We received the results of my daughter’s Day o’Testing, and the results came back as everyone pretty much not knowing  the cause of my daughter’s multiple speech and behavioral issues.

Which is SO not helpful.

I should start by stating that my daughter was not diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum.  But let us just say that she needed a home run, and only scored a triple.  She needed one more box to be checked to have a confident diagnosis, and the team of doctors didn’t feel they could do that.  So, that leaves us with a little person who has some issues, they just don’t fall into neat categories.  They felt that the ABA therapy that autistic children often receive would not address her particular needs.

Apparently they felt that she has some sensory processing problems (sensation-seeking) that are leading to some of the behavioral things, so she will be getting some occupational therapy for those.

She will continue to receive the maximum speech therapy allowed under our insurance plan, and also that is the maximum recommended for her age group.  She fell into the 7th percentile for expressive speech, which I don’t have to tell you is not all that hot.

I think as a parent, I wanted everything to fall perfectly into those boxes, so that I could point to something definitively and say, “Aha! That is the cause!” and then do everything I can to learn about that something and advocate for her regarding that something.

But that something isn’t anything at the moment, although she will be re-evaluated in six months because as I said, there are things that are not quite right, they just don’t fit into the autistic spectrum at this time.   So I’m left sort of wondering why her speech is so delayed and why she has some of the problems that she does without any medically recognized condition behind them.

Which for me, personally, is difficult.

Any advice?

…here at Casa Glinda.

Let me throw a pity party for myself for a second,  OK?

I promise there will be goody bags.

After months of speech therapy that did not alleviate the bulk of her behavioral/developmental delays, yesterday we took our daughter to undergo a three hour battery of tests given by a multidisciplinary team of experts.  This was done basically to determine if she needs further, intensive behavioral therapy and if she is going to be clinically diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum.

To say that I have been getting harassed by my immediate family for doing this is somewhat of an understatement. I have been accused of “wanting” something to be wrong with her to “having her labelled for life.”

Well Christ, I would say that when your three year old maxes out at three word sentences and still has a very limited vocabulary, as well as other behavioral issues, then it is high freaking time she get some intervention.    I resisted the testing battery for a few months because I wanted to see how much she would improve after six months of speech therapy, if her behaviors were the result of a bright mind frustrated by lack of communication skills.  And in some regards, they are, but my husband and I believe there are deeper issues that need to be addressed.

You know, because we are the ones living with her, not the people who see her for a maximum of a few hours a month.

Apparently that makes me a bad mother.

So now we wait a week to meet with the team and they will deliver their findings.

To say that I am stressed is also somewhat of an understatement.

Also, that whole remodeling thing and moving to another city?

Yeah well, that went kerplooie, and to be honest it was my decision to halt everything.  But that was because for 10 entire months, I was blockaded and stalled out and literally lied to.

So I took myself off the roller coaster.

In one sense it is a relief and I don’t regret the decision, but in another sense making that decision is taking me down a specific road that other people aren’t going to like.

Too bad.

I guess the moral of this post is that I have learned that life is too short to keep people around that are full of negativity and to keep on doing what you think is right.

Here is your goody bag, full of self-righteousness and resolve.  Trust me, it’s better than a Twix any day.

Because man, did he ever beg for one for his birthday.

And I get it, I really do.  He wants to be cool, video games that are not Wii-related are cool, and he loves video games in general.  I was in a similar situation back in the caveman days when the Atari first came out.

Except naively, my parents bought us one, not fully realizing the addictive powers of the video game.  How could they?  But my generation, we know better.

And really, I think my son can get addicted to playing his video games. The more time he spends with games, the shorter his attention span and the less willing he is to listen and do his schoolwork and chores.

Besides, his Kindle has no shortage of them, his most favorite being Minecraft. Now Minecraft is actually a game I don’t mind as much.  You have to use your brain and your imagination a bit, and even though there are apparently zombies out to kill you, you at least have to work and create things in order to stay alive.

Which is to say that it is absolutely nothing like a game such as the Halo series, which I believe is just people killing the crap out of other people just for the heck of it.

I could be wrong.

My husband and I were actually going to get my 10 year old an Xbox as an easy way out.  We had nothing else we could really think of getting for him, and we felt that the first double-digit birthday should be treated as a bit of an occasion.

But then we got to talking about the whole uncensored XBox Live thing, because apparently it isn’t worth playing unless you can be online,  how he doesn’t even have a television in his room, how many of the XBox games are fairly violence-prone, and some other stuff.

So about a week before his actual birthday, we called off the XBox purchase.  As I said before, he has plenty of mind-numbing things loaded onto his Kindle, and when he is truly bored, he can come and kick his parents’ butts at Mario Kart.

Instead we will take him on a trip somewhere.  Somewhere where he gets on a plane and experiences something unlike he’s ever experienced before.

I’m glad we changed our minds.

It is difficult to believe in this age of attachment parenting that ideas such as this were once popular:

Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.

…

When you are tempted to pet your child remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.

Shake hands with them in the morning! That is classic!

My son would come into the bed when he woke up in the morning and snuggle with me/us until we kicked him out. I never saw that as unnatural for a second.

Now that quote up there? Totally unnatural.

And of course, written by a man.

via Sociological Images

It’s totally irrational, I freely admit it.

But it annoys me to no end to see a family dynamic that is fairly uncontrollable (unless possibly adopting a particular sex) played out as competition.

The one up in the picture I can sort of live with, but I saw one today that caused me a fair amount of rage.

Instead of a simple boys vs. girls, it had “Boys 2, Princess 1.”

Ugh.

Let’s not show any favoritism here or anything.  Nothing like letting everyone in the Southern California region know that you think your daughter is a cute, adorable princess and your boys are just, well, boys.  Whatever.

Now if it had said “Princes 2, Princess 1″ I would have been totally fine with it.

Perhaps I have a certain sensitivity when it comes to girl favoritism when it comes to my in-laws, who definitely fawn over the granddaughters much more than the grandsons.  And of course, they have almost twice as many grandsons.

Fine, fine.  It’s totally a personal problem.  I’ll just go away and sulk in a corner by myself.

As some of you may have read, the annual cost of child care in some states exceeds that of tuition for a four year degree.

Let’s think about that for a second.

I am all for paying childcare workers a fair and living wage, as well as treating their positions with respect.  But is the high cost of a full-time daycare truly reflective of a highly trained staff and a safe, stimulating setting, or  is it a business just trying to take advantage of a situation where both parents feel they need/want to work?

When I became pregnant with the Munchkin, my husband and I sat down and discussed what I was going to do with myself once our son was born.  My husband was all for me continuing to work, as he likes having money.  I too, like having money, but I pointed out to him that the cost of childcare would negate much of my earnings (although not all) but the net gain we would make from my salary wasn’t worth it to me.

This was a point of contention for a while, with him pointing out that we could hire some aging grandmother off the street who would come in for cheap.  Well, that might have been true, but I still felt that my son was best off with me as his caregiver, period.

So, as in many of our disagreements, I came out the winner.

If good, reliable childcare that didn’t break the bank in my area was obtainable, I might have considered staying at work, or at least scaling back to half or part time.

But it wasn’t.

And so here I sit, stay at home mother to a 4th grader and a toddler with speech and developmental delays.

Yeah, not looking good for a return to the workforce any time soon.

Is childcare in your area reasonable, or a big ripoff?  And how did it influence your decision to stay/not stay at home?

I take my daughter to speech therapy twice a week for an hour.  The office is less than five minutes from my house, and because of the whole homeschooling thing, I have to bring my soon-to-be 10 year old along with us every time.

Which, you know, on the grand scale of things, is not really that big of a deal.  They have an observation room that we sit in, and we either read books or play games on the Kindle.  Well, usually it is me reading a book and him playing the games.

For almost all of my upper elementary years into high school, I was a stereotypical latch-key kid.  I would take the bus to my grandmother’s house, go into the backyard and over into the garage, where the house key would be waiting for me, tucked into a compartment in the water heater cabinet.  I would let myself in, watch television, maybe get a drink, and my grandmother or grandfather would be home from work in two hours or so.  My grandparents were very young, and didn’t hit retirement age until I was almost in high school.

I never had any issues or problems during those latch-key years.  No person trying to rob the house or salesmen knocking on the door.  Or, if there was someone purporting to be a salesman, I simply didn’t answer the door at all.

Even though he will be 10 in less than a month, my son has a fairly good head on his shoulders.  I know he is definitely not the type to light something on fire just for the hell of it, or make prank phone calls.  He just doesn’t have that type of temperament, and never has.

I was toying with the idea of possibly leaving him here for the hour that I am away at speech therapy, what with being so close and it admittedly being quite boring for him during the sessions.

My state has no age limit as to when a child can legally be left at home alone.  It’s more of a “you can make the decision yourself, but there will be hell to pay if you make the wrong one” type of thing.

At what age, if ever, did your parents leave you home alone?

When I recently accompanied my son and a friend to our local county fair, I got a glimpse of my future for the next few years.

You see, my presence at the fair with them turned out to be that of a wet rag, a damper on all the fun they could be having if it wasn’t for grumpy old mom pointing out that they had run out of money for games, or that no, it wasn’t worth walking across the entire fairgrounds just to eat some chocolate covered-bacon.

But yet, I was also a necessary evil, as I was also playing the role of chauffeur, line stander, and ATM.  But my son pretty much tried to act like I wasn’t really there most of the time, which is good, really.  I mean, if he was holding my hand and begging me to ride the bumper cars with him, it would probably be some kind of red flag.

On the other hand, I’ve got my toddler, as needy as all get-out.  She is an affectionate child, so I am often the recipient of hugs and kisses and sometimes elbows in the stomach, it all depends on just how affectionate she is feeling at the moment.  She is still of course dependent upon me for a great many things, although she is much more independent overall than her brother was at this age.

It’s just really odd for me to have one child figuratively pushing me away as he gets older and tries to find his own footing in the world, and at the same time have this greedy little time-suck known as a toddler to deal with all in the same day.

Motherhood is hard, y’all.