." My 10-year old Explorer was a proud member of the club, but it will be a while before either of our current cars are so honored.

So while I don't have a problem saying "no" to my boys when it comes to buying junk that they see on TV or in Target, but I don't really want there to be a problem saying yes. To them, or to myself. During my SAHM stint, I had a lot of issues with whether I deserved to buy things when I was out of work. I hated it. And we weren't even talking Saks and Bloomies either.

I want my kids to have an understanding of money based on common-sense, rather than emotion.

Elana Centor's essay on job-loss and children in this economy rekindled this line of thinking recently. I'll admit I was horrified by her daughter's initial reaction and I was glad to hear that things got a little bit more reasonable with time and thought. It resonated with me because I had a smaller scale incident with my older son a couple of weeks ago that made me realize he needed a more realistic perception of how money worked.

While we were at the museum, I agreed to buy each of them a science related trinket in the gift shop. When the boys brought their selections to the counter, Tigger instructed me to "Get out your credit card, Mom." The guy at the register chuckled, but I was horrified by the sense of entitlement he exhibited. He may or may not have meant it that way, but entitlement is what it sounded like.

I was at a loss for words, but it's just as well. What we need here is not a lecture, but a system.

The trouble is that I'm exactly what that system might be. I didn't really have a chore chart growing up. I didn't get an allowance. Technically I worked for my mother, but she too often found a reason not to pay me. I was never taught to manage money and when I got out of college, it showed. I think we agree that there must be chores, and there should be payment for those chores but we need to figure out what besides feeding the dog and unloading the dishwasher we can expect them to do. Then, once they earn the money, what gets saved long term vs. short term.

We had wanted to do this regardless of the economy, but what I am wondering is the extent to which universally tight times will result in less competition in the acquisition department. If the Joneses don't have a lot of disposable income or are watching their budget, is it then going to be easier to keep up with them? And if more responsible living becomes the norm, what happens to our economy as a whole in terms of industry growth and job creation?  Can we be a nation of earners without being a nation of consumers? Or does standard of living automatically necessitate accumulation of stuff?

So I'm wondering if this generation of parents will be teaching their children better respect for money, to be more discerning consumers, and that moderation is the way forward? Or once we have the illusion of stability again, we we return to our more thoughtless buying habits as before?

ADD, Information Overload, Overstimulation, Exhaustion

Or maybe just a huge case of projection.

I've been psyching myself up for Pumpkin's neuropsych evaluation in a few weeks and thinking a lot about over-stimulation, ADD, information overload. I've been thinking about this not just in terms of Pumpkin, but also noticing how much those things affect me as well.

Am I one of those adults who has ADD that was never diagnosed, or am I just one of the many who say they do. I remember when the ADD term began to come in to common use, I speculated to a friend that such a label might apply to me. She promptly pooh-poohed the notion and I didn't give it much more thought until a few years ago when I was struck with a terrible case of Mommy Brain. I'm easily distracted on the best of days, but with kids there were days when I misplaced my keys, forgot my cell phone, and couldn't remember whether I'd left things on once I left the house. Anxiety would build, making my short-term memory function even worse. Things are better now, especially when I get enough sleep, but my days of near photographic memory are gone.

Eventually I figured out that I get really stressed out when there's so much noise that I can't hear myself think. I 've never been good at filtering out background noise, whether it was from the television or the couple at the next table in a restaurant telling stories. It's often easier for me to pay attention to what is going on in the background than it is to the person I am actually supposed to be interacting with.

During Pumpkin's early days in pre-school, the teacher had quite a challenge trying to get him to attend circle time. Not wanting to push him, she would let him play quietly with a toy while she worked with the other children. Very quickly, she figured out that he many not have been present in the group activity, but he was plugged in the whole time.

A couple of days ago, we took the kids to go bowling. We were having trouble getting Pumpkin to understand where his turn came in the rotation, when to wait for the little pin gates and eventually I noticed that no matter how loudly Piper yelled to him, he kept right on doing what he was doing, but if I tapped him on the shoulder and showed him where he was supposed to stand, he had no problem following directions. It started to dawn on me that he wasn't hearing us with all the background noise. Not that it was a hearing problem, per se, but maybe a processing problem. It was all just too much for him to take in.

Over the past few years, I've grown accustomed to the near constant feeling that my brain is full; that it can handle no more input and even making sense of the input it has recently received can feel like too much to ask. My head feels foggy and trying to focus requires a fair amount of effort on my part. Effort I feel myself resenting having to make. It's worse when I am tired, and isn't really an issue if I've caught up on my sleep.

They say that kids with sensory integration disorder need a lot of sleep and I can usually tell when the Pumpkin hasn't had enough. The "sillies" start earlier in the day and are triggered by the most innocuous of things. It is harder to get him settled down.

I've been thinking a bit about this article, but more with the city as a metaphor for any kind of information overload. It made me think of Last Child in the Woods, written a few years ago about how our media- and fear-driven culture is keeping kids from getting enough time playing outdoors and may be exacerbating the widespread diagnosis of ADD.

As we wrapped up the holiday season, the little thinking I was able to do in my overloaded exhaustion, was about how to conciously de-stress and get rid of some of the noise in my brain. Part of it is going to be getting to bed at a decent hour. Part of it will be trying to eliminate distractions (says the girl who just joined Facebook - hoo boy, major timesuck there). Some of it might be alleviated by actually getting a desk in the room that is supposed to be my office so when I do have to sneak some work in, I won't be doing it in the same area as the HUGE television that commands both living room and kitchen.

Part of it, I think is going to involve getting some answers about Pumpkin's brain and what may be going on in there. Evaluation is scheduled to begin on the 21st. Let's hope whatever they come up with will help us cut through the noisy fog in his mind - and then eventually in my own.