(no subject)

[cahn]

Happy things:

-Thanksgiving!

-My in-laws are THE BEST.

-Seeing E. play with her cousins.

-Getting to see A. and talk about Fringe and Yuletide.

-The 9-hour train ride back from Thanksgiving with E and her grandma, which I was expecting to be a disaster and in fact was mostly very pleasant and I got some work done, which I desperately needed to do

-The fact that E said afterwards that she liked the train ride a lot, even though she kept wishing to be home during it

-Our having gone through three years of E catching every cold that came around, so that now our immune systems are strong enough that when we catch colds it is mostly just annoying instead of super debilitating

-The fact that we have some steps to take about E's meltdowns and maybe we will get somewhere

-I DO NOT HAVE TO RUN MUSIC FIRESIDE THIS YEAR. This makes me absurdly happy, because I do not have the tiiiiiime. (There may however be another post, or two or three, on music drama. Because it is December!)

-The Relief Society (women's organization at my church) is having a dinner tonight and it will be really yummy and fun and I will have a good time and my mother-in-law is coming and she can meet all the cool people I go to church with

Annoying things:

-The fact that E has learned the phrases "I'm bored" and "It's not fair," probably from preschool because I have never said either of these words to her

-My mother-in-law is doing lots of cleaning at our house, which is great and she is really nice and non-boundary-stomping about it, but makes me feel like a failure at housekeeping, which I guess is only fair because I do suck at it

-D's sister's family is awesome but does make me feel inferior. Both parents work full-time, they have two kids, and they have this huge and immaculate house with everything put away in its proper place, and their kids eat healthy food. Whereas we don't even have proper places for a lot of stuff. (We are working on getting more storage space, yes, but it is an ongoing process. Also the getting rid of excess stuff we really suck at.) And if I can stuff two bites of a vegetable into her, I count it a successful day. (Most days are successful, and fortunately she loves beans of all sorts, but still.)

-I suck at everything these days involving organization. Sadly this is most things in my life. (Tutoring and music I can do without thinking. Yuletide fic treat writing also does not involve organization. So it's not everything. But pretty close.)

-Probably at least part of the problem is that cold season has begun, and my motivation goes all to pieces when I'm sick, even though at least it's not as bad as it used to be. Cold season started early this year; we have been sick pretty much since the beginning of October, maybe? Meanwhile, E's grandma came to visit while sick, and now her grandpa has it. So today I started feeling better from the last cold... so I expect I have maybe two days before we catch whatever they have.

-E is still melting down [Apologies for deleting the last post, if you saw it] and actually had to be removed from preschool one day, sigh.

-I am supposed to be making photobooks for both sets of grandparents. When this will happen I don't knoooow

Comments

[philomytha]

Long train rides are the best for getting work done. If I don't have children with me, I can do so much on a train. The confined space and removal of my usual distractions plus the scenery and the people to watch seems to work really well.

And many commiserations on the meltdowns. It's hard to deal with, and so exhausting. I hope you can get somewhere with it all.

[cahn]

D's mom is really great -- she spent a lot of time with E on the train so I could get work done. Going on a long train ride by myself sounds really great for getting work done!

Thank you -- our situation is different, of course, as 90% of the time E is completely lovely and high-functioning, which of course is totally awesome. (Of course, there's that other frustration of people who don't see her in meltdown situations thinking I'm exaggerating or over-worried about her. Am I crazy? Am I crazy? as Miles would say :) ) We've got an ASD specialist observing her this week, and the numbers of a couple of other behavioral psychologists to call if necessary. It's also possible she might grow out of it, as I've noticed in general a fairly consistent emotional delay which might just mean she's going through her age-3 tantrums a year late. (But, argh, if I just knew...)

I hope things are going well for you as well. Your last update sounded so great!

[philomytha]

We always think about three sets of circumstances with Philomythulus when we're talking about his challenges - what he can do at his best, what he does on average, and what happens on the worst days. And when you're requesting help, it's that last one that you need to focus on. It's sometimes hurtful and painful - an hour-long meeting where everyone talks about him preferentially hitting the smallest children in the class is not my idea of fun (though it can also be weirdly validating when it turns out the special school or respite centre have the exact same problems that we have at home, because it means it's not just me being inadequate as a parent). But it is a good way of figuring out where to focus the help and support and in understanding what's going on. I hope your specialists can be helpful at that.

[cahn]

*nods* And they're so different! E on her best days / situations is perfectly lovely and accommodating. E on her worst days is... not. And because one of her big triggers right now involves large groups of kids doing things in unison, and no one in our family tends to see her in those sorts of situations, it's hard for them to get it.

...yeah. Just had that meeting about E kicking and hitting (though not particularly the smallest kids). Totally hearing you about the painful but at the same time weirdly validating thing -- okay, it's not just me making up stuff in my head that something is wrong!

[antisoppist]

If both parents are working full-time, there is no-one in the house all day to untidy it. Easy. But proper places for the stuff would help.

Me: The hob is revolting
Him: I know. I'm leaving it for your mother when she comes so she can just clean that and feel useful and won't tidy up anything else so I can't find it.

[cahn]

Yes, proper places would help. Our house has very little built-in storage, and the process of coming up with storage and then organizing it is apparently very slow for us.

D's sister has a 200-element checklist of monthly items to Tidy Every Day, which is how she does it. In principle having 15 minutes of things to do every day sounds good, but in practice when I get sick I don't even do the base-level tidying at night, much less 15 more minutes of tidying.

I laughed out loud at that exchange, because we have this problem with both parents where we can never find anything once they leave...

[antisoppist]

We have no built-in storage. We have IKEA shelving and I put things in boxes and baskets on it but they all just overflow. I want cupboards and drawers! I don't have a wardobe either. I now have a clothes rail in the corner of the room but it too turns into an overflowing pile of stuff. I want it behind doors!

Lists and 15 minutes sounds like Flylady. I did do that when I was the one at home with children all day because "tidy one space for 15 minutes every day" worked and I gradually kept on top of things that way when "tidy absolutely everyhing all at once" just resulted in burnout and more chaos. Now I am the work-outside-the-home parent, no-one is doing that and I think my new year resolution will be to start it again.

[cahn]

YES. Sister-in-law has cupboards and drawers and pantries and huge wardrobes and closets! WANT. We also have more and more IKEA shelving, which overflows and which we never have enough of for the different piles of things, ugh. Now, sister-in-law's house was renovated for many of those things, and also cost probably twice as much as our house, so there's that too.

On days that I'm not sick (today, yay!) I feel very optimistic about 15-minute lists! Then I get a cold and sink into torpor. Maybe my husband and I can switch off, because we usually get at least some days where only one of us is feeling coldly.

[thistleingrey]

I like trains, too.

Preschool is great and horrid at the same time, yeah. Recently we have overheard "You don't even know anything" and "God, you're such a baby," both via the same classmate (who probably hears these things from her older sibling), which has led to a multi-part discussion of domino effects, not in those terms. Since that classmate has also claimed arrogantly but incorrectly that she's eldest of the year (two boys have a few months on her), she's been fairly easy to discredit as a model, but it's been a good reminder for me that age four = cognition-complete, only without the necessary hoard of experience and risk-assessment resources that older humans have. :/

[cahn]

You've watched Spirited Away, yes? I thought one of the lovely things about it was how it got the feel of what it was like to be on a train, especially as a child, exactly right.

Ouch. I don't think E has been exposed to anything quite like that (and if she were, I think the teachers would come down pretty harshly very quickly). But yeah, there's been the kid that said E didn't know [thing E definitely did know], probably also coming from an older sibling, and we had to talk through proper responses, etc. I... am so not looking forward to middle school...

[thistleingrey]

Yes!

Oh, yes, the teachers are On It, but the kids have to figure out for themselves how to react in the moment; the teachers can't always intervene, from this age on up, unless someone breaks down in tears or is hitting / being hit. And all I can do is offer a sounding board and occasional advice: it is exactly like tiny middle school in that way. (I was bullied by someone I'd considered a friend during first and second grades, so the trick is actually not to overdo the advice by accident, heh.)

[cahn]

*nods* Yeah. A lot of E's problem is that she freezes and can't figure out how to react in the moment, and instead loses control of her emotions, and we're really trying to give her tools to deal with that. Ugh.

It's also the case that she often needs emotional reactions to be explicitly spelled out for her, so I find myself offering more advice and less sounding-board at this point... but at some point that balance is going to shift, and I worry that I won't see when it does and still be giving her Too Much Advice.

[thistleingrey]

I worry about that, too. I suspect that worrying about it a little will help, in its way....

[cahn]

Yeah, that's true. And even though I can't calibrate exactly by other kids/families, at least they provide some measure of calibration :)

[ase]

On cleaning: first, a 200 item checklist sounds like my definition of Hell. Second, can you think of some other areas your energy might be going at the moment? It sounds like you have lot of worthy projects taking up your attention: the holidays, E., tutoring and music, and aren't you somewhere in the second trimester? On top of energy-draining colds, your poor family!

And some silly person keeps talking your ear off about Yuletide and TV shows. :-)

Any chance you can fob off the photobooks to another party? Or to a less busy season? Not sure what the logistical feasibility of those options are, but it sounds like that's the last straw on your to-do list right now.

[cahn]

Hee. 200 over a month, so fewer than 10 items/day! It seems like it should be manageable, right?

Yeah, I'm realizing that the energy that with a normal person might actually go into cleaning the house, I'm putting into choir, tutoring, Yuletide treat-writing... I am going to cancel the first two, at least, after the critter's born, darn it. Yuletide treat-writing may be a lost cause.

My family's photobook is Now Done If Of Inferior Quality, darn it. D's family's photobook is on hold until brother-in-law sends pics, and their family also is okay with not getting them until after Christmas, because they are reasonable people not beholden to arbitrary dates. Um. Yes. Just saying.

(The TV show actually helps! I do way better at household cleaning tasks when I have a TV show on in the background, for some reason. I'd forgotten this, but my mom is the same way.)

(K)

[(Anonymous)]

Audiobooks! I put them on my phone, stick the phone in my pocket, headphones in the ears, and suddenly the dishes and laundry and untidiness is almost just an excuse to read. I have an Audible subscription just for housework. And you can tell how engrossing my current book is by the cleanliness of our house. Of course this only really works when D is in bed, because it's pretty annoying to be interrupted.

(More generally, *hug*)

Re: (K)

[cahn]

:) (I think I missed the notification for this, sorry!)

...For some reason audiobooks just do not work for me, and I don't understand why, because TV shows work just fine, even when I am not really looking at the picture that much. I think maybe because when I read I skip over all the description, and the audiobook won't let me do this? :) (D teases me about this, a lot.)

[metaphortunate]

We have been doing photobooks at Walgreens. You upload your pictures and say Make This A Book and they organize them sort of at random, which you could take the time to make really nice if you wanted to but if it's already midnight and you're exhausted you can just click Checkout and pick them up in a couple of days. It's nice.

[cahn]

Ah, this sounds great, and particularly relevant for my family, where I don't think the order matters as long as the requisite Many Pictures of New Baby get stuck in somewhere.