Author Archives: Jill

We need to just go already

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Okay, as if I don’t have enough evidence that I am obsessing about our upcoming trip to Disney World too much (such as my recent Disney nightmare – see comment on my previous post), now comes this.

Yesterday, I was thinking about all the pictures I want to take while we’re at the parks. I want a photo of the kids with Santa Claus, and one of the whole family in front of the castle for our Christmas card. I want to take the kids and reprise photos that we’ve taken of them in years past, to show how they’ve grown between trips. Of course, I want shots of them with their favorite characters.

I started to wonder whether my compact camera is good enough to get all these shots. It’s a nice little camera, but it isn’t nearly as good as my big ol’ SLR. I’m also not nearly as reliable with the little one as I am with the big one.

I began to think that maybe I should bring the big camera. Sure, the little one fits in the pocket of my jeans. The big one comes with lenses and a case, and could never be left in the stroller for fear of theft. But I’d get better photos…

Then I remembered that last year, Byron and I went to Europe for our anniversary. We traveled to several cities in Italy, including Venice, and also to Paris and Normandy in France. I didn’t even consider bringing my big SLR on that trip because I knew it would be too much of a hassle. I took all my photos with the little compact.

If the little camera could handle the actual Europe, I think it’s good enough for the World Showcase at Epcot Center. I need to get a grip.


Google knows my son better than I do

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(Please forgive the length of this one. I wasn’t sure I was going to write about this at all. Then I got going and just couldn’t stop. -J) Just as none of us know what is going on inside anyone else’s marriage, none of us know what it is like to parent someone else’s child. We hear stories about other people’s kids and might think either, “Man, I wish my kid was like that” or, “Egad, I’m glad my kid isn’t like that.” But there’s really no value in peeking over the fence at the boy or girl next door. In the end, we have to deal with the ones who live in our own house. There’s just no getting out of it.

As I’ve discussed before, I have always considered my son Mack to be a difficult kid to parent. But I had no frame of reference, and I sort of just thought he was difficult in ways that all kids are difficult. As he has gotten older, though, I’ve noticed that he isn’t necessarily typical. A lot of the issues I have with Mack are absent in his brothers. Or maybe they crop up occasionally with Aidan and Reid, but happen multiple times a day with Mack.

Mack is not a docile, easy kid to get along with. He is, as one drama teacher once put it, a powerhouse. He tends to make a lot of noise, and have a lot of energy, and try to take over every room he is in. Some teachers and coaches have loved this about Mack, and have looked to him to Bring the Thunder. Others have obviously been put off by Mack’s outsize personality, and have struggled to rein him in and quiet him down.

I’ve spent a lot of years being conflicted about Mack and his relationships with other adults. On the one hand, Mack drives me certifiably insane. There have been days where I honestly felt that I spent 75 percent of my waking moments screaming at him. On the other hand, he is my son. I love him, I think he has a lot of great qualities, and I can’t stand to hear anyone else putting him down. (I think of this as the Mother-in-Law Paradox. Ever notice how you can complain about your mother all day long, but if your spouse so much as says, “Yes, I agree,” your immediate, visceral response is, “How dare you speak that way about my mother?!”)

I’ve also spent years dealing with concerns about how my parenting has helped make Mack the wonder/monster he is. When adults react negatively to Mack, I sense judgment and criticism from them, even when it isn’t there. (Although I’m pretty sure it is usually there.) I’ve spent many years feeling guilty and embarrassed, wondering why I am failing at something which other parents do so well. Why can’t I find the magic strategy that will make Mack more disciplined and respectful? Never mind that I’ve tried rewards, bribery, punishment, threats, tough love, behavior charts, time-outs, 1-2-3 countdowns, and, yes, screaming. People don’t see the effort. If the desired results never come, they think you’re just fine with letting your kid run wild.

For most of his life, Mack managed to do pretty well with his behavior outside the home. With us, he might be running around, slamming doors and arguing and screaming about how he hates us. But he would go to school, or to soccer practice, and do pretty well…or at least well enough to get by.

However, in the last few months that started to change. I first started to notice it with Mack’s football team this fall. After he pestered us approximately every fourteen minutes for five years, Byron and I decided to let Mack play tackle football this year. Mack plays quarterback. He was actually recruited by his flag football coach to play for his team, and was drafted in the first round of the picks.

For the first few weeks of practice, this coach treated Mack like a son (actually, a lot better than the coach treated his own son). He was full of compliments and made it clear that Mack was his quarterback and his Golden Boy. Then things took a turn. The coach started to pick on Mack, and yell at him. He was often inappropriately mean with his criticisms. Then he put another kid in at quarterback, and moved Mack to wide receiver. When we asked the coach what was going on, he had a litany of complaints about Mack. He never seems to listen. He doesn’t make eye contact. He doesn’t follow directions. He fidgets all the time. He seems listless and doesn’t have the “passion” that the other boys have.

Anyone out there already figure out what’s going on with Mack?

At around this same time, Mack started fourth grade. As I wrote in a previous post, Mack has not had an easy relationship with his teacher this year. She sent us e-mails indicating that Mack was having problems in class, with her and with the other students. He was talking too much and not working well in groups, moving around the classroom too much and not paying attention.

Mack’s schoolwork started coming home and it was also cause for concern. We noticed that Mack almost never got 100 percent on his work. I’ve been told by my sister, the gifted education teacher, that we are not supposed to expect perfection from our children. It can be dangerous. But paper after paper was coming home with the silliest mistakes. He would understand the conceptual part of a math problem, figure it out entirely, then make a mistake adding five and two. He would write ten sophisticated, evocative sentences using his vocabulary words, but completely forget to punctuate four of them.

I started to wonder whether Mack just wasn’t that smart. He qualified for the gifted program, and I know that he has good genetics in that area. But I just couldn’t understand how anyone with an above-average brain could make the kinds of dumb mistakes he was making – constantly.

Mack’s teacher allows children to correct all their mistakes and turn papers back in for half credit. Mack and I sat each night and corrected every mistake. After a week or so, I was so frustrated by all the silly errors that I started having him add a sentence below each correction, explaining why he had missed the problem. I soon noticed that the sentence was almost never, “I didn’t understand how to do the problem.” At least 90 percent of the time, the sentence was either “I didn’t pay attention” or “I got distracted during the question.”

Have you caught on yet? If not, don’t worry. I hadn’t, either.

A few weeks ago we received Mack’s first-quarter report card. He got straight As, but a slew of negative marks in behavior. He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t follow instructions. He talks too much. He doesn’t have self-control. By this point, I was just at my wit’s end. Mack had always been hard to handle at home, but he had been mostly successful in sports and at school. Now those arenas were starting to fall apart as well. What was going on?

I sat down in front of Google. I don’t even remember exactly what I put in the search box, something like: boy careless mistakes not listening fidgeting. What I got back was a few thousand pages about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). I clicked on the first one and began to read. Within literally 15 seconds, I recognized my son. As I continued to read the list of symptoms and behaviors of the disorder, it was as if I was reading about Mack. It honestly felt like someone had studied his life and then written about it. Tears streamed down my face.

I knew almost nothing about ADHD that evening. I had kind of a vague notion of a five-year-old boy, running around a room in circles, screaming and climbing on the furniture. I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve learned that while most children with ADHD are diagnosed by age seven, there is an exception to that rule – gifted children. Those children don’t fall behind in school, so their disorder isn’t noticed as easily. It isn’t until around age ten that their problems start to become more obvious, when compared with the maturation of their peers.

I’ve learned that children with ADHD have problems with excessive talking, with fidgeting and with hyperactivity. They make careless mistakes in their schoolwork and lose things a lot. They have nervous tics. They have trouble going to sleep at night and trouble getting up in the morning. Approximately 40 percent of them also have something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), which makes them seek out power struggles with adults. Son? Is that you?

Sadly, a lot of older children and teenagers with ADHD also develop emotional issues, especially severe anxiety and depression. It seems that years of being told that you are not listening, not following instructions, not doing well enough in school, not the quarterback anymore…can have an effect on your mental well-being. Imagine that.

We’re currently working with a doctor to see if Mack has ADHD, and any of the concomitant issues and disorders. I believe that he does. It is extremely hard, as a mother, to realize that my son has been struggling with this for his entire life. Now that I see it, it is so huge that I can’t figure out how I ever didn’t see it. I’m just happy we’ve caught it before he started to doubt himself the way I, to my eternal regret, began to doubt him

As happy as I am that we can now start the process of helping him, I will never forgive myself for not figuring this out sooner. So many of the behaviors that have made me so angry for years are things that, well, he really can’t help. I see him in a whole new light, and I’m hoping this will help everyone in our family. Kids with ADHD and ODD are plagued with family issues. Their siblings grow tired of watching one child take up so much of the parents’ attention. The parents fight with the child, and with each other, about how to handle all the conflict and drama. These parents have a high rate of divorce. It just isn’t easy for anyone to deal with a kid like this. But knowing why, finally, is the first step to finding that magic strategy I’ve wanted so desperately.


By the book

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One of the best things about being a parent is that you get to watch your kids learn to do new things. When they are babies, the learning and the “firsts” come fast and furious. They roll over, and crawl, and eat real food, and clap, and walk. There is new stuff to celebrate all of the time.

As the kids get older, obviously, the fun of watching them conquer new things comes less frequently. (When it comes to learning to urinate into the toilet bowl, not around it, it actually seems that none of my boys will ever achieve mastery.) But there is still that jolt every once in a while, when they surprise you by doing something you didn’t know they could do. Today, Reid made his own peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch, from start to finish. I don’t know which of us was more tickled.

There are certain things that I always knew would be important for me to teach my kids, or have others teach them. It was imperative to me that my kids learn how to swim, and swim well, at an early age. They have all done that, and I love to watch them as they improve and learn new strokes. I wanted my kids to have an appreciation for United States history. Through our conditioning, they’ve all become little history buffs, who nerdily collect and display their National Parks Junior Ranger badges.

I also was adamant, before I ever had kids, that I wanted them to learn a second language while they were still young. On that one, sadly, I totally failed. Turns out it’s pretty hard to do if you, yourself, don’t speak another language.

One thing I was bound and determined to pass to my kids was my love for reading. I am a written-word junkie. I pretty much don’t go anywhere – even from room to room in my house – without a book in tow. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. I took a lot of grief from my peers for reading instead of playing at recess, but I think most of them were impressed by how I could ride my bike home from school while reading at the same time. Like Thomas Jefferson, I cannot live without books; I wanted to make sure I passed this love to my kids. Once I had all male children, I was even more determined, because I’ve known so many men who never read for pleasure.

So I made sure to expose my kids to books from an early age. I hit a hundred yard sales, and bought a thousand children’s books. I read to them, although never as much as I should have. (Evening reading time often dovetailed with “If I spend one more minute dealing with you, I’m going to jump out the bedroom window” time. Reading lost to wine many times.) I also read my own books in front of them, thinking that eventually they would realize, “If Mommy does this all day every day, there must be something to it.”

Frustratingly, however, my oldest son had no interest in books for years. When Mack was in preschool we did flashcards and learned sound blends. He learned to sight read the most common words, but he didn’t care to push it any farther. All through kindergarten, he was disinterested in really learning to put words together. In first grade he had a better teacher, and he began to read well. But he still never, ever, chose it as a leisure activity at home. He showed no interest in books. It made me so sad.

When he was in second grade, we found the key to unlocking the bibliophile within Mack. His class participated in Accelerated Reader (AR), a reading program where each child reads independently, then takes a test every time he finishes a book. They earn points and compete against their classmates. At the end of each quarter, the kids in each grade with the highest point totals were announced over the school loudspeaker, and they won prizes. Aha! Competition – the one thing that could make Mack pick up a book when he didn’t have to. Next thing we knew, Mack was going to the school library every day, sometimes more than once a day. He polished off the contents of the non-fiction shelves and then grudgingly tried some fiction. (Who knew? There was a whole world of books outside those about the greatest NFL quarterbacks in history and the coolest mammals of the sea.)

Funny thing, but the side effect of all that reading was that Mack got better and better at it. His books became increasingly advanced and eventually, without realizing how, he found that he loved to read. Now he reads – by choice – every night before he goes to bed. He’s devoured most of the series that his teacher Aunt Emily has recommended, and occasionally asks me to reserve new books for him at the public library.

His classes don’t do the AR program much anymore, but Mack did recently get the highest AR point total for the whole school, for the first quarter of this year. I asked how that was possible, and he reminded me that he read books one through five in the Harry Potter series this summer. I guess he took all those tests back-to-back, and they amassed a giant point total. Turns out one 800-page Harry Potter book is equal to around 40 little books about the animals of North America.

My second son, Aidan, originally seemed even less curious about reading than Mack. He wouldn’t even really learn the words on those flashcards that I dug out of a drawer, although we made a little headway when I gave him a Hershey’s kiss for every word he memorized. But Aidan was fortunate enough to have a wonderful kindergarten teacher, who gave him all the building blocks he needed to learn to read. And suddenly this summer…out of nowhere…he was reading. It literally seemed to happen overnight. He went from maybe knowing a few short words to reading whole sentences to me.

The first quarter of this school year has been even more remarkable. Every night when we sit down to read, I’m amazed at how he does. He’s gone from reading readiness to chapter books in two months. Aidan has always been a kid who just has to do things at his own pace, and who doesn’t want to be taught. He wants to get there on his own. But I didn’t think he’d be able to do that with reading! I don’t know if I have ever had as much fun, watching one of my kids learn something new, as I have had watching Aidan discover the world of words this fall. It makes me happy every day. And I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve succeeded, at least with the first two boys, in creating book lovers, after all.

Of course, by far the most important aspect of Aidan learning to read is that he is so much better at our Rock Band video game. When he used to sing, he didn’t know the words and he would just kind of scream and hum into the microphone. Now he can read the lyrics and we get such better scores on our performances. Priorities, folks.


This embarrases me alot

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I am a total grammar, usage, and spelling snob.

I did not ask to be this way. No one ever would. But I can’t help it. I notice all those little misspellings, those apostrophes that aren’t supposed to be there, those words that are capitalized for no apparent reason. And these things drive me crazy. I just can’t ignore them.

I know plenty of well-educated people who write beautifully, but who don’t get bothered when others use “your” for “you’re” and “it’s” for “its.” They don’t seem to notice the little mistakes. Or, if they do notice them, they don’t really care. I wish I could be like that.

Every “recieve,” every “catagory” makes me crazy. A construction site down the road from my house has “No Tresspassing” signs posted on the fence. I drive home the other way so I don’t have to pass them.

I’m not saying that my grammar is perfect. I’m no William Strunk, Jr.; I make typos and I forget the rules sometimes. But I try hard to keep from making silly errors. Is it too much to ask everyone else in the world to do so, too? Please?

I have, at least, gotten a little more tolerant as I’ve gotten older. I sometimes used to correct peoples’ speech to their faces. I cringe when I think about one boy I worked with in college, who I tortured for weeks on end because he was always putting “at” on the end of sentences that didn’t need it. What a rude little brat I was. He should have smacked me.

But, seriously, “Where did you put the forms at?” And you go to William & Mary? (Oh shoot, I’m at it again.)

Now I wouldn’t think of correcting someone’s grammar face-to-face. But I just can’t help myself when it comes to tearing apart written communications. I’d love to be someone who can take a letter from the PTA out of my son’s backpack and just read it for whatever content it contains. But my perusal goes more like, “Okay, back to school night…blah blah blah…oh look, there will be ‘alot’ of information. Can I please get ‘a lot’ of information instead? I prefer that. Blah blah blah…oh good, they’re going to serve ‘Cookies’ and ‘Punch.’ Those must be famous, specific, treats since they get to be capitalized. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, then we get to go to the ‘classroom’s.’ The classroom’s what?”

It’s really obnoxious. It drives my husband crazy. At least he has good spelling and grammar himself, or we’d be in real trouble. Although, it has to be some sort of passive-aggressive or Freudian thing that whenever he screws up something and has to say he’s sorry, he sends me an e-mail saying “I apoligize.” (Really.)

I’m working to be less of an uptight pain in the ass when it comes to communication. I am aware that not everybody pays as much attention to the little details as I do. I know that a lot of errors occur because people are rushing, not because they are pathologically stupid. I’m trying to be serene, and accept that I must pretend I’m okay with people using not only “party” and “impact” as verbs, but “task” as well.

I must be growing and getting better, because last week I actually did something totally out of character. I had put together an invitation for Mack’s birthday party, and sent it to be printed. When the printed cards came in the mail, they had a space in the text that I hadn’t included. For whatever reason, the word “afterwards” was printed to look like, “after wards.” Many of you will not believe this next part: I looked at the cards, calculated the amount of time I would have to spend on the phone to get replacement cards printed, thought about how much time it would take to get them in the mail, and decided to just let it go.

I know!

I sent the cards out with the typo intact. It was a real moment of personal growth.

Of course, right now the mother of one of Mack’s friends is probably like, “Blah blah blah…oh ‘after wards’ we will have a sleepover. After what wards? Hospital wards? That doesn’t sound like a good party.” Sigh. I can only hope that none of the invitees’ moms are as obnoxiously Type A as I am. And, sadly, the odds of that are pretty good.


I have a feeling we’ll be back

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Last night I was in a celebratory mood. It had been a really nice day. (I should have known that this meant that the world would fall on my head today, but that’s a separate topic.)

The William & Mary football team, which for 20 years I have followed with an inappropriate amount of emotion, had just been given the #2 seed in the national championship tournament. We’d finally gotten Beatles Rock Band working again, and the kids and I killed “Come Together.” Byron did the grocery shopping and the Costco run. All seemed right with the world.

In the late afternoon, I took the three boys for their swim team practice. I never approach swim practice with much optimism. In the past, the boys heartily complained before, during, and after every workout. Aidan often has been pulled out of practice for “time outs,” due to his inability to keep his hands (feet, belly, groin, etc.) to himself. Mack used to treat each practice as a delicious idyll, where others might be concerned with going fast and working hard, but he took more of a “what a lovely day for a leisurely glide” approach. And Reid…well, Reid is only four years old. He is the youngest and smallest kid at the workouts and, although he is proving to be a total rock star at this, I worry every week that he will suddenly realize, “Hey! I am in preschool! I can’t be expected to swim laps for an hour.”

But yesterday, all three boys had great practices. Aidan stayed focused, Mack went hard, and Reid even tried to do backstroke. My little fishies had put the cap on a lovely day. I decided to reward them by taking them to our favorite restaurant, Red Robin, for dinner. Our family’s love for Red Robin is a deep and mysterious thing. It can’t really be fully explained in a single blog entry. So I’ll just say “bottomless steak fries” and leave it at that.

We got to the restaurant and, as I usually do, I let the boys order their food first. They always know what they want, and it is just easiest to get their orders in right away. A few minutes later, Byron met us at the restaurant. He and I placed our orders, with Byron asking for an appetizer with his – but saying that everything should just come out whenever it was ready.

I know, this is riveting. But I have a point.

The kids’ meals came out fine, and they dug in. Byron and I expected ours to come soon, but they didn’t…not even the appetizer. We sat and waited, and waited. Meanwhile the kids were in the middle of their meals. Our server finally stopped by and said that the appetizer station was backed up, and he was sorry, and the onion rings would be out in a minute. Byron asked, “You’re not holding the meals back too, are you?” The server assured us that he wasn’t.

At last, the appetizer came out. We had that, and then waited some more. By this time Mack and Aidan were done eating. (Reid will never finish eating. We could sit for three hours and he would just drink his chocolate milk, pick at his food a little, and then go back to coloring.) Finally, the server approached to say that he was sorry, again, but there was a “mix up” in the kitchen and our meals had been sitting there for a while. So they were making us new burgers, and it would be just another few minutes.

He walked away and I asked Byron, “So, by ‘mix up,’ he means, ‘I didn’t pick up your food’?” But I have to say, through all of this I wasn’t really annoyed. We come to this restaurant probably 40 times a year. The kids love it, I love it, Byron tolerates it. They are always nice to us, and usually very quick. Mix ups happen…no big deal.

Finally, they brought our burgers and both of us realized pretty quickly that they were undercooked. I guess the cooks hurried, because they knew we had already been waiting a while. But again, I didn’t really care that much. By that point, I had been snacking on bottomless baskets of steak fries for the better part of an hour. I couldn’t eat much more anyway. When the server came to clear stuff off our table, he asked if there was something wrong with the burger, and I told him honestly that it was too pink for me.

Next thing we know, the manager stopped by our table to tell us that they had comped the whole meal. I was shocked! All of the kids’ food was fine, and I personally had eaten about $45 in french fries. We never even complained (although the sever could probably tell we were getting annoyed when he was clearing away the kids’ plates and our food hadn’t even come out yet).

I have had much worse service in restaurants and stores (not to mention doctor’s and dentist’s offices) and not gotten even an apology, much less a freebie. So the point of this whole story is to commend Red Robin for treating its customers right. They made a couple of minor mistakes, and we weren’t even really put out about it, but they did the right thing to make sure we keep coming back.

To be fair, the manager probably realized that if they lost our business, the franchise would go under by the end of January. So it really was a wise business decision for them.


Who let the dogs out?

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Okay, so I am not a “dog person.” Actually, I’m not an animal person of any kind. Maybe it’s because we didn’t have any pets when I was growing up. But when I think of dogs, what comes to mind is all the negatives – the slobbering, the poop, the financial cost, the having to find someone to watch them when you go away, their constant need for care and attention.

This is why I don’t question my friends who have chosen not to have children. I totally get that when they think of having kids, they think of all these same things.

Anyway, I can appreciate that there are also a lot of benefits to owning a dog. Dogs can be really fun and affectionate. They keep you from being lonely and they can keep you safe. I never question anyone as to why they would want a dog. I just don’t want one myself. When my kids pester me to get a dog, I tell them that maybe we can get a pet once I don’t have to spend so many hours a day taking care of the humans who live with me.

Now, not all of my kids want to get a dog. Aidan sometimes says he’d like a fish, or a hamster, or a unicorn. But he doesn’t ask for a dog…because he is terrified of them. He always has been. He’s not just scared of big dogs. He’s scared of every dog, even if it is on a leash, even if it is shaking and appears to be 150 years old, even if it is wearing a tiny Burberry sweater and sitting in an heiress’s purse.

Aidan’s fear seems perfectly reasonable to me. I have always been afraid of big dogs, myself. Sure, most dogs are sweet and tame. But some of them aren’t, and you can’t always tell just by looking at them. Seriously, let me describe something to you: Imagine a big, hairy creature with tons of really sharp teeth and drool coming out of its mouth. It is probably going to jump all over you, and may knock you down. You won’t be able to communicate with the creature, but – be careful! – it will get more aggressive if it smells your fear. Oh, but don’t run! If you run it will chase you, and it is very fast.

Are you thinking, “Boy! That sounds like something I want to let sleep in my bed!”

So I have no problem with the fact that Aidan is afraid of dogs. It seems eminently reasonable to me. But I am always amazed at how many people seem to think that this fear is something for him to be ashamed of. They ask, “Why is he afraid of dogs? He needs to get over that. Was he bitten by a dog once?” I always want to reply, “Isn’t the fact that you’re wondering whether one of these things bit him enough explanation for his fear?” Seriously, if he was afraid of dandelions, I would understand it if people thought that was weird.

Because dandelions are not known for biting children.

But usually I just kind of chuckle and say, “Oh, you know, dogs make a lot of people nervous.” Then I pry Aidan off of my leg, where he has assuredly plastered himself in fear, and walk him home.

I’m also amazed at the people who will bring their dogs, even really big dogs, around kids without showing any sensitivity to the fact that cynophobia is very common among the soft, vulnerable people under five feet tall. Of course, many dog owners are great about this. We used to go to the home of DwC’s very own Erinn every week, for a playdate. She always made sure any dogs currently in residence were shut away, so my kids wouldn’t be terrorized. And I can’t complain when we go trick or treating and someone sits on his porch with his dog, giving out candy. (Which is when Mack has to say, “Can I have a piece for my brother?” and point to the costumed fellow cowering at the edge of the sidewalk.)

No, I’m talking about the people who bring their dogs to an area with tons of kids, and let the dog run around without a leash. At our school, we have parents who bring their dogs right up to the doors when the kids are released, so every kid who leaves has to walk right by them. They seem to think nothing of it. At Reid’s soccer practices all year, there was a lady who would come to the field with her dog and a big bucket of tennis balls. She would throw the balls, right across the fields dotted with dozens of three-, four-, and five-year olds (and their older brothers), and the dog would fetch them. The dog was obviously a sweetheart, and well trained. But the kids don’t necessarily know this, and some of them were visibly scared. (One even had to go sit in my his mom’s minivan every time.)

I can’t understand being so oblivious. My guess is that most of these people aren’t actually oblivious, but rather don’t care that their dogs scare kids, because they think the fear is stupid. On the few occasions when I have asked dog owners to leash their dogs or take them away – something I have only done a couple of times, even though our local leash laws are very strict – they’ve always given me attitude.

I can understand that if you are a dog person, and you have a pet that seems practically like a member of your family, you want to take that dog out to have fun. I also get that when you know your dog is well trained, you think being afraid of it is just silly. But I wish those people could hold Aidan after a big dog gets close to him, or chases him – to feel him shake and see the terror in his eyes. It is a real thing, this fear. It should be treated with respect.


Could you share some of that with your brother?

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Parenting three boys is an eternally frustrating experience. With most things I’ve had to learn in my life, there was a learning curve, but eventually I was able to succeed. (Cooking, playing basketball and getting along with small-minded people being three big exceptions to this rule.)

But the learning curve in parenting seems to be still heading up, up, up. Even if I figure out how to handle a challenge with one son, the next son comes along and I find that my first solution is completely worthless with that one. You’d think that kids would all be somewhat the same, and that with all boys my kids would be even more similar to each other. But I keep finding, as my kids march through Middle Childhood, that they are each as unique as snowflakes…although not nearly as fluffy and delightful.

For example, I feel like I have given all my boys the same amount of positive encouragement and the same absurd number of compliments every day of their lives. As a mother of sons, I feel it is my sworn duty to make sure all of them are just stuffed full of confidence. That way, no future girlfriend or wife will ever be able convince them that they aren’t perfect. In this way I make sure that my boys will always love Mommy best. (You’re welcome, future girlfriend or wife.)

Yet, despite the equal helpings of “You’re so handsome!” and “Has there ever been a boy as smart/athletic/funny/sweet as you?” my two older sons view themselves vastly differently.

Nine-year-old Mack is, in many ways, an absolute mess. He’s hyper and loud and never works up to his full potential. He fights with his friends constantly and has never met a jacket he couldn’t lose and, sadly, seems to have inherited his physical coordination from me, not his dad. His teacher hates him and one of his football coaches this year actually physically attacked him. He drives people crazy.

But Mack has more self-confidence than any person you have ever met in your life. He enters every room with the assumption that he is the coolest, most fabulous person there. And if you don’t agree with him, he just feels sorry for you for being so sadly mistaken. (Here is where I stop to point out that despite his foibles, Mack is also truly exceptional and wonderful in a myriad of ways, and I’m proud that he is my son, blah blah blah.)

Then there is Aidan, who recently turned seven. All of the things that come hard for Mack come easy for Aidan. He enjoys school and loves his teachers and works hard to please. He’s a natural at every sport he’s ever tried, hears it immediately when he plays a wrong note during piano practice, and loves to make a room neat and tidy. Sure, Aidan is a bit nuts, but he’s so sweet and earnest that people can’t help but forgive him when he acts up.

And Aidan, sweet Aidan, is a teeming mass of insecurity. If I tell him he’s a great reader he replies, “I’m not as good as Lauren.” If I admire a drawing he made, he’ll say, “You should see how Caroline can draw.” Any time he gets a haircut or wears a new shirt for the first time, he frets that the other kids will make fun of him. He seems inherently unable to see how wonderful he as.

How can two boys who have been raised by the same parents see themselves so differently? It’s especially strange considering that they both have so many of the same gifts and do so many of the same things. Why does Mack seem to absorb only the good things he hears about himself, why Aidan seems to block out all but the negative? How can I teach Mack some humility and Aidan some confidence when I don’t know why their outlooks diverged so far to begin with?

I’ll close with the specific anecdote that got me thinking about this topic, just because I think it is funny. As part of an anti-bullying program at school, both Mack and Aidan recently completed a form about tolerance and self respect. The first part of the form listed various behaviors and asked the kids to rank how often they did well at these things (“I am responsible,” “I am a good citizen of my school”). At the end of the form were four blank lines for the kids to fill in an answer to the question, “I also respect myself because…”

Aidan wrote about how he always treats his friends nicely, and he works hard and always does his best.

Mack used the four lines to write three words: “I am awesome.”


Not so “magical”

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Our little family will be heading down to Orlando in a few weeks. We need a Disney fix, plus the siren song of the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter (at Universal) is too loud to ignore any longer.

Before I go any further, I want to ask something. Why is it that everyone seems to think that we go to Disney World all the time? Just yesterday I mentioned this upcoming trip to the mother of one of Mack’s friends and she said, “You guys do that a lot, don’t you?” Another mom recently asked me, “Do you go every year, or twice a year?” Well, for your information, it will be more than 19 months between our last trip and this one. And the trip before that was in December 2007, three years ago – and it was to Disneyland, not Disney World, so it really doesn’t even count.

Shoot, my sister and her family have been to Disney World and Disneyland since our brood last booked any Happiest Place on Earth time. Her kids have been looking down their noses at my kids for months.

And it’s not like we don’t go anywhere else. My kids have all been in at least 35 states, and this year we even took them to the Grand Canyon. Shoot, Mack’s been to Mount Rushmore twice. Not many kids from Virginia can say that. Anyway, tangent over. I don’t know why we’re somehow considered The Disney Folks, but I guess there are worse things to be.

The last time we went to Disney, we didn’t have much time to plan. Byron and I decided we felt like going, and then we got the idea to surprise the kids. So we put the trip together just a few weeks beforehand, and didn’t tell the boys anything about it. One day in May we told them we were going bowling, and piled into the car. We drove to the airport, as they got increasingly agitated, trying to figure out what was up. We parked the car and pulled up a blanket in the back to reveal our packed suitcases. “We’re going to Disney World!” And thus began the six-day trip that Aidan still calls, “The time we didn’t get to go bowling.”

But this time, we’ve had the trip planned for a long time – basically since they announced the opening date of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I had it in the back of my head all year, and in the last couple of months we’ve bought all the tickets and made all the necessary arrangements. (Well, we haven’t told all the teachers yet. It’s always easier to beg for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.)

When one is as obsessive as I am, it is extremely dangerous to have this much time to prepare for a trip to “The World.” Normal people (i.e. not one of the other two people who write for this blog) are probably not aware of this, but there is a lot of space on the Internet devoted to planning a trip to Disney World. And when I say “a lot” I mean maybe slightly less room than there is devoted to porn…but it’s close. There are information sites and tip sites and sites that describe each ride and rank it on a scale of one to ten. There are whole sites devoted to discussing the different resorts and restaurants. But the best are the forums, where Crazy Disney People gather to dissect and debate every – every – aspect of Disney World. They have little abbreviations for everything, including every ride (PotC) and every resort (PoP). Cast members are CMs and annual passes are APs and it is very troubling to me that I’ve come to be literate in their lingo.

These discussion sites are horribly annoying, yet completely addictive. Every day I promise myself I won’t visit them, because I don’t like how I feel afterward. But every day, at some point, my resolve wavers and I find myself typing one of those URLs. I don’t know why I do it. Occasionally I read a good tip or find out about something my family might enjoy. But the vast majority of the discussions make me think one of two things, “Get a life!” or “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

I will never be able to approach a visit to Disney the same way again, now that I know that these people are there. In past trips I was just spending time with my family. I didn’t know I was being judged for the size of my stroller, the paths I take through the parks, the treats I buy my kids, the rides my kids do or do not ride, what time we arrive to watch the parade, even the way we stand in line. These people have opinions on everything and they are not afraid to give them.

One of the biggest eye-openers for me is that the Disney Crazies are psychotic about line cutting. Many times in the past, I’ve gotten in line with the kids while Byron grabs some Fastpasses, or parks the stroller, or puts trash in a trash can. Then he comes and joins us in line, even if a couple of people have gotten between us. After all, it doesn’t really cost anyone behind us any time, as we’re all going to ride together anyway. Many times, of course, we’ve also let people walk in front of us to join their party, the same way. Well, I am now aware that doing this is basically akin to a terrorist attack. This is line cutting! And rude! And cause for dismissal from the park! The mere suggestion that this might be okay makes the crazies go apoplectic with rage.

Some write posts that ask what they should do if they’ve been waiting in line for 45 minutes and their child desperately needs to go to the bathroom. Can they send the child with one parent, and have them come right back? Verboten! “Too bad!” say the crazies. “You should have planned ahead, like we do!” If you have to get out of line for any reason, they insist, you lose your place. One woman mentioned that her child has a medical condition that makes it hard for her to predict when she has to use the bathroom. They didn’t care. “Why should I know or care about your issues? Maybe I have a medical condition that makes me get tired when I have to stand for extra time because you think you can hop in and out of line whenever you like!”

All of this line cutting and bathroom talk led, naturally, to a discussion of a woman who recently changed her child’s diaper while standing in line for the Toy Story Mania ride. Yep, right there in the line, she got down on the floor and changed the kid while the line waited behind her. You’d think that any rational person would be disgusted, right? Well, notice I said “rational.” The crazies seemed to love it…or at least to respect the woman’s commitment. One post even suggested that parents consider carrying an empty water bottle with them, so their kids could pee in the water bottle rather than get out of line if they were close to the end of the queue (I assume this was only for the parents of boys).

Seriously. Peeing into a water bottle right there in front of everyone. How twisted is that?

Although, you know what? My boys would probably think that was the most awesome thing they had ever been allowed to do in their entire lives. They would enjoy it way more than they enjoy the Hall of Presidents. This trip would then always be remembered as, “The trip where we got to pee in a bottle.” I bet we could even get one of the Disney Photographers (DPs) to take a commemorative photo.


I wish I could just put him in bubble wrap

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I’m told that every family has one of these…the kid who just can’t seem to stay out of the emergency room.

In our family, that kid is Aidan. Mack and Reid have a combined total of zero broken bones, zero times getting stitches, zero times getting their head stapled back together. But Aidan works overtime to pick up his brothers’ slack. As Eva Cassidy was born to sing and Michael Phelps was born to swim, sometimes it seems Aidan was born to visit the emergency room.

Last week, Aidan turned to grab his backpack off the kitchen island, about to head out the door to school. He tripped over his Converse All Stars and fell into the counter. If it had been Mack or Reid, they might have hit their head, but it would have been a minor incident. A minute of tears, a small bruise, and on with the day. But because it was Aidan, he slammed right into the corner of the island and opened a deep, inch-long gash near his eyebrow. He started screaming, and I turned to say, “Come on bud, you’re okay.” (I had thoughts of the ever-approaching school bus on my mind.) He moved his hand away from the cut and I saw that the whole side of his face was covered in blood. I handled this with my usual aplomb…screaming, “Byron! Byron!”

So no school for Aidan, as off we went to the hospital. He was, as always, a fantastic patient as the doctor closed his cut with four sutures. The nurses all commented on how calm and good Aidan was. I replied, “Well, unfortunately, he is an old pro at this.” Aidan added, “One time I had 23 stitches. That took a lot longer.”

Aidan has mixed feelings about his supernatural ability to get injured. Right after he gets hurt, he usually asks, “Why me? Why is it always me?” But after he calms down, he takes obvious pride in his toughness, telling anyone who will listen, “I barely cried. I cried for like one minute.”

He is also extremely proud of the ever-increasing total of ER visits he is racking up. Remember how I said that every family has this kid? Well, when I was growing up, that kid was definitely my sister, Emily. She was famous for taking a seemingly minor fall and then having to go get stitches, usually in her face. I’ve told Aidan many times that he shares this trait with his beloved Auntie Emmy. So when Aidan saw Emily at school a couple of days after his injury, he told her that he had counted, and this was his seventh ER visit. He was tickled when Emily replied that he’d better not beat her family record.

I have a bad feeling that he will, though.


To be continued

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As you might have noticed, I actually wrote a couple of posts last week. And I enjoyed it!

I don’t know why I stopped writing, sometime early this year. I had a busy spring and a difficult summer, and I guess I just never had the energy to sit down and try to be creative or funny. But what I forgot was that writing actually makes me feel better, and gives me energy. When I am feeling down, writing gives me a boost. (Chocolate cake also gives me a boost, but with writing there is no remorse afterward.)

So I am going to try to get back on the horse and try writing regularly for this blog. If the posts aren’t always great, well at least they’ll serve as a kind of journal of what life is like for our family right now.

In order to get rolling again, I’m going to mine my memory and write about a few things that have happened over the last six months. But I’m going to write about them as if they just happened. So I order you to pretend, when you read a post about spring break or summer swim team, that you’re reading it in April or July. It’s my blog (well, partially). I make the rules.